The “Yet” Man
You haven’t seen anything yet.
The “Yet” Man
There is a sentence that appears whenever something unfamiliar enters the room.
“I’ve never seen that before, so…”
It arrives softly.
Often politely.
Sometimes with authority.
And almost always with finality.
For a long time, I tried to meet it head-on.
I brought examples.
I brought data.
I brought timelines, references, demonstrations.
Eventually, I stopped.
Now I answer with a single word.
Yet.
Not as a challenge.
Not as a correction.
As an opening.
Because “I’ve never seen that before” is not wisdom.
It is simply a record of where someone’s vision currently ends.
What Ten Thousand Hours Actually Give You
People talk about 10,000 hours as mastery.
That has never felt accurate to me.
What those hours really give you is humility.
And timing.
And a kind of quiet confidence that does not need to be defended.
You stop chasing novelty.
You start recognizing patterns.
You see ideas before they stabilize.
You recognize systems before they are named.
You notice how discomfort almost always precedes understanding.
Most of all, you learn that the future rarely announces itself with clarity.
It whispers.
It stumbles.
It looks unfinished.
And it is almost always underestimated.
The Misuse of Familiarity
“I’ve never seen that before” often masquerades as rigor.
But it is not analysis.
It is autobiography.
It tells you nothing about the idea.
It tells you everything about the limits of experience observing it.
Familiarity feels like truth because it is comfortable.
But comfort has never been a reliable guide to what comes next.
Every meaningful shift begins as something that does not quite fit.
Too strange.
Too early.
Too incomplete to be taken seriously.
Until it does.
Why I Say “Yet”
“Yet” is not dismissive.
It is respectful.
It acknowledges experience without letting it close the conversation.
It honors the past without letting it veto the future.
“Yet” creates space.
For learning.
For revision.
For becoming less certain in the ways that matter.
It is a reminder that time is still moving.
And so are we.
The Thing Experience Teaches You Last
If you spend long enough working at the edge of change, especially in AI, you learn a strange lesson.
The future almost never looks impressive at first.
It looks smaller than expected.
More fragile.
Wrong in ways that are easy to criticize and hard to explain.
Skepticism is healthy.
But assuming that what you have already seen defines what is possible is not.
The Only Punchline That Matters
So when someone says,
“I’ve never seen that before,”
I pause.
I smile.
And I answer:
Yet.
Because if there is one thing I know with confidence now, it is this:
You haven’t seen anything yet.