Building OpenThink: on courage and facing what you're afraid of

I almost didn't build this.

Not because I didn't believe in it. The idea of OpenThink — a public space for slow, honest thinking — felt right to me for a long time before I did anything about it. The delay wasn't doubt. It was fear.

Fear of what, exactly? I've had to be honest with myself about this.

Partly it was the fear of being wrong in public. If you build something, you're making a claim: this matters, this is worth doing. And you can be wrong. You can build it and have nobody care. Or worse, have people engage with it in exactly the way you were trying to move past — performatively, combatively, without any of the genuine search you were hoping for.

Partly it was the fear of being presumptuous. Who am I to say how thinking should happen? I don't have a philosophy degree. I haven't published anything. I'm a person who reads a lot and worries about the same things most thoughtful people worry about. The voice in my head that says who do you think you are is a familiar one.

But here's what I finally understood: waiting for courage is not the same as courage. Courage is the decision to do the thing in the presence of the fear, not after the fear has passed. The fear doesn't go away. You just stop letting it run the meeting.

The phrase that finally moved me was one I'd heard a hundred times but had to sit with for a long time before it meant anything: be the change you wish to see in the world. I'd mostly filed that away as a bumper sticker. But taken seriously, it's actually quite demanding.

If you want a world with more careful thinking, you have to be a careful thinker. In public. Where it costs you something. Not just in the privacy of your own head.

OpenThink is my attempt to do that. To think out loud, build something in public, be wrong occasionally, update, keep going. It's not a polished product. It's an ongoing act of trying.

That's all I've got. But I think it's enough to start with.