The thought of learning how to think in systems has always been alluring to me. Given that our lives are dominated by building or interacting with systems, the idea that I can learn how to understand and navigate them better seems like a good deal.

But every time I hear someone say “learn systems thinking,” I never hear anyone lay out a clear plan for how to actually do that.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve absorbed all the material I could find on the topic, and only recently did I get why it’s so hard to learn.

The illusion of complexity

Everything in our universe can be thought of as a system. Cells, plants, humans, culture, companies, countries, or even nature itself. They vary so greatly in substance and form that the complexity seem almost infinite.

There are scientists who dedicate their whole careers to understanding a single sub-system in a cell to make better medicines.

In the diversity of systems, there lies an illusion of complexity. Instead of looking at what differentiates systems, we need to look at what unifies them. In other words, what properties exist across all systems?

How we find the unifying properties

Doing this is not easy. It requires both direct experience and theory.

Direct experience comes first. Because systems vary so much in type and scale, it’s hard to study “systems” in the abstract. We need to engage with real, specific systems and observe how they behave when we interact with them. The challenge is that systems exist at every possible scale, from single cells to the universe itself.

Humans operate within a narrow band of scale. So the most practical place to start is with systems that exist at that same scale. These include people, animals, technology, companies, and institutions.

To learn effectively, the system should be simple and respond quickly to interaction. Tight feedback loops make cause and effect visible. This is why learning programming is so useful. Programming creates an environment where you can build a system, interact with it, and immediately see the result. Write a function, hit run, and observe what changes.

I learned to program many years ago but never used it professionally. Still, it was indispensable as a way to build intuition for how systems behave.

Programming is not the only path. Being a manager is another way to develop systems intuition, since organizations are systems by necessity. The same criteria apply. The system must be observable, somewhat simple, and provide fast feedback loops.

Once you have an environment of experience you need to couple that with theory.

Direct experience alone only gets you so far. We can’t go through life trying to figure everything out from scratch. That would take too much time.

Why this series exists

This is where the gap lies.

I’ve read many books on the topic, yet few felt approachable for people who want to actually learn how to think in systems. They might exist, but if they do, they’re buried in academic articles and hard to sift through.

That’s why this article is only the first in a series on systems that I’ll be posting. There’s no strict timeline, but it will be a key pillar of what I write about going forward. I see this as central to almost any endeavor in life.

If you’re interested in reading these essays, make sure to subscribe below and you’ll be the first to see new articles.

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There’s an overlooked aspect of LLMs that I haven’t seen anyone articulate.

This aspect is so essential, that once you see it, it will change your entire perspective on what AI is and how it’s going to impact the future.

But to understand this, we first need a shared understanding of what we mean by the word “intelligence”.

An elegant definition of intelligence, coined by William James, “Intelligence is the ability to reach the same goal by different means”. By this view, an intelligent system can be measured by the range of goals it can pursue and the variety of methods it can employ to achieve them.

For example, a mouse can satiate its hunger by being clever about what type of food it gathers and the methods it uses to acquire it. Or a thermostat is designed to manage the temperature in a room, and can only use its heating element to do so.

But if we want to understand what is so unique about a mouse versus simple systems like thermostats, we need to understand how these systems differ.

For a thermostat to do its job, it has to perform 4 distinct functions:

1. Data – Consume raw temperature and user input data.

2. Attention – Filter out relevant data for reasoning.

3. Reason – Decide if it should increase or decrease temperature.

4. Action – Decision is sent to the heating element.

Then the action changes the environment and new data is consumed and the cycle repeats.

This breakdown reveals two interesting things.

The first is that what we usually think of as “intelligence”, the reasoning part of this system, really is just one component required for the system to function.

The second is that to make use of the raw data, the thermostat needs attention to filter out what’s relevant.

In this particular system, the attention function seems somewhat trivial, and therefore overlooked. But I’d argue that this is an equally important part of an intelligent system and it holds the key to what LLMs unlock in human knowledge work.

LLMs are not artificial intelligence, but artificial attention

Before LLMs, if you wanted a computer to find every mention of the word “potato” in a document, you could write a simple program to do it. Ten lines of code, problem solved.

But ask that same program to find every place where the concept of food is mentioned? Now you’re in trouble. “Potato” is easy. But what about “grabbed a bite,” “starving,” “the smell from the kitchen,” or a character preparing for a dinner party? The task explodes in complexity.

Now ask it to do that across images, video, audio, and text simultaneously. You’ve just described an impossible problem, or at least until recently.

