What If You Could Wish?

When I was a kid, there was this German children's story called Das Sams — a strange little creature with a pig nose and red hair, covered in blue dots on its face. Each dot was a wish. You'd speak a wish out loud, a dot would disappear, and the thing you said would happen.

It was one of the first books I ever borrowed from the library on my own. I can still see the cover. The feeling of carrying it home, this story about a creature that could turn words into reality — it lit something up in me that I didn't have a name for yet.

Harry Potter did the same thing, right? A wand. A word. A world reshaped. Every kid who watched those movies spent at least one afternoon pointing a stick at a door and whispering Alohomora.

We all wanted magic. We all wanted to speak things into existence.

We're building the Sams

Here's what hit me this morning: we're actually doing it.

In my work with AI, I watch what's happening with interfaces, with voice, with how the gap between what you say and what gets built is shrinking to almost nothing. Not just in software — AI is getting physical arms now, robotics, physical-world capability. The line between speaking and making is getting thinner every day.

In my bubble, people call this question: What if execution becomes the commodity?

And I'd put it differently. More like a child would: What if you could speak something into existence?

Because that's what's happening. We're building a world where you can say a thing and it becomes real. We're building the Sams — we just wrapped it in enterprise software and forgot how magical it actually is.

Then the only question left is: what do you wish for?

And this is where it gets interesting. Because if speaking becomes making, if execution is no longer the bottleneck — then the bottleneck shifts to something much more human:

What do you actually want?

Not what LinkedIn tells you to want. Not what your parents' generation optimized for. Not what looks good on a slide deck. What do you — the actual human reading this — wish for?

Some people are calling this the Imagination Economy. The idea that the next economy isn't about who can execute fastest, but about who can imagine most clearly. Who can paint the picture that hasn't been painted yet.

Rutger Bregman talks about this in Utopia for Realists. He says we've lost the ability to imagine where we're going. Historically, humanity always had a north star — beat the plague, end the war, reach the moon. Big, visible, shared goals. But right now — where is our next utopia?

Everybody paints a different picture

I have a strong picture of where I want to go. But when I try to describe it — I start gasping for words. Reaching. Grasping. If you've ever watched the video on my page, you've seen it: me trying to explain something with my hands because the words aren't enough.

The closest thing I've found is a word someone else coined: Solarpunk — an art and literary movement that started in Brazil and imagines a world where humans and technology live alongside nature, green and futuristic at the same time. I reach for that word because it's the closest painting someone else has made to what I see in my head. But it's their painting. Not mine.

And that's the thing — I wouldn't call myself a painter. I wouldn't call myself an artist at all. I never have. Until a conversation with Karla changed that. She listened to me talk about haelp for two and a half hours and at the end she handed me a book: We Need Your Art — Stop Messing Around and Make Something. And she told me that what I'm doing with haelp is art. That I just hadn't recognized it as such because I was too busy looking for the right frame.

So maybe that's the first step. Realizing that we all have to become artists. That we all have to paint our version of where we want to go — even if it's messy, even if it doesn't look like what we think art is supposed to look like. And then we have to show it to each other.

Nine years ago, I stood on a stage and asked a room full of graduates to imagine everyone painting their version of "the best" — and then laying the paintings on top of each other. Would they really be identical?

No. Of course not. The paintings look different because we're different. Different colors, different strokes, different levels of detail. Some bright and optimistic. Some darker, illuminating what they're afraid of.

But here's what I keep wondering — and wondered even then, before I had the words for it: underneath all those paintings, deep, deep down, aren't we all trying to paint the same thing? Being human? Having a good life? Living in peace?

Isn't it actually that simple? Did we just keep adding layers on top until the simple thing underneath became invisible?

The paintings won't look identical. But I believe what's underneath them is. And we only see that when we look at each other's paintings, really look, connect with the artist, and say: oh — you too?