From Takamaka to AI: Running Fast, and Forgetting why

Jul 11, 2025

I failed. I underdelivered.

My last essay was published over two months ago. And if I wanted to be brutally honest with myself, I should really count three months of inaction in Substack.

My last essay was just a quick reflection on the aftermath of “the blackout”. A mere excuse to shut up the voice in my head that kept repeating: “Noelia! You had committed to an essay per month”. I’ve clearly grown more comfortable ignoring the voice since.

Are commitments made to oneself not the easiest ones to break?

I can’t help but wonder: will this “Substack experience” follow the familiar pattern of my attempts to stick to a daily journal? Entries that soon became scattered: once a week, then once a month… only to disappear until the following crisis (often a heartbreak) brought me back many years later?

It may, and you will be my witness. But for now, I am not going to let that happen.

What happened?

I know how good I feel when I finish an essay. It is not only the sense of accomplishment, of conquering something I’ve always wanted to do, and thought I could not. It is also how the process of bringing the essay to life helps me structure my thoughts, ask myself new questions, dive into subjects from different perspectives, and, above all, how it helps me better understand why I think what I think. I know how important metacognition1 is for my critical thinking capabilities, and I want to intentionally create more spaces for that healthy exercise.

Like writing…

And yet, I’ve kept pushing it off.

Is it because I’ve grown more self-conscious than when I started, as I have more people reading? “Is it going to be up to your standards, dear reader?” - my subconscious may wonder - “What are you going to think? Will it be worth your time?”
Is it because the process is hard? Sure it is! I´ll go back and forth, rewrite, struggle to figure out what I want to say, and then how to say it. It is so much easier for me to focus on what comes easily: send another email, have another meeting, work on the P&L, write that post on LinkedIn...
Or is it because of what I’ve consciously told myself, to try and justify the delay? “I need to focus on being productive! I have so many more urgent things to do!”

The real reason is probably a mix of the three, but the last one, the one I’ve used as the logical justification to put off what I know is so important for me and my long-term strategy, is the one that got me thinking today.

It reveals an uncomfortable truth about my own behavior.

Could I possibly be the incarnated example of what I always advise companies NOT to do?

When I advise companies on how to unlock AI’s potential, I always focus on the importance of “pausing” to consider their goal, to ask themselves the right questions instead of going straight into mindless execution mode. I explain how strategic thinking, when properly done, does not lead to inaction. On the contrary, it leads to more productive action, ensuring you are moving in the right direction. It leads you beyond short-term results and helps you build resilience, which is so important in an environment that is changing every day.

I can almost see some readers rolling their eyes…. “Blah blah blah… I don’t have time for this”.

I get it.

Look, I am absolutely convinced of the benefits of pausing to think, and yet, I have ignored the required “pauses” for almost three months - not writing, not deep thinking, just grinding - because I have “urgent” things to do.

Or possibly “easier” things to do.

Ahhhh, how the easy-to-check boxes feed my old sense of accomplishment!

And it is in this state of mind, caught between knowing better and acting otherwise, that I thought of Takamaka.

The story of Takamaka

My husband’s grandparents, on his father's side, grew up on the island of Reunion. That is why curry was a regular ingredient of his family meals in France, and why he used to tell our daughter the story of Takamaka when he put her to bed.

A bit random, I know, but the scene made me think of this quote, attributed to Albert Einstein by most internet sources, although it could have been said by anyone.

This fable - or at least the version that has survived in our family - starts with the king of the forest facing a big problem: the main source of water in the kingdom is drying up!

God must have a solution to bring the water back, so he decides to send an emissary to talk to God. Of course, because God lives far… far away, he must choose the fastest of the animals, as speed is of the essence.

The cheetah runs as fast as he2 can and gets the answer from God, but when he’s back in front of the king, he realizes he ran so fast that he can no longer remember what God told him!

The king sends the hare immediately after, only to end up in a similar situation.

Finally, he is so desperate that he agrees to send the turtle, whose repeated offers as a volunteer he had previously rejected.

The turtle takes longer to go back and forth. On the way back, she walks slowly, and thoughtfully, repeating to herself:

taaaaaa…kaaaaa…maaaaa…kaaaaa

So she does not forget.

And surely, she brings the solution back to the king: to open up the Takamaka tree, which will provide the necessary water to fill up the big pond and provide for the kingdom.

Thanks to the turtle, the kingdom is saved!

“Thinking before doing” is so out of fashion!

I often catch myself thinking about Takamaka lately (it could have been “The hare and the tortoise” of Jean La Fontaine if it were not for my husband’s grandma). Proverbs or sayings with the same spirit have survived centuries in our culture. Like the “Vísteme despacio que tengo prisa” (“dress me slowly, I am in a hurry”) we often hear in Spain3.

They must have survived for a reason!

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Like the star that shines afar
Without haste and without rest
Let each one wheel with steady sway 
Round the task that rules the day
And do their best.

