I was walking from my car to the office, talking through a solution to a problem with Claude on my phone. Then I walked in, saw a teammate, and said hola.
My teammate isn’t Spanish, and neither am I. Once upon a time I set out to learn Spanish. I understand some of it (more than a little, less than a lot), but I’m not fluent and don’t get many chances to practice, so bits of it pop out of me now and then, mostly because I like the language. So we chatted for a bit, and I completely forgot Claude was still listening.
When I got back to my phone, Claude had already switched to Spanish. All it took was one hola. Somewhere in the chat with my teammate I must have said something it took for a pardon, because one of the replies on the screen was:
Tranquilo, sin problema.
It was funny and a little impressive at the same time. It didn’t stop to point out that I’d switched languages, or ask me to repeat myself. It heard a half-learned Spanish greeting and an apology I’m not even sure I made, kept calm and carried on. Should there be a leadership lesson here? Hm... let’s skip it for today.
So, naturally, I tested it
Obviously, I had to take it one step further. What would the world be without a bit of ad-hoc scientific experimenting? If it can follow my rusty Spanish... what about Chinese? Maybe I’d magically start speaking it, Claude would recognize my hidden genius, and my polyglot level would go straight to godlike. A 100x idea if I ever had one.
I don’t speak a word of Chinese. All I have is a handful of sounds I picked up from movies, so I strung a few of them together with great confidence and waited.
Silence. Tried it again. Still silence.
No polite guess or creative translation of whatever I thought I was saying. My Chinese wasn’t Chinese, and I was busted. So much for godlike. Leadership lesson? Not today, Mateja.
No problemo
The phrase stuck in my head. It was clearly wallpaper material, so I asked ChatGPT to make me one: Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, saying tranquilo, sin problema.
I didn’t pick him at random. Remember Terminator 2, in which John Connor teaches the T-800 to talk like a person: you don’t say affirmative, you say no problemo?
Absolutely silly wallpaper, but it did wonders for my work mood. A little humor in the morning, and I flew through my to-do list without thinking too much about how long it was, how difficult the challenges were, or where I’d lost one of my terminals with Claude running.
Tranquilo isn’t the whole plan
Lately, there’s plenty on that to-do list, much, much more than before. We’re tackling many things in parallel, dealing with humans and agents, exploring different options and pilots, searching for the next 10x or 100x workflows, skills, and people. (No pressure.)
With all of that going on, my funny wallpaper got me thinking: should I get this line as a tattoo? A permanent reminder to stay calm and... then what? Pretend there’s no problem? No. Stay calm, because I’ll figure something out.
That part I’ve always believed: most problems are figureoutable, and I still do. But is tranquilo, sin problema the same thing? Not really. Figureoutable is about what you’ll do: there’s a way, and you’ll find it. Tranquilo is more about how you react, as in this doesn’t need to be a big deal right now.
When everything around you is a potential 10x, figureoutable (did I mention figureoutable?) can turn into pressure. If it’s all solvable, why haven’t you solved it yet? Tranquilo comes first, so you can pick one priority off the list (per agent, human or otherwise) and get it done.
Of course, I’m still the person who sees the traps (I’ve been called a pessimist for it, more than once). Every new idea comes with a list of problems forming in my head: dependencies nobody has mapped yet, who inherits the maintenance when the excitement wears off... and plenty of those end up on that mile-long to-do list too.
The trouble is, once I can see how something will go wrong, it starts to feel urgent, even if it won’t bite for months. A Terminator telling me to relax didn’t make the traps disappear that day, but it reminded me of my own advice: prepare for the worst, then forget you did. The traps stay on the list. They don’t all get to be urgent at the same time.
So, rusty Spanish or movie Chinese?
Claude wasn’t going to pretend my movie Chinese meant anything, and honestly, fair enough.
Okay, okay. I’ve dodged it twice already, so here’s the leadership lesson after all.
Looking back, my ad-hoc experiment came down to one question: is this an actual language, or just a bunch of confident noises? My Spanish, rusty as it is, passed. My Chinese flunked, no matter how sure of myself I sounded (twice). My 100x idea of the day, instant polyglot genius, turned out to be a brain fart (this is how my brain works, sorry). And if Claude had played along, I could have spent another half an hour coming up with (to me) Chinese-sounding noises. For what?
My to-do list isn’t that different from my ad-hoc experiment: most of the ideas I put on it, mine and other people’s, come in one of two languages.
Rusty Spanish sounds like can we rethink this part of the system as an agentic one? It’s clumsy at first and the grammar isn’t perfect, but you can tell there’s something real underneath, if you ask a couple of questions and help define it better.
Movie Chinese is a string of all the right words (more! agents! 10x! 100x!), delivered with great confidence. Look a bit closer, though, and it’s a solution for a problem that’s yet to be found. Espera, ¿cuál es el problema?
So the rusty Spanish gets my patience and a bit of my time. The movie Chinese can get the same treatment Claude gave me: a polite, well-deserved silence.
Hasta la vista, baby.