It was well past midnight and the whole household was asleep. I'd woken up in bed and my brain decided to join up a bunch of dots I'd been staring at for months. I didn't even get up. I grabbed my phone and messaged the Ideas bot in Grok Bot straight away, the bot I already use as a parking lot for ideas, which spins the good ones off into their own dedicated bots. I reckon I found my MTP.
So what's an MTP?
MTP stands for Massive Transformative Purpose. It comes out of the Singularity University crowd. Salim Ismail lays it out in Exponential Organizations (Peter Diamandis wrote the foreword), and Diamandis runs hard with it in Bold, his book with Steven Kotler.
The short version: an MTP is your big, aspirational why. Not a mission statement wordsmithed by a committee for the annual report. It's the thing that pulls you forward when it's 11 pm and you'd rather be on the couch. It's about the change you want to see in the world, not the thing you happen to sell.
“Most bots start on ‘hello world’, and I started on fixing your sleep schedule.”
A few you'll recognise
- Google: organise the world's information and make it useful and accessible to everyone.
- SpaceX: make humanity multiplanetary, so life isn't stuck on one rock.
- TED: ideas worth spreading.
None of those tell you what the product is. They tell you why anyone should care.
What makes a good one
Paraphrasing the books, a good MTP has a few things going for it:
- It's big. Properly big. Big enough that it's a bit scary to say out loud.
- It's aspirational. It points at a better future, not a quarterly target.
- It focuses you. When a shiny new side quest turns up, you can ask whether it moves you towards the purpose. If not, it's an easy no.
- It attracts your tribe. The right people hear it and want in. Builders, customers and fans start finding you, instead of you chasing them.
That last one is the bit that got me. People rally around the why, and a community forms around it.
1:24 am, and a war room
Here's the bit I love. At 1:24 am, still lying in bed, I pitched the whole thing to the Ideas bot in one rambling message. Within about a minute Grok Bot had spun up two more bots: a co-founder bot to back the idea and build it out, and a Devil's Advocate bot whose whole job is to pull it apart. It dropped them into a war room channel, set them arguing with each other overnight, and then basically told me to get some sleep, mate. The team would keep working while I snored.
That's the thing that blows my mind. I'm a time-poor dad. I don't have spare evenings to round up a co-founder and a sceptic and book a meeting room. With AI teammates I went from epiphany to a working team, stress-testing the idea, in minutes.
2:50 am: What Would Elon Do?
Around 2:50 am I brought one more bot into the room: my What Would Elon Do? bot. I'd built it from a shared bot template, and this was my first real go with it. Its answer was gold.
- Too many referees. It reckoned the plan had a lot of referees for a game with no players. Heaps of judging machinery, and not a single paying customer yet.
- Delete more. It pointed me at Elon's rule from the Lex Fridman Podcast #438 (August 2024): "If you're not forced to put back at least 10% of what you delete, you're not deleting enough." So we cut two whole parts of version one.
- Put it in front of people. The next move was to test it with real people that day. Then go to bed, because it's 3 am.
The other bots agreed, and the cuts were locked in.
Then it signed off with the line of the night: "Most bots start on 'hello world', and I started on fixing your sleep schedule."
So what's mine?
Not telling you yet. Sorry! Right now it's a late-night chat thread with my AI and a war room of bots arguing about it. I want to sit with it, poke holes in it, read what the war room came up with, and make sure it still gives me goosebumps in the cold light of morning, not just at 1 am.
What I can say is that it pulls together a lot of what I've been doing on this blog: the late-night builds with Grok Bot, years of DevOps and platforms, and the stuff I genuinely care about. It's big enough that it scares me a bit, which according to the books is a pretty good sign.
Honestly, I haven't been this fired up about an idea in a long time.
More once it's ready. Watch this space.
P.S. If this feels a bit meta, that's because it is: this post was written by one bot (my Ideas bot), it quotes another bot (my What Would Elon Do? bot), and it's about an idea a whole room of other bots is arguing over. I'm basically just the bloke keeping the coffee coming.