Birding Thinking

Resources

Going deeper.

The book gives you the framework. This is where we apply it — to real situations, new questions, and the world as it keeps changing.

Three content pillars

Categories that stay on-brand and deepen the framework without replacing the book.

Birding Thinking in Practice

Applying the framework to real-world scenarios — no jargon, real situations.

Observation in a Noisy World

The bigger cultural conversation the book sits inside — attention, focus, AI, information overload.

Field Notes

First-person stories — Eric’s voice, personal anecdotes, moments where Birding Thinking showed up in unexpected places.

Birding Thinking in Practice

How to Know If You’re Solving the Right Problem (Before You Spend a Week on It)

Most of us start solving before we’ve finished looking. A problem lands on the desk, it feels urgent, and within an hour we’re three browser tabs deep into a solution. A week later we surface — and realize we solved the wrong thing.

Birding Thinking has a fix for this, and it lives in the first phase: the 3 Knows. Before you commit a single hour, ask the three questions a birder asks before walking into the field.

Know the Birds. What exactly is the problem? Not the symptom, not the request that came in — the actual thing. If you can’t name it in one clear sentence, you’re not ready to solve it. You’re ready to keep observing.

Know the Habits. How does this problem behave? When does it show up, and what surrounds it? Problems have patterns. The recurring complaint that spikes every Monday is a different bird than the one that appears once a quarter. Knowing the rhythm tells you whether you’re chasing a one-off or a system.

Know the Habitats. What environment does this live in? A problem inside a five-person startup is not the same problem inside a regulated enterprise, even if it looks identical on paper. Context changes everything about what a good solution even is.

Here’s the test. Spend twenty minutes — not a week — writing down your answers to those three. If the answers come easily and point in the same direction, you’ve probably got the right bird. If they contradict each other, or if you find yourself guessing, that’s your signal: keep observing before you commit. The twenty minutes you spend looking will save you the week you’d have spent building the wrong thing.

The right idea and a good idea are not the same. A good idea is well-executed. The right idea is well-aimed. Birding Thinking is how you aim.

Observation in a Noisy World

AI Gives You Execution. It Doesn’t Give You Clarity.

There’s a quiet assumption baked into the AI moment: that the bottleneck was always execution. That if we could just produce faster — more code, more copy, more designs — everything else would follow. AI removed that bottleneck almost overnight. And yet the most common feeling among people using these tools isn’t relief. It’s a strange new kind of overwhelm.

The reason is simple. AI gives you execution. It does not give you clarity. It will cheerfully build whatever you point it at, including the wrong thing, faster than you’ve ever built the wrong thing before.

Think of AI as a flashlight, not a compass. A flashlight is extraordinary — it lets you see in places you never could. But it doesn’t tell you which direction to walk. Point it at the wrong corner of the room and you’ll see that corner in breathtaking detail while the door stays dark.

This is exactly where the observation skill becomes the defining advantage. The person who knows what to look for gets dramatically better results from the same tool than the person who’s just generating. The 3 Knows are, almost word for word, what a great prompt contains: a precise definition of the problem, the patterns around it, and the context it lives in. The 3 Tools tell you what to research and who to consult before you ever open the chat window. The 3 Actions turn the output into a decision.

The skill that mattered before AI matters more after it. When everyone can execute, clarity is the only edge left. Birding Thinking was written for a world with too much noise. It turns out that’s the same skill you need for a world with too much output.

So before your next prompt, slow down for a moment and ask: do I actually know which bird I’m looking for? The flashlight is ready. The direction is still yours.

Start with the book.

Everything here is an extension of what’s inside Birding Thinking. The best place to start is still page one.

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