Why I Started Showering More Than Once a Day
/ 3 min read
I’ve been taking two showers a day. Sometimes three.
Not for hygiene reasons.
There’s a class of AI wearables that got a lot of attention last year — pendants and pins you clip on that record ambient audio, transcribe it, and surface insights later. The pitch: your best thinking happens out loud, in conversation, in the middle of something else. Capture it all.
Great idea. Wrong room.
My best thinking doesn’t happen in meetings. It doesn’t happen while I’m walking, or driving, or cooking. It happens in the shower. Specifically, in the shower. The running water, the heat, the absence of screens, the fact that my hands are literally occupied — it creates a kind of enforced idleness that my brain rushes to fill.
So my product idea, mostly a joke but only mostly: the shower pendant. Waterproof. Always listening. Built for the one place where capture is currently impossible.
But here’s the real observation underneath the joke.
For most of my life, having a lot of ideas wasn’t a superpower. It was kind of a curse. I’m brimming with ideas — always have been. A million a day. And for a long time, that just meant a million things I couldn’t do anything about. Ideas are cheap. Execution is expensive. The bottleneck was always on the build side.
That changed.
With AI, I can actually build the things I think of. Rapidly. The gap between “I have an idea” and “this exists in the world” has collapsed in a way that still feels a little unreal. It’s not zero — there’s still real work, real craft, real judgment involved — but it’s a fraction of what it was. The build bottleneck is no longer the binding constraint.
Which means something shifted.
If you can build almost anything, the new scarce resource is the idea itself — or more precisely, the captured idea. The flash that comes and goes. The thought that arrives fully formed in the middle of a shower and evaporates by the time you’re dry.
The loop used to break at execution. Now it breaks at capture.
That’s what the shower pendant is really about. Not a wearable device. A bridge. Between the moment you have the thought and the moment you can act on it.
Voice memos are the obvious hack, and yes, I use them. But there’s something about the shower specifically — the way the idle mind produces its best signal exactly when you’re least able to record it — that feels like an unsolved problem.
So until someone builds it, I’ve resorted to the only available workaround.
More showers.
If you’re building in this space, or if you’ve solved the shower capture problem in a way I haven’t thought of — I genuinely want to know.