Chapter 27: The Epilogue — Lenny's Prince

This chapter has 3 parallels — tap the highlighted passages to explore them.

Chapter 27 illustration And now six years have already gone by . . . I have never yet told this story. The companions who met me on my return were well content to see me alive. I was sad, but I told them: "I am tired." Now my sorrow is comforted a little. That is to say—not entirely. But I know that he did go back to his planet, because I did not find his body at daybreak. It was not such a heavy body . . . and at night I love to listen to the stars. It is like five hundred million little bells . . .

But there is one extraordinary thing . . . when I drew the muzzle for the little prince, I forgot to add the leather strap to it. He will never have been able to fasten it on his sheep. So now I keep wondering: what is happening on his planet? Perhaps the sheep has eaten the flower . . .

At one time I say to myself: "Surely not! The little prince shuts his flower under her glass globe every night, and he watches over his sheep very carefully . . ." Then I am happy. And there is sweetness in the laughter of all the stars. But at another time I say to myself: "At some moment or other one is absent-minded, and that is enough! On some one evening he forgot the glass globe, or the sheep got out, without making any noise, in the night . . ." And then the little bells are changed to tears . . .

Here, then, is a great mystery. For you who also love the little prince, and for me, nothing in the universe can be the same if somewhere, we do not know where, a sheep that we never saw has—yes or no?—eaten a rose . . . Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten the flower? And you will see how everything changes . . . And no grown-up will ever understand that this is a matter of so much importance!

This is, to me, the loveliest and saddest landscape in the world. It is the same as that on the preceding page, but I have drawn it again to impress it on your memory. It is here that the little prince appeared on Earth, and disappeared. Look at it carefully so that you will be sure to recognize it in case you travel some day to the African desert. And, if you should come upon this spot, please do not hurry on. Wait for a time, exactly under the star. Then, if a little man appears who laughs, who has golden hair and who refuses to answer questions, you will know who he is. If this should happen, please comfort me. Send me word that he has come back.

Parallel 1 ★

Act decisively across uncertain futures rather than waiting for clarity that will never arrive.

Eric Ries Founder & Executive Chairman, Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE); Author of The Lean Startup

The aperture of possible futures that AI makes possible is so incredibly wide. And predicting it requires a really deep understanding of a bunch of empirical questions, as far as I can tell, nobody knows the answers to right now. So given that it's not knowable what's going to happen... The thing that makes sense is to pick actions today that make ethical sense in a wide variety of future scenarios and do those. And what's really interesting is that takes people out of total paralysis about it into there's actually some very clear things that we should do.

Reflections on a movement, Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology), 2023-10-29 ↗

Why this parallel

The narrator oscillates between two futures — the flower safe, the flower eaten — and cannot resolve which is true, yet must live inside that uncertainty anyway. Ries describes the same condition at civilizational scale: the futures are unknowable, the paralysis is real, and the only exit is to act well across all possible outcomes rather than waiting for certainty that will never come. Both are meditations on how to keep caring — and keep moving — when the answer cannot be known.

Parallel 2 ★

You cannot delegate care; the founder's sleeplessness is inseparable from the product's soul.

Dalton Caldwell Partner Emeritus at Y Combinator, Co-Founder of Standard Capital

You can't delegate caring about your users and you can't delegate caring that the product is great. That is so critical.

Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more, Dalton Caldwell (Y Combinator, Managing Director), 2024-04-18 ↗

Why this parallel

The narrator's anguish springs from a single moment of inattention — a leather strap left undrawn — and the knowledge that no one else will notice or remedy it in his place. Caldwell's warning lands in exactly the same register: the founders who stay great are those who understand that the small acts of care cannot be handed off, because the thing that makes a product matter is indistinguishable from the person who loses sleep over it. Delegation can transfer work; it cannot transfer the ache of consequence.

Parallel 3 ★

Build conviction in unmeasurable quality—the belief that good and great differ, even when data can't prove it.

John Cutler Head of Product at Dotwork

You could rationalize that all you want, but at the end of the day, it's often because either the founders or other people involved have seen how that can work because there is a leap of faith and there's a leap of faith that no amount of data or no amount of AB testing or no amount of rationalizing or no amount of spreadsheet math to figure out the ROI of what you're doing will ever help you. It's just not. I just noticed that pattern over and over that there was just a slightly irrational belief in the power of what it would take to have a nine craft level product versus a seven craft level product.

What differentiates the highest-performing product teams, John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess), 2023-01-15 ↗

Why this parallel

The narrator's final question — whether an unseen sheep has eaten an unseen flower on an unreachable planet — cannot be answered by any evidence, yet it changes everything. Cutler observes the same paradox in the best product teams: their driving belief in craft and consequence is explicitly beyond what data can justify, a 'slightly irrational' conviction that the unprovable difference between good and great actually matters. In both cases, it is precisely the unverifiability of the stakes that gives them their power.

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