Just keep skimming, just keep skimming. I thought to myself as I paced through my open plan living room and dining room while reading Attention Span by Gloria Mark. You need 1735 steps anyways, so you might as well get through this chapter…or at least to the next subheading of the book. God, I was bored.

Earlier this year, I came across a Tumblr post that I keep thinking about.

It’s the story of a man who is writing an article on people achieving high scores in classic video games. He finds out that the record for tetris is 327 lines. This man’s wife, regularly clears 500 - 600 lines on long car rides easily.

So, they go to a tournament, and she sets the record at 841. That wasn’t even her best score. She’s just a baller like that.

After setting a baseline at Tough Temple last July, I was ready to make some improvements at my next weightlifting meet.

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

‍ ‍

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.

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.

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”.

So there I was, minding my own business, when the Digital Wellbeing app on my phone decides to inform me that I’m spending an average of 15 hours a week on Tiktok.

Sir, I think at the app, how could you say something so controversial, yet so brave?

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!