“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

— widely attributed to Maya Angelou1

Feeling is a strange phenomenon. It’s usually a complex, multi-component experience: scent, imagery, and memory woven together, uniquely tied to the human condition. Sometimes you recognize it as it’s happening. Sometimes it hits you years later with the same force, like it just occurred. Sometimes it’s as simple as “hm, nice!” when using a product. And sometimes it’s a whole-body visceral reaction, goosebumps and tears when you hear music your dad loved or think about seeing your child being born.

I’ve always been a ‘feel’ kind of person. As a kid, I’d lie on the floor for hours listening to my dad’s old records. “To dream, an impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe”, searching for something I couldn’t name. I’ve chased that feeling ever since, in my studies (where it shows up as intuition for a subject), in my work output (ideas, projects, prototypes, papers, presentations). Without it, things feel superficial and temporary.

A couple of years ago, I had an epiphany listening to Aaron Rodgers2 talk about his approach to the game: “In drill work, people are so concerned about how it looks rather than how it feels. And how it feels is way more important.”

It wasn’t new information. I’d been searching for that feeling he was describing in most of what I do, my whole life. I had read it articulated differently in The Inner Game of Tennis3. But hearing him articulate it beautifully made me realize: this thing exists, it has a name, and I can notice when it’s there and when it’s missing. That awareness changed something foundational for me. It made me care about ‘feel’ deliberately, made me know when my work had it and when it didn’t.

When you ‘attach a feeling’ to a thing, whether it’s a rep in the gym, a line of code, or teaching your daughter how to throw a ball, that’s when magic happens. It changed how I approach preparing for talks, building products, even coaching my kids in sports.

As an engineer, the instinct is always to get to that function with clear variables and output. Map the inputs, define the parameters, predict the results. But feel is freeing in a different way. Your brain does its own math through functions you can’t fully see and produces results that feel magical. If you pay attention, you’ll slowly figure out some of the parameters and patterns. The results become scalable, repeatable, but they never lose that magic. The weights of the parameters are where the secret sauce is.

I’m a sentimental person, and maybe that skews my judgment, but I believe how much heart has gone into creating something, versus just how much work, matters. That struggle and heart get transferred. It comes through in the work and it comes through the screen.4 It’s how most of us can tell good acting from bad acting, even if we can’t articulate exactly why. It’s why I think an AI-generated movie might become technically flawless, maybe even unrecognizable from human-made content, but knowing that mere fact, I don’t think it would generate the same visceral feeling, at least not at scale. Maybe that’s wishful thinking.

In the age of AI, this might be one of the few things that gives us an edge, and more importantly, happiness. AI can optimize form beautifully. It can generate technically correct outputs at scale. But it can’t feel. It can’t know what it’s like when an old friend you’ve fallen out with shows up unannounced at the hospital when you’re expecting your first child and the rest of your family is out of the country. (I teared up just thinking of this. The recall alone brought it back.)

I’m not saying feel is the path to excellence. There are a thousand ways to skin a cat, and who am I to prescribe one? But ignoring feel is unwise. It’s prone to mechanical output: work that’s correct but soulless, functional but forgettable.

For people like me who are inspired by excellence, and I mean excellence in craft, not numbers on a chart, feel is one way to get close. It’s how you detach from outcome anxiety and attach to something deeper. It’s how you stop performing and start creating.

So here’s what I’ve learned: chase the feel. In your work, in your hobbies, in how you show up for people. Notice when something resonates in your chest or gives you chills. Don’t dismiss it as irrational or unquantifiable. That feeling is data too, just in a format your conscious mind hasn’t fully decoded yet.

People might forget the details of what you built or what you said. But they’ll never forget how it made them feel.

Originally drafted February 2026. Lightly revised September 2026.

Notes

Footnotes

  1. The quote is widely attributed to Maya Angelou. An earlier version appears in Richard Evans’ Quote Book (1971, p. 244), attributed to Carl W. Buehner: “They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” ↩

  2. Cameron Hanes podcast, Keep Hammering Collective, Episode 061, interview with Aaron Rodgers, Watch on YouTube ↩

  3. W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance, Random House (1997) ↩

  4. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson touched on a related idea in Rework: Change the Way You Work Forever (Vermilion, 2010), in ‘Decommoditize Your Product’: including you in the product is an edge that can’t be copied. It’s in the feel arena, in my view. Your fingerprints on the work. ↩