# On Competition and Convergence (yes, Claude helped me write this up) I missed the deadline. Clief Notes · 💰 Competitions Weekly Comp #8: The Wildcard; "You are the client this week." The competition I'd been meaning to enter closed while I was heads-down on something else, and for about a minute I let myself mourn it. C'est la vie. The easy move was to shrug and move on. No prize left on the table, so why do the work? I did it anyway. Told myself I'd run the competition as an exercise, point it at one granular piece of the system I've been designing for months, and call *that* a win. No trophy, no leaderboard. Just edification. The assignment was literally be your own client — so I was. Here's the part I didn't see coming. Somewhere in the doing, things started to surface. Structures I'd been squinting at for weeks turned obvious. The vision went gestalt. The work got *easier* — not because the problem shrank, but because I could finally see the whole shape of it at once. A big piece of that, for me, was working across a defined information surface — Claude Code, one shared place my collaborator and I both edit and maintain. No more insane piles of files in dubious, hastily-named folders scattered across my C drive. An actual, mutual work surface. The architectural vision I'd sketched at the start of this trip finally had somewhere to live, and it implemented as a real structure, granularized at the appropriate nodes. Wow. Just wow. (I'll spare you the full gee-golly.) So here's the take-away, and it's the whole reason I'm posting: Do the exercises! Do the competitions — *especially* the ones you already lost. Put the work in when the only prize on the table is your own understanding. The deadline was never the point. The convergence was, and it only shows up for the people who keep doing the reps after the whistle blows. Turns out the cure for a squirrel-chasing brain isn't fewer acorns.

Inspired by a post by @Tyler Lucas - I realised that there are some real gems about how to get started with ICM that are in this community and might be hard to find for people who are new. So, here's a bit of a "getting started" Clief Notes ICM primer. First off, the classic from @Bas Rosario who explains ICM using a birthday cake: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/new-to-icm-icm-explained-with-a-birthday-cake?p=04ac5c73 He follows that up with a post about how to go from that to building the bakery: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/you-baked-the-cake-now-lets-build-the-bakery?p=e5c5dbe1 @Carla Bosteder also wrote a primer for us, explaining that ICM is AI workflows in a box: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/ai-workflows-in-a-box?p=58542a05 Need some help with all the terms and jargon? @Joshua Hubbard has you covered: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/18-terms-this-community-uses-constantly-plain-definitions-no-assumed-knowledge?p=ec670702 Need an ICM tutor? Check out the one that @Don Roy shipped to help you: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/a-foundations-tutor-for-those-who-need-more?p=b5403a30 https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/a-foundations-tutor-for-those-who-need-more?p=4044e34b Or skip the tutor and build one that fits your own personalised needs - here's the post from @Tyler Lucas saying that he did just that (and that inspired this collection): https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/making-foundations-my-own?p=c277d862