It was 1899. President William McKinley needed to deliver an urgent message to General Calixto Garcia, the leader of the insurgents in America’s war against Spain. But Garcia was lost somewhere deep inside the mountain vastness of Cuba.
“There’s a fellow by the name of Rowan who will find Garcia if anyone can,”
someone told the president. So McKinley summoned Colonel Andrew Rowan.
Rowan took McKinley’s letter,
“sealed it in an oil-skin pouch, strapped it over his heart, in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle and in three weeks came out on the other side of the island, having traversed a hostile country on foot, and delivered his letter to Garcia.”
Notice that Rowan didn’t equivocate. He didn’t ask McKinley for detailed instructions. He simply took the letter and delivered it to Garcia.
People like Rowan—who accomplish missions quickly and efficiently, with minimum oversight—are as rare today as they were 100 years ago when publisher Elbert Hubbard wrote “A Message to Garcia.”
If you doubt this, read Hubbard’s words below to someone who is charged with leading an organization:
“ My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the ‘boss’ is away, as well as when he is at home. And the man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets ‘laid off,’ nor has to go on strike for higher wages. Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals. Anything such a man asks shall be granted; his kind is so rare that no employer can afford to let him go. He is wanted in every city, town and village—in every office, shop, store and factory. The world cries out for such: he is needed and needed badly, the man who can carry a message to Garcia.”
The leader (and your future boss) will be nodding in agreement before you finish the first sentence. By the end of the paragraph, he or she will likely say, “So true. So true. If only I had a few more people like that. Each is worth his or her weight in gold.”
<aside> 🥇 The ability to execute is more valuable than education or talent because it is far rarer.
</aside>
To succeed in the 21st century and to operate at the cutting edge of AI (which, today, is Generative AI and AI Engineering), you must cultivate the ability to execute.
Uncertainty and ambiguity will always reign in the spaces of the unknown that we’re treading into, and a bias toward action is a minimum requirement for anyone looking to play this game.
Upon successful completion and certification within The AI Engineering Bootcamp course, you will immediately be the expert amongst your peers with regard to building production LLM applications. If it were easy, everyone would do it.
Technology will change, and with it, the tools (and even the concepts) that you use to build, ship, and share your creations will too. As a result, for continued success, you will have to pursue a disciplined practice of following steps until they become deeply embedded habits: