I haven’t put one of these together in some time. At the moment, I’m on my annual Lent sabbatical from social, so this is truly the only avenue I have to share a few of the interesting things I’ve read lately. This week’s is all over the place, which is honestly ideal. Some good career advice, some bad financial advice, and random thoughts on the future of technology from writers far better than myself.
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37 Pieces of Career Advice I Wish I’d Known Earlier | Ryan Holiday
This was one of the best career advice things I’ve read. Listicles can come across as clickbait without the value - but this one delivers. Every student about to start their big kid jobs should read this every morning their first couple of years at work.
Find canvases for other people to paint on. Come up with ideas to hand over to your boss. Find people, thinkers, up and comers to introduce them to. Cross wires to create new sparks. Find what nobody else wants to do and do it. Find inefficiency and waste and redundancies. Identify leaks and patches to free up resources for new areas. Produce more than everyone else and give your ideas away. The person who clears the path ultimately controls its direction, just as the canvas shapes the painting.
Click here to read the full article.
Want to Be a Better Leader? Stop Thinking About Work After Hours. | Harvard Business Review
More is not more when it comes to being an effective leader at work. It’s a lot like running. Running too much and not setting rest boundaries can actually make you perform worse over time. As it turns out, research proves that leadership at work is a lot like that.
Our work emphasizes that it is important for leaders to find ways to detach from their leadership responsibilities after work. Leaders have a tendency to overwork and feel the need to always be available, but our results legitimize disconnecting from work and taking time to recover rather than continuing to think about work until late into the evening. Whether it is mastering a new hobby, exercising, spending time with loved ones, or simply reading a book to relax, leaders may be wise to find activities that they enjoy in the evening to turn their thoughts away from work.
Click here to read the full article.
Apple’s Vision Pro Doesn’t Augment Reality—It Sacrifices It | The Dispatch
I’m an Apple fan and generally like their products. This is one I just can’t get hyped about - and this article from The Dispatch articulates my feelings better than I could myself. I think it’s a cool toy to watch TV on or even have on a work trip to have multiple monitors setup to work from anywhere. But augmenting human interaction isn’t something that I consider an upgrade.
When we are absorbed in an ordinary screen, it is obvious to those around us. Even very small children can tell when we’re giving them half our attention, making half a human connection. (I speak from regrettable experience.) You no doubt know what this is like, having been on both sides of such conversations yourself: the little half-glances upward, the slightly too frequent confusion over a simple narrative (wait, who said that?), the steady murmurs of mhm and yeah, wow and oh, totally meant to suggest at least some attention is diverted from the screen.
The face computer will be this, but worse. The same disconnect, only more apparent. Talking to someone while looking at their EyeSight—while they look through you to the Word document in the middle distance—will never feel quite like a normal human interaction. It can’t, because it isn’t a normal human interaction. It’s half an interaction at best, mediated by an animation expressly designed to fool our loved ones into forgetting we have other, more absorbing things in view.
Click here to read the full article.
How social media algorithms 'flatten' our culture by making decisions for us | NPR
The internet took away the old gatekeepers of producers, editors and publishers and let anyone put their art out into the world in a way that they see fit. It’s a great thing right? But have we replaced human gatekeepers with algorithmic ones, creating art that is optimized for a feed? What other downstream effects have algorithms had on culture at-large?
We don't have a sense of how many other people are fans of the same thing that we are fans of or even if they're seeing the same piece of culture that we're seeing, or experiencing an album or a TV show, in the same way. So I think there's this lack of connection ... this sense that we're alone in our consumption habits and we can't come together over art in the same way, which I think is kind of deadening the experience of art and making it harder to have that kind of collective enthusiasm for specific things.
Click here to read the original article or listen to the full interview.
Dave Ramsey Tells Millions What to Do With Their Money. People Under 40 Say He’s Wrong. | Wall Street Journal
One day, maybe sooner rather than later, I want to put pen to paper (digitally) about Dave Ramsey. I think a lot of what he has to say is useful and helpful. In fact, while his debt snowball idea may not be the most mathematically reasonable way to pay down debt, it taps into behaviors that help people hit the end goal of being debt free more effectively. I do have issues with his style, thoughts on childcare costs and expected rate of returns on investments. I also think some of his advice lacks nuance at times - but ironically also so do some critiques of him in this article. Though, some were spot on.
“What Dave Ramsey really misses is any kind of social context,” says Morgan Sanner, a 26-year-old who runs a résumé-advice company in Columbus, Ohio, and has shared her feelings about Ramsey on TikTok.
She began paying off $48,000 in student loans (a Ramsey do) and also took out a loan to buy a 2016 Honda (a Ramsey don’t). Her rationale was that it was safer to pay extra for a more reliable car than a junker she could buy with cash. She feels these sorts of real-life decisions don’t factor into his advice. Her video about this has 875,000 views.
Click here to read the full article.
It’s easier to forgive a human than a robot | David Heinemeier Hansson
AI will disrupt the workforce. There are some areas where I think the change may be understated. There are also other areas where we may be fearing AI a little too much. This article talks about how robots have to be perfect all the time, while anything done by a human is usually received with a little more grace from consumers.
One of the reasons I think AI is going to have a hard time taking over all our driving duties, our medical care, or even just our customer support interactions, is that being as good as a human isn’t good enough for a robot. They need to be computer good. That is, virtually perfect. That’s a tough bar to scale.
Click here to read the full article.
What am I reading?
I’m about a third of the way through Traffic by Ben Smith, the former managing editor editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed and current co-founder of Semafor. It’s a fascinating book that walks through the history and background stories of some of the most viral websites from the early aughts that have impacted (probably for the worse) how we consume information today.
As always, if you are reading something interesting, feel free to share it! You can reach out by responding to this email or clicking here. Would love to hear from you!