Category: Life
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Sheridan’s levels of autonomy
AI can easily take over generative creative work because that stage of work has a lot of room for making mistakes. In fact, you could say that mistakes are encouraged. Sometimes, an AI hallucination is the best thing that could happen to an idea. However, at some point in the creative work, there’s much less…
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One sitting vs. many sittings
When you commit to making something, and not stopping until you’re finished, you’re tapping into an incredibly powerful energy. This is the power of one sitting. It has the same energy as a sprint. For example, hackathons take this force to the extreme, stretching the time window out to a full day or two. If…
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Don’t overlook pain prevention
A father wanted to show his son how important it was to regulate his emotions. The son was given a rule: whenever he got upset, he would hammer a nail into their wooden fence. Initially, the son hammered a lot of nails, but the practice taught him to be more mindful of his temper. He…
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Letting go
Unlearning is an incredibly important skill. It’s also often, in my experience, much more difficult than learning. Part of that is probably because we go through decades of learning to acquire facts, lessons, and insights, but there isn’t much of a curriculum on unlearning beliefs and scripts. I’ve had some experience applying and practicing in…
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Advice for taking advice
The best advice comes with another person understanding you. In fact, the best advice could even originate from you. The other person isn’t forcing you into a solution; they genuinely want to understand the problem, and in the process of doing that, help you understand it better as well. They know how to ask you…
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J. Cole’s hard decision for an easy life
In case you’ve missed it, two of hip-hop’s biggest superstars—Drake and Kendrick Lamar—have been in conflict for the past several weeks. (There’s a Wikipedia page!) The inciting incident for this particular one was Kendrick responding to Drake and J. Cole’s song, “First Person Shooter.” While J. Cole responded with a diss, he quickly withdrew it…
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Thin rewards vs. thick rewards
When you cave in to your impulses—to check social media, to engage an overwhelming emotion, to eat delicious food of little nutritional value, to not speak up, to people please, to follow a default path, etc.—you will feel good in the moment. Unfortunately, the feeling usually disappears very quickly. These are thin rewards, and you…
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Effective first
An effective first approach prioritizes getting your work done (feeding your family, achieving your goal, helping a friend, etc.), within the boundaries of your values and ethics. When you work from a stance of effective first, you prioritize doing the real thing. You tell people about what you’re doing. Through this doing, you get the…
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“What if I’m no good?”
Let’s say you want to do something creative. You’re not sure about how good you really are, or how much money you’ll make, or whether or not you’ll “go somewhere” with it. Would you do it anyway? The answer needs to be a resounding yes. That’s the level of drive and sacrifice that it takes…
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The dirt
In Clear Thinking, Shane Parrish writes: Too often decision-makers get their information and observations from sources that are multiple degrees removed from the problem….You can’t make good decisions with bad information. In fact, when you see people making decisions that don’t make sense to you, chances are they’re based on different information than you’ve consumed.…