Thoughts on Business · October 2, 2026

Ideas for eight lifetimes. And one calendar.

I have the ideas and the creative energy for eight lifetimes. But only one life. That’s not a coffee mug slogan, that’s my everyday reality.

For a long time I thought of it as a problem. If you start a lot of things, people are quick to assume you never finish any of them. I see it differently now. Lots of ideas aren’t chaos. They’re raw material. The only question is who sorts them.

For a while now, half of that sorting has been done by an AI.

I don’t use it like a search engine. I use it as a space to think. I tell it whatever is rattling around in my head, unsorted and sometimes mid-sentence, and let it reflect back to me which parts are actually a plan and which are just a whim. The decisions stay with me. But I get from a jumbled idea to a question I can work with much faster.

What honestly startles me is how many business owners have never tried this. Not because they’re against it. But because they asked ChatGPT something once, got a mediocre answer, and have assumed ever since that that’s all it can do. That’s a bit like judging a tool by the first time you picked it up.

I believe that if you run a company, you should understand the tools we’ll all be working with soon. Not to replace people. But to think better, learn faster and build more.

The risk is real, of course. When every idea can turn into half a concept in minutes, it’s tempting to chase every single one. At that point it’s no longer creativity, it’s distraction with nicer formatting. So the real work stays with me: deciding what I won’t do.

I don’t have eight lifetimes. But I do have one that I can shape pretty deliberately.

Daria Helck