The Weekly Minute - March 25, 2023

The Weekly Minute - March 25, 2023

Brian Wagner

Hope you’re enjoying the first days of Spring and the March Madness tourney. It’s a glorious time of year. 

Shots like this just make it all worth it. (This was last week in the First Round) 

What I Read This Week

  • Unlocking the Power of Simplicity (via Sahil Bloom)

    • From Sahil: “Complexity is a silent killer of focus, clarity, and performance. This statement is true for businesses, but even more so for your work and life. It's easy to let complexity and disorder slowly seep in—we tend to add, but rarely subtract.

    • The Simplicity Audit examines four key environments of your life: Physical, Digital, Mental, and Social.

    • For each item in each environment, ask: (1) Is this necessary? (2) Is this creating energy? If "Yes" to both, keep it. If "No" to both, remove it. If "Yes" to one, think on it.”

    • Click the link above to get Sahil’s full breakdown.

  • In this article, Austin recounts a conversation with Kevin Kelly about AI. Kelly describes current AI as being like having a personal intern that can perform tasks such as writing rough drafts, summarizing research, brainstorming ideas, and suggesting headlines. However, since these AI agents are still primitive, their work needs to be checked and improved upon by humans. 

  • Kelly argues that the generative AIs are trained on a large amount of mediocre human work, which can produce average results. Austin does admit to being skeptical about the benefits of having an AI assistant, preferring to do the research and writing themselves. 

  • This space is certainly something to keep monitoring as this world gets even more sophisticated and can assist us all in many more ways. 

  • Early in Romeen’s career, he came across a 2x2 matrix developed by Paul Podesta, Chief Strategy Officer of the Cleveland Browns. It is one of the few frameworks that he still uses to this day to retroactively evaluate every key decision I make. 

  • Two quadrants in the matrix are intuitive and two are counterintuitive. Understanding the counterintuitive quadrants early on has had an outsized impact on my career. In this essay (an image shared through Twitter), he unpacks the counterintuitive quadrants and shared a perspective on how to best use them to your advantage.

One Quote 

  • "A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be." - Rosalynn Carter

What I Watched (on YouTube)

  • Happiness is a 2x2 Matrix 

    • Funny, here is another 2x2 quadrant! This was developed by American psychologist Hillel Einhorn. (Hat tip to David Epstein)

    • The video below is just more than a minute long, and in it Einhorn shares the insight: that we should appreciate the fact that we don’t have a lot of things that we don’t want. Take a look:

What I’m Watching (on TV)

  • Shrinking and Ted Lasso (Shoutout to AppleTV+)

  • March Madness 

  • PGA Tour

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