By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We know “thinking before doing” - a phrase my father repeats constantly in imperative form - leads to better decisions. We know the little time we take to think - or to “breathe” - is well spent, and will likely save much more time later. And yet… we feel the pull.

“I cannot go for that walk, I must stay in front of my computer.”

“I don’t have time to eat, I have back-to-back meetings!”

“I cannot afford a workshop with my team to figure things out. We need to execute right away!”

What seems to be recognized as a cognitive bias4 - action bias - is unequivocally reinforced by our social and business conventions. It may just be my entrepreneurial DNA, but I am used to feeling productive when I am “doing” (as opposed to “thinking”), when I am “executing” (as opposed to “strategizing”)... and proudly so. As an entrepreneur, I’ve been trained to keep a thousand balls in the air, to move as fast as possible, even if I break things in the process. I have to do so much, and move so fast, that any time I don’t spend “transacting” almost feels like time wasted.

That’s why it is so exciting that the new wave of AI is finally here to release us from all this pressure! We´ll finally be able to sit back and relax with the confidence that our AI agents will continue to transact for us.

Yeah, right! Of course, I am being ironic 🙂

The prevailing (and narrow-minded) narrative of AI’s dramatically increased productivity drives us to run even faster to barely keep up with our competitors, who today can be ten times as fast and do ten times more than they did yesterday. As companies and individuals, the fact that we can do so much more with less, and more so every day, can simply drive us to feel like nothing we do is ever enough.

This is the reason why I stopped writing. I had to do more… more of what feels productive, even if I know that pausing to think, or to simply “breathe”, increases my real “productivity".

Perception trumps knowledge, once again!

Like me, companies fall into the trap of confusing motion with progress when facing the AI wave (and hype). In a world where technology keeps changing faster and faster, it is easy to feel like stopping for a day or two, to come together and ask ourselves important questions, or to take a few weeks at a time to probe, is making us fall behind. It is in the implementation of AI that we feel “productive”: let’s license another tool, let’s define the architecture, let’s gather use cases, let’s launch pilots… But if we focus on running, we may forget why we are running in the first place, like the cheetah in the fable. And as Sangeet Paul Choudary so eloquently explains in this essay, this rush to “just do” may be even more problematic in the age of AI, because when execution is cheap, value shifts to discernment: knowing what to execute.

I hope I can convince more companies to see discussions around their AI strategy not as a distraction from productivity, but as a necessity for impact. But I need to remember to start applying it to myself!

Thanks for reading till the end! If you share this post, or Noel-IA’s Substack, I may get more subscribers, and more good pressure :-)

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As a bonus, and because this publication is Noel-IA after all, let me share what came up as I used AI to verify the details of the Takamaka story.

The assertive oracle in action

As I was writing about Takamaka, I doubted whether the first animal sent was the cheetah, and because my husband was at work and my daughter at school, I asked Google about the “Takamaka fable”. Google’s AI (Google Overview) responded, very assertively, that this fable is the corporate story of the Takamaka Distillery, which makes rum in the Seychelles.

Uhhhh??

Well, it’s normal that Google does not know about the Takamaka fable in Reunion Island. The story has probably never made it to a digital format after all. Yet, Google answered the question “What is the Takamaka fable?” with the wrong answer, and no hint of doubt whatsoever.

Then, I got curious and asked Perplexity, who provided a similar answer: “The story of Takamaka, as told by the rum brand and its founders, is not a traditional fable but rather a modern success story.” But at least Perplexity mentioned that this was not a fable in the traditional sense, and acknowledged the answer was limited by its sources.

Claude, from Anthropic, did not provide the reference to the Takamaka Distillery, likely because at the time it was not yet connected to Search, as it is today. Yet, it provided an answer coherent with what fables are usually about and the countries where Takamaka trees are often found, and included words like “might” and “possibly”.

A reminder of how much sources determine the answers, how limited “digital resources” are versus our whole reality, and how much our perception is impacted by the way information is presented to us.

Metacognition = Awareness and understanding of one’s thought process.

Thinking about how I write (is this metawriting, then?), it occurred to me that I may have included a term I’ve only become familiar with in the past few months - when I started to worry about AI’s impact on our cognitive capabilities - in an effort to appear worthy of your reading. I guess I still feel quite insecure about writing.

I debated whether I should refer to the animals as “he/she" or “it”. I settled on using he and she because this is a fable, after all, and used the gender that naturally came to me when thinking about this in Spanish: the cheetah and the king (the lion) are masculine - “el guepardo” y “el león”- the hare and the turtle are feminine - “la liebre” y “la tortuga”. How this came to be in Spanish is a source of fascination for me, and maybe material for another essay.

From the classical “Festina Lente” (hurry slowly), attributed to the Roman emperor Augustus, through Goethe’s “Ohne hast, Ohne rast” (“slowly but surely”).

Cognitive bias: A heuristic or shortcut in our brains that results from evolution but currently may have a negative effect.