If you have interacted with me at all sometime in these past eight weeks (specifically after I listened to this episode of At Work by The Ready), you will have heard me share this quote by Alvin Toffler:

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write. It will be those who cannot learn, unlearn and learn again.”

In my recent newsletter, I recommended looking at those three states and defining what you think you are doing to fulfill those three categories: what are you learning? What are you unlearning? What are you learning again?

Today, however, I am going to use these three states differently. I am going to apply it as a vertical to my relationship with control.

‍Thanks to this tiktok, I found out that Ours was hosting a Cinematic Mindfulness workshop and boy, did it deliver!

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It took me almost two years, but I finally finished reading Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. In one of the last chapters, they discuss a concept that really resonated with me. It’s called the three I’s, which stand for Ideology, Ignorance and Inertia.

Here’s a terrifying article from the Washington Post. It’s titled: AI is more persuasive than a human in debate, study finds. Subheading: When provided basic demographic information on their opponents, AI chatbots adapted their arguments and became more persuasive than humans in online debates.

Here is my position on balance.

Balance is a worthy goal, but I don’t think we have a correct calibration of the scale on which it is measured.

This weekend I lost my community.

My weightlifting gym BASA (Baltimore Area Strength Athletes), run by Jason Morstein, permanently closed.

I feel dramatic saying this but it’s true.

Work chat channels are the worst. When left to occur organically, chat conversations are disorganized, nothing is tracked, and everything is forgotten in a day.

It has been exactly a year since I started learning how to play the bass. Other than some middle school experience with music/choir – I started from scratch.

TLDR: Being Obedient = Bad, Being Reasonable = Good.

I love working with Founders. There is a special kind of compatibility I can achieve with someone who is over-indexed on Innovational and Relational thinking because they balance out my Procedural and Analytical affinity.

However, as I evolve my portfolio of startups I work with, I am becoming more keyed into the type of person I want to work with. Here are my 3 Green Flags and 2 Red Flags that I look out for when chatting with a potential collaborator.

This year has been hard. Really hard.

It’s like 2024 decided to be 5 years at once. Maybe it’s a tax thing.

Lately, I’ve been having regular conversations with my mentor and friend, Simon Carcagno, and this man has been on a roll. He will make these, seemingly throwaway, comments and observations that worm there way into my brain and unlock and unblock these mental obstacles I’ve been struggling with since the beginning of 2024.

I’ve never been against gratitude. In fact, I have my whole trifecta of Love – Gratitude – Imagination and how it’s important to tap into all of them.

But I’ve got to be honest.

“Pro-bleeeeeemmmmm?!?!?” she exclaimed, while sticking a microphone taped to a golden mannequin leg into my face.

I stare at her, my eyes wide, slightly panicking while scrambling for a better way to explain what I want to say. I draw a blank. I resign myself to saying “existential dread”.

This concept, introduced by this episode of Fixable, has brought together some of my favorite things: mathematics and working smarter.

They say when you make a plan, God laughs at you. Then, God then sends a man to ruin your plan!

I will not help you.

Nicholas Epley, a Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago, once wrote “Your brain’s greatest skill is its ability to think about the minds of others in order to understand them better.”

So, I decided to exercise that skill to understand why someone would support the genocide occurring in Palestine. Here are the reasons I came up with…

I didn’t realize I would have actual applications for what I learned in my Automate the Boring Stuff course so quickly! If you have any tasks that require the same sequence of mouse clicks, keyboard taps or anything like that to occur, then I have a time-saver for you!

Have we ever earned anything in our lives?