In the face of an uncertain future, and with our “learning debt” growing as technology marches on, life can feel overwhelming and like we’re constantly falling behind.

Today, remember that learning just one thing, however small, is progress.

Even if it’s not as much as you’d like, it’s something. And it matters.

If you’ve ever managed human beings, you know one of the great challenges is to properly explain what needs to be done.

No one can see inside our heads, and what is obvious to us is seldom obvious to other people.

When we get lazy, we ask people to fill in the gaps for us, and then we get frustrated when they don’t make exactly what we want.

In a world where AI will soon be able to create anything we can imagine (as long as we can properly explain it), we’re all going to have to get a lot better at explaining what we are trying to solve.

This exercise will benefit our communication for years to come.

Never before has it felt more like there are two different worlds growing simultaneously.

In one world, tech is moving at such an absurd rate that we need to chronicle its updates in minutes, not days.

In the other? A plumber without a website is booked solid for months and will arrive sometime between 9AM and 9PM (hopefully).

Half of the world feels like it’s being upended in real time, never to return to normal.

And the other half feels like a glass of cool lemonade on a summer porch.

Alt title: Do you trust your friendly neighborhood chatbot?

By default, LLMs are sycophantic “yes men”. They tell us what we want to hear. This is good, in the short term, to help us get out of our own negative self talk.

But in the long term? It’s just another hit of dopamine. The very same we get scrolling through an infinite social feed.

Too much dopamine keeps us hooked on the chatbot experience itself, instead of letting us use the chatbot to make change in the real world.

This is an inherent conflict of interest in any LLM-as-a-business, that we must all keep in mind.

Legendary music producer Quincy Jones (RIP) famously said “Leave space for God to walk through the room”.

In any creative pursuit, we can’t plan our way into brilliance. If that were true, there’d be more spreadsheet Mozarts out there, and a lot fewer meddlesome, irrational, unpredictable artist/genius types.

As tempting as the idea is to schedule everything ahead of time in an Excel sheet, brilliance always requires a bit of randomness—a bit of chaos.

Are you trying to plan everything? Or are you leaving space for unexpected magic?