For the last two years, I’ve been doing something with AI that I didn’t expect when I started: trying to figure out why I am the way I am. You know, map where I get certain ways I think and act.

A big part of that has been identifying what I call my “archetypes”. They aren’t heroes. I don’t want to be any of these people or characters. Some of them have enormous flaws. I’m interested in specific things I learned from them. Here is a partial list:

George Carlin taught me to stand outside the system long enough to notice what everyone else has stopped noticing, then be able to explain it plainly.

Bruce Lee taught me to absorb what is useful, discard what isn’t and make the rest my own – and practice it until it becomes part of you rather than something you have to think about.

Steve Vai showed me another version of that. Influences disappear into you. Eventually what comes out isn’t imitation anymore. It’s yours.

Clayton Christensen showed me that incredibly complicated systems can sometimes be explained with surprisingly simple models. Complexity doesn’t require a complicated explanation.

Steve Jobs reinforced something I had already experienced repeatedly: the dots only connect looking backward. Something that seemed unrelated or useless at the time becomes important years later.

Batman gave me one of the simplest definitions of identity I know: “It isn’t who I am underneath, it’s what I DO that defines me. “

Rocky taught me about will. You don’t have to solve forever. You just have to get up one more time.

Then, if necessary, you do it again. Life is iterative – not designed up front.

Iron Man also iterates. The previous version isn’t a failure. It is what taught you how to build the next one.

Superman (Man of Steel version):

Clark: “The world is too big mom.”

Martha: “Then make it smaller”

Focus on the smallest thing that makes a difference. Try not to get overwhelmed. I’m still working on this one.

House investigates until he understands. An accepted answer isn’t necessarily an understood answer.

Dexter is a stranger one. He represents taking something genuinely wrong or dark in yourself, putting constraints around it and finding a way to point it somewhere useful instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.

There are others, and the list keeps changing as I understand it better.

Eventually I found a technical metaphor that explains what I’m doing better than “archetypes” does. They’re external libraries.

I’m the linker.

I don’t link the whole library. Nobody should. I take a procedure from Carlin, another from Bruce Lee, something from Christensen, Batman, Jobs, Rocky or somebody else. I know where they came from because provenance matters to me. But once they’re linked together and running, the executable isn’t any of them.

It’s me.

That is why I think this work matters.

Most of us accumulate influences our entire lives without examining them. Parents, teachers, books, movies, music, bosses, friends, people we admire and people we absolutely do not want to become.

They leave pieces behind.

Looking at my archetypes has let me reverse-engineer some of those pieces. I can see where certain ways of thinking came from, why seemingly unrelated things have always attracted me and why patterns that looked random at the time weren’t necessarily random at all.

AI has been unusually useful for this because it can hold a ridiculous amount of conversation, compare things separated by decades and challenge the story I’m telling myself. Sometimes I see the connection first. Sometimes it does. Sometimes neither of us has it quite right and we beat on it until something survives.

That’s important too. I don’t want AI to tell me who I am.

I want it to help me see what I might have missed.

One thing I’m missing is the bitterness. I haven’t found the root cause of that yet …