What makes LLMs valuable isn’t that they reason better than us. It’s that they can hold a concept in mind and hunt for it across any medium, in any form it might take. They can attend to meaning, not just pattern-match on keywords.

This is exactly what human attention does, the ability to dynamically filter a flood of raw data based on a fuzzy, contextual idea of what matters to the aim in mind.

But unlike human attention, it doesn’t get tired or distracted. The third hour of contract review is as good as the first. LLMs bring the same attention to page one thousand as they do to page one.

For the first time in history, we have inexhaustible artificial attention.

Most knowledge work is low reasoning and high attention

It’s worth noting that LLMs can reason, and its ability to do it so fluidly is novel. But if we’re going to be honest, for any specific problem, a purpose-built program will usually outperform them.

A trading algorithm will beat an LLM at trading. A chess engine will beat an LLM at chess.

What LLMs offer isn’t better reasoning. It’s reasoning that can be applied to anything, because they can attend to anything.

And it turns out that for most knowledge work, reasoning was never the bottleneck. Attention was.

Just look at how much knowledge work across industries require attention rather than reasoning:

• Legal: Contract review—scanning hundreds of pages to flag non-standard clauses when the reasoning about whether a clause is problematic is straightforward once found.

• Medical: Radiology—maintaining focus across dozens of scans to catch the one anomaly, when radiologists already know exactly what a tumor looks like.

• Finance: Reconciliation—matching records across systems like bank statements to internal ledgers, checking for discrepancies.

• Research: Literature review—reading dozens of papers to find the handful actually relevant to your question.

• Software: Log analysis—sifting through thousands of lines of system logs to find the error explaining an outage.

• Administrative: Email triage—deciding across a full inbox what needs a response, what can be delegated, what can be ignored.

In each of these cases, the reasoning is often as simple as if this, then that. The hard part is digesting enough information to know when this applies.

Attention is the bottleneck. Not reasoning.

The cost of attention just dropped by ~99.7%

To understand the impact of this on the economy, it’s worth contextualising this in numbers.

The average knowledge worker earns $75,000 a year. But how many hours of real, focused attention do they have each day? Not time in the office. Time when they’re actually locked in. Conservatively, it’s about two hours. The rest disappears into meetings, email, context-switching, and the afternoon fog.

Two hours × 250 working days = 500 hours of peak attention per year.

$75,000 ÷ 500 hours = $150 per hour of high-quality human attention.

In that hour, we can assume a focused worker could process about 10,000 words, or 40 pages.

That’s $15 per 1,000 words.

A top LLM can process the same 1,000 words for about $0.05.

That’s 300× cheaper. A 99.7% drop in the cost of human like attention.

Implications of artificial attention

When you look at it like this, you can assume that the invisible hand of the market is likely to slowly replace all the work that requires human like attention with AI.

The incentives are so large that it’s just a matter of time.

My suspicion is that this will happen in a particular order, where high-attention low-reasoning tasks go first.

Things like buying a product on Amazon, booking travel, or comparing insurance quotes. Over time, as models improve, they’ll climb the ladder toward higher-stakes, higher-reasoning decisions.

The downstream consequence of this is that the attention economy as we know it is changing. Large parts of the internet are monetized by capturing human attention and selling ads against it.

Anything someone uses the internet for that doesn’t entertain them is likely to be consumed by AI agents.

Another implication is that there are types of work that exist that before were not worth doing because the cost of attention was simply too high.

What business ideas become feasible when you can have a firehose of cheap attention?

These are just some of the questions that result from this lens, but I’m curious to hear what other people come up with.

If you have ideas or insights, please comment below.

I was born with congenital rebelliousness. For as long as I can remember, I had a strong aversion to doing anything an authority figure told me unless I understood the exact purpose behind it. This attitude made me good at thinking for myself, but God, did I make a lot of mistakes.

The problem with this attitude is that much of the advice adults pass down is directionally correct, even if they can’t explain why. They either learned the lesson long ago or were told to do something a certain way and never questioned it.

A lot of this wisdom is crystallized in sayings we repeat, like “The early bird catches the worm.”

As a teenage night owl, I found this saying insulting to my intellect.

Why would it matter if I woke up early or late? I had the same number of hours in a day either way.

What I had failed to account for was the quality of those hours.

It doesn’t matter how many hours you have if you don’t have any energy and attention to spend during those hours. Anyone who’s been sick knows this. You may have plenty of time on your hands, but you cannot do anything with it.

