Token Maxxing

Over the past few months in New York, the AI conversation has reached a whole new fever pitch. While it used to be contained to only the software engineers and tech twitter loiterers, it’s now every operations analyst, banker, consultant, private equity, hedge fund, doctor, lawyer, friend etc. all asking the same question: what the heck is there to do and how do I keep up?

Most aptly described here:

First off, you are right to be feeling this. That stress in your stomach that you aren’t doing enough, aren’t learning fast enough. I promise you this is not just you. Listen to Karpathy say it on No Priors here. The man who co-founded OpenAI saying he’s in a “state of psychosis” trying to figure out what’s possible, that he’s antsy he’s not at the forefront. Let me repeat, this is one of the founders of OpenAI saying that he worries that he isn’t doing enough, so let’s just plainly state that we are in good company.

So what do you do?

I think the best answer is actually pretty simple. It doesn’t look the same for every person or every job and it should really be driven by your own curiosity. But it all leads to the same conclusion.

You just want to maximize your token usage. You should be token maxxing. Use any tool that may make your life easier but don’t shy away from it, lean into it. The right move is just to use the tools a lot. In your domain. On your actual problems. More this week than last week. The specific tool doesn’t matter that much. The best model changes every few months. Cursor vs Claude Code vs whatever else, who cares, it’ll all look different by summer.

Find a flow, build something that makes your life easier, share an automation with a colleague, create that idea that’s been knocking in your head into some MVP you’re super proud of.

The people who are furthest along aren’t the ones who found the perfect tool. They’re the ones who started earliest and used it most on real work. The CEOs paying attention to this are saying the same thing internally: the people furthest along at their companies weren’t the most technical. They were the most willing to start.

The goal at the end of every week is that you used more tokens than the week before. That’s the whole metric.

There is no curriculum for this. Open the tool. Use it on whatever is in front of you. A habit tracker, a work problem, something you've been curious about for years. Do that more tomorrow than you did today. That's the whole thing.