Author: neil

Mark Cruth: Improving Team Collaboration

Roger Martin: How to prepare for strategy

 

Long day at the office. Great conversations, and amazing work from the team. Got a ton of new ideas, and shared some old ones. I’m too exhausted to link to anything today except this NYTimes article covering the launch of Anthropic’s Claude

The Nation: The metaverse is dead

Stella Silence: The sound of silence, a different kind.

Ryan Holiday: It always takes longer than you expect

Hanns Scharff, The Nazi Interrogator Who Revealed the Value of Kindness

Stewart Brand: Pace layering

 

Paul Graham: How to do great work  “Once you’ve found something you’re excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.”

Careering life – a fantastic exploration of what it means to be creative at work while growing as a human.

Suzi Quatro & Chris Norman

The things we fear most in organisations – fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances – are the primary sources of creativity. – Meg Wheatley

 

On writing: A prayer wheel for capitalism

Good work is not enough. “Success is a lagging indicator”

The Miracle Sudoku. Constraints can be beautiful for creativity.

Ben Evans: AI and the automation of work

Boaz Barak: The problem with metaphors for AI

Om Malik: Ethernet at 50 and Computer History Museum’s write up

 

Om Malik: AI Hype – Smoke & Mirrors. The reason apps worked was a. Happiness (enchantment) or b. Utility (or solving a problem). The same holds for AI apps.

I discovered RSS (& Google Reader) from a Toastmasters’ speech about the subject, & have been hooked on RSS ever since to keep up with my reading. This Verge article was another one to reminisce about that time.

Long read from the Gradient: Why Transformative AI is really hard to achieve

Ethan Mollick: The Homework Apocalypse

An interesting Twitter thread for book openings

 

John Hagel: Authors Shaping My Journey

Seth Godin: Overstuffed

Jack Clark: The story in this edition of Import AI, titled Silicon Stakeholder Management, is a stunning read.

Richard Merrick: Intelligence is more than data: “Data has no magic. It is sterile until it comes into contact with imagination.”

George Saunders Convocation Speech 2013: Kindness

Sahil Bloom: Public Speaking Guide

 

Robin Hanson: Defy Your Neck-Hairs

Rob Walker: Never again, in a good way. I’ve toyed with the idea of a gratitude journal, never successfully.A learning journal (or a never-again journal) is more enticing, but again this particular user is not consistent 😉

Xinyue Wei: Delight in the everyday

I resonate with the lessons in this video about football strategy  in a non-football context

“People like to say that feelings aren’t facts, which is true BUT one thing I have come to understand is that other people’s feelings are facts to them. The irony of the ‘facts aren’t feelings’ crowd is that they spend all this time trying to argue other people out of their feelings… as if that has ever worked. As if that’s not a super emotional and irrational thing in and of itself. The sooner you accept that a person feels a certain way and meet them there (or just let it go), the sooner you can come to a resolution and an understanding (or just move on with your life).” Ryan Holiday

All success is a lagging indicator. – also Ryan Holiday. I remember this often at work.

Rands in Repose: Ask questions, repeat the hard parts, and listen

Sara Canaday: How do you measure your effectiveness as a leader?

David Perell: How Learning Happens

David Epstein: Pour out lesser ideas to get greater ones

Henrik Karlsson: Podcasts and the age of enlightenment

Five thoughts of a dying professor, University of Waterloo