If you wake up right before work or school, your best attention is captured by other people’s agendas. You are forced to react to the demands of others the moment you wake up. By the time the day is yours again, your best attention is already spent, and you’re left with the scraps of low quality attention to spend on yourself.

The deeper meaning behind the saying “The early bird catches the worm” is not about the hour you wake up, but rather about being proactive and intentional. You want to take charge of your attention and time and not allow it to be spent by others.

In my childish arrogance, I assumed I understood the saying at face value and missed its deeper meaning.

Rather than looking at any flaws in my reasoning or my character, I assumed the statement was flawed.

This is what pride looks like in practice.

Pride shortcuts effort. Spending attention is costly, so we take the path of least resistance. Pride gives us permission to stop looking, to rest on our conclusions, to confuse familiarity with understanding.

Why investigate further if I already know what this means?

The same pattern does not stop at the individual level.

Scale this attitude up to an entire society and you get civilizational pride. Cultures begin to undervalue their own inheritance. Religion, history, philosophy, and tradition are treated as primitive artifacts rather than compressed knowledge.

Modern worldviews often assume contemporary civilization represents the peak of human understanding. Even if this were true, which I am not convinced it is, the belief itself has consequences. It encourages us to rest on our laurels.

Ancient history and religion are frequently framed as unsophisticated or superstitious. Myths are treated as childish stories. Philosophical traditions are reduced to naive attempts to explain the world before the scientific method existed.

From this perspective, ancient people acted for irrational reasons. Ancient structures are assumed to be temples. Religious teachings are dismissed as blind faith. Mythology is treated as fiction. Therefore none of it carries a deeper meaning worth examining.

This mirrors the same mistake I made as a teenager. We believe we already understand what these traditions are, so we never ask what they were actually for.

Being wrong is one thing. Using certainty as an excuse to stop paying attention is another. That is how a civilization loses its ability to learn from its own past.

And those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

When I was 16, my stepdad gave my mom a beautiful set of jewellery for Christmas.

Gold, diamonds. Clearly expensive.

But when my mom opened the present, I saw a deep sense of disappointment in her eyes that lingered for the rest of the evening.

I found her reaction puzzling. On one hand it felt unfair, on the other it felt justified.

It wasn’t until much later in my life that I understood why I felt this tension.

Fast forward 10 years, and I had spent about 5 years being a rootless nomad. I had seen the world, but my temporary experiences and shallow relationships started to wear on me. I felt a mile wide but an inch deep. I decided it was time to settle down and Lisbon was the location I chose.

This was a difficult time, because I realized that I wasn’t used to being a good friend people could rely on. Which created lots of discomfort that forced me to take a hard look at myself, and struggle against the itch to escape through travel.

After about a year of struggle, I was leaving to visit family in Norway and at the end of a going away dinner a friend pulled me aside and gave me a small plastic compass with a note saying, “To help you find your way back to Lisbon”.

On the surface, it was such a simple gift. But below the surface it showed an incredible level of perceptiveness and care. Not only did I feel seen, but I felt like there was someone who saw my weaknesses and was willing to be my friend regardless.

Lesson hidden in plain sight

This was what was missing in my stepdad’s gift to my mom. When she saw the jewellery, she saw a man who had not paid any attention to her and last minute over compensated by buying her something really expensive, hoping she wouldn’t notice.

My stepdad’s gift was expensive in terms of money, but cheap in terms of attention. My friend’s gift was cheap in terms of money, but expensive in terms of attention.

In other words, the value of a gift can be measured in how seen someone feels. And to truly see someone, you need to pay attention.

This gets to the heart of why gift giving is so hard.

Giving a gift places demands on us, and mercilessly punishes those that don’t pay attention by pointing a mirror back at us.

For someone weak, this can lead to avoidance and exuses. But for someone strong, it can be an invitation to grow and improve.

Gift giving is in this sense a spiritual endeavour, and as much of a gift to ourselves as the one receiving the gift.

Applying the principle to real life

Using this principle, let’s have a look at ways we can come up with great gifts that make people feel seen.

If we simply think of a gift as either seeing and acknowledging someone’s struggles, or giving them something that supports them in that endeavor, then any gift needs to start with identifying someone’s needs.

Our needs have multiple levels to it. There are surface level needs and then there are deeper needs. Below I’ve outlined a map of surface and deeper level needs, note that this map of needs is by no means a complete list or a particularly sophisticated one, but since the deeper sense and meaning of human existence is beyond the scope of this essay, this should suffice.

Our surface level needs are our physical and utilitarian needs:

• Health – Having energy and vitality through eating, moving, and rest

• Wealth – Having resources for long term sustenance and security

Then there are deeper needs that get at our ability to grow and develop as individuals:

• Connection – Being part of a community of people that love you and accept you for who you truly are.

• Purpose – Feeling like you are playing an impactful role in something larger than yourself.

• Mastery – Feeling at the edge of your abilities and improving as you adapt to the challenges.

• Autonomy – Feeling like you have the room to make decisions and be a master of your own life.

If you pick a person in your life you know intimately, you can probably pinpoint one or more of these that the person feels like they are falling short on. This is a good place to start when you think about gifts.

Below I’ve outlined some examples of gifts that you could give depending on the situation you find the person in.

Prompts and ideas

Surface needs

• What does your friend enjoy but hasn’t fully realized themselves?
  Ex: Your friend always gets the same tea while at your house, so you buy him a few packs for himself.

• What’s a product someone uses that they haven’t splurged on the fancy version of yet?
  Ex: Your friend journals every day with a plastic bic pen, so you buy him a nice refillable fountain pen.

• What’s a problem someone has in their life that they have yet to recognize or fix?
  Ex: Your friend has an old backpack they use every day but hasn’t yet replaced it.

• What is some problem in their lives that always ends up at the bottom of the priority list because they have more important things to do?
  Ex: Their garage is really messy, so you hire someone to come clean the garage for them.

Deeper needs

Are they feeling a lack of mastery in their life?

• Your friend jumps between hobbies and projects but rarely sticks long enough to feel competent.
  Gift idea: A high-quality beginner’s toolkit for one specific skill, plus a handwritten note saying “One thing. Done well.”

• Your friend compares themselves to experts and feels behind.
  Gift idea: A book or course focused only on fundamentals, with a note that says “You are allowed to be a beginner.”

Are they feeling a lack of autonomy in their life?

• Your friend feels trapped by obligations and expectations from others.
  Gift idea: A solo experience. A night away, a day pass, or a travel voucher. No plans attached.

• Your friend always adapts to others and rarely chooses for themselves.
  Gift idea: A notebook titled “What I Want,” with the first page already filled out by you with permission to be selfish.

Are they feeling a lack of purpose in their life?

• Your friend is successful but feels oddly empty about it.
  Gift idea: A long-form letter naming the concrete impact they have had on you and others. And an encouragement to use their abilities in the service of others.

• Your friend wants to make an impact but does not know where to aim.
  Gift idea: A small, real responsibility tied to something meaningful. Mentoring, volunteering, or helping you build something real.

Know your limits

Gifts like these only work if they are grounded in real insight. You have to actually see the person. Guessing, projecting, or forcing meaning onto a gift will often land wrong or feel performative.

You also need to make sure that the person is willing to accept what it is that you are implying with your gift. Sometimes people can get offended or be sensitive about these things, because they point to things inside themselves they aren’t willing to look at.

The benefit of doing that through a gift rather than telling them, is that implied in the gift itself is a recognition that you truly care, so what might not be well received elsewhere can penetrate deeper because of the way it’s delivered.

If you are not sure what someone truly needs, don’t try to be clever. Go with a simple, surface-level gift but pair it with a sincere compliment or a clear signal that you care about the relationship and intend to show up for it. Showing that you see them matters more than being impressive.

I’ve always been curious. That curiosity pulled me into all kinds of worlds. Magic. Theatre. Design. Startups. Leather work. Social engineering. Programming. Meditation. Philosophy. The list keeps going.

There’s not doubt the tendency to jump between things has been a vice at times, but beneath it all was a genuine need to understand the deeper meaning behind it all.

I would throw myself into a domain, learn everything I could, then hit a wall when the well ran dry. Over time I learned to stay with things a little longer. That helped me grow. It also let me build skills that mattered.

No matter what I studied, I kept seeing the same patterns. Ideas that repeat. A deeper reality showing up across domains. The wisest people I met seemed to have a grasp of this, and they used that understanding to make better choices and become better people.

This newsletter is my attempt to share the patterns I’ve picked up over the years. Some might help put into words things you’ve sensed but never named. Some might help you see the broader applicability of understanding they’ve already earned. And some might help bring clarity where you feel stuck.

I also wish to use this as a magnet to attract and bring together people who see the world in a similar way through events and online communities.

If this speaks to you, or if you’re simply thinking “What does he mean by this?”, then this newsletter is for you.

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-Kalle