A Learning a Day

I got a call Saturday evening that showed up as Google. An automated voice asked me to press one to confirm I was Rohan. A follow-up call came from someone on Google’s security team, investigating a breach on my account. They told me to check the Google support portal, where I’d see a ticket raised in my name.

I checked. There was nothing there.

They didn’t miss a beat. No problem, they said, we’re already on it. Then a notification arrived saying someone had tried to log into my account and added a new recovery email. All I needed to do now was verify my login by sharing a code.

That’s when I stopped. You should never share a verification code with anyone.

I’d fallen for a version of this years ago with a Craigslist scammer, and I wasn’t doing it twice. I hung up.

What struck me was how sophisticated this was. The caller ID said Google. The email looked like it came from Google. None of the usual tells were there.

A friend told me recently that he doesn’t pick up calls from numbers she doesn’t recognize, period. I think I’m going to be adopting that policy too.

And the one rule that’s worth repeating: never share an authentication code with anyone, no matter how official the request sounds or how convincing the person on the other end is.

A Brown economics professor gave his first-ever take-home midterm this spring. The class average was 96%. His midterms usually average between 65 and 80%, and this exam was harder than his past ones.

He ran it through ChatGPT, and the answers mirrored what his students had submitted. The giveaway was the style. On one question, a direct argument was the obvious route. ChatGPT and many of his students used a convoluted proof by contradiction instead. Correct, but oddly contrived.

Then he made the final exam in-person. The class average was 48.6%, the lowest in the history of the course. Eighteen students dropped, and nineteen failed.

Inside Higher Ed tells the fascinating story of Prof Serrano’s attempts at pursuing this with the Brown Ethics committee and the university’s meek response.

Putting aside pontification on what this means for education, the gap between the midterm and final performance reminded me of AI work slop. The graph hilariously differentiates between those who understood the content vs. didn’t.

Beware outsourcing your thinking to AI.

PS: Kudos to student 1 – she/he might have been the only one in the class who did the midterm without AI.

I recently read Die with Zero by Bill Perkins. Multiple friends had recommended it, and it turned out to be a genuinely thought-provoking read. Three lessons stayed with me most.

First, the most important thing we do in this life is collect memories. It’s easy to slide into the default of accumulating money and forget that money is a means vs. the point. Experiences pay dividends the way invested money does. Learning to live well means learning to strike the balance between saving and spending on experiences.

Second, there’s only a limited window in life when you have the right combination of money, time, and health to actually enjoy memorable experiences. You need to plan around that window instead of assuming it’ll always be there. Health is the scarcest resource of the three, because without it, none of the rest matters much. We tend to have more time when we’re young and more money when we’re older, and the real skill is figuring out how to balance the two across a lifetime instead of defaulting to one extreme.

Third, the real value of the book isn’t the specific techniques (though there are a few of those too). Instead, it is Bill Perkins’ insistence that we should be thoughtful and analytical about our relationship with money. He pushes us to put a number on our fears instead of leaving them abstract. How long might we live? How expensive might a health emergency actually be? How much will we need?

That’s where the wisdom sits. The book isn’t a license to spend everything because YOLO. It’s an argument for being deliberate enough with money that our choices become intentional instead of reflexive.

A lot in the book resonated, but that last point is the one that actually is changing how I think, talk, and act around money.

I was in a series of discussions recently where the hardest part was that too many variables were changing at once. All fluid, all moving, seemingly at once.

It’s remarkably easy to get stuck in circular conversation when you’re facing that kind of complexity.

Until someone writes it down.

Once we took the time to put it on paper, the decision paths and the bottlenecks became clear.

The bottleneck in these situations is almost always clarity. Writing doesn’t just help you express the clarity you already have. It helps you get there in the first place.

Write it down.

There’s a trail on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon called Shoshone Point. Most of the South Rim works the same way: you drive, or take one of the free shuttles, pull up to a viewpoint, and step right out into a view of the canyon. It’s spectacular, but you’re never alone.

Wherever the view is easy to reach, so is everyone else.

Shoshone Point is different. You park, then walk about a mile along a quiet dirt trail. That small bit of resistance changes everything. At the end, the trail opens onto a wide, unobstructed view of the canyon, and almost nobody else bothers to make the walk.

It’s a good analogy for life. Plenty of beauty is available to anyone willing to show up to the right place.

But the places that ask for a little extra effort, the ones most people skip, are usually the ones that end up feeling the most extraordinary.

One way to think about the impact of social media on a person is to think of the two things it does at once.

On the one hand, it keeps feeding you people and content that align with your worldview, confirming what you already believe.

At the same time, it sprinkles in people and content that are the exact opposite, enough to spark outrage. Both extremes generate engagement, so the feed keeps serving both.

No feed is built to make you think better or sharpen your views. It’s built to maximize the hits from confirmation and outrage.

Zoom out to the scale of society, and you get exactly what you’d expect: extreme loyalty to people who already agree with you, and extreme hostility toward everyone who doesn’t.

A simple definition for AI work slop: it’s when the output outruns the thinking.

Or to use an old saying, it’s when you see a ton of lipstick on a pig.

A good friend has a term he uses when he coaches people on how to be a better direct report. He calls it “show the ramp.”

The idea is simple. Don’t go from “everything is okay” one day to blindsiding your manager the next. Showing the ramp means your manager can see you move from okay, to here are some reasons to be upset, to actually being upset. It gives them a chance to react while there’s still time to do something about it.

People value predictability. A problem that goes from calm to five-alarm fire with no warning is jarring, even if the problem itself was always there.

It’s advice for managing up, but it applies to any healthy relationship. Showing the ramp is just what being a good counterpart looks like.

I’ve played a lot of pickup soccer over the years, with plenty of players who were genuinely good. Not Messi good. Pickup good.

Within that group there’s a tier of players who have the full trifecta: ball control, game intelligence, and communication. The ball seems to stick to their feet, and they always seem to have more time on it than everyone else.

But even within that tier, only a few rise to being great.

The difference is what they do with their skills. Great players lift the team up. They give feedback, they push the bar higher, but they do it as a light, not as a judge.

The skilled ones, who often have the exact same technical attributes, tend to make life harder for everyone around them, not because their instruction is wrong, but because of how they deliver it.

I see the same pattern at work. People who seem unhurried, who always find the right pass, whose communication shows up as much in how they act as in what they say.

It’s a beautiful thing to watch and to aspire to.

I took some time recently to reflect on the three things I find most annoying about myself at the moment. It’s a useful exercise to revisit periodically. My current list is:

(1) Letting people finish their thought instead of letting excitement or impatience get the better of me. This is a long-term project. It’s the dark side of a strength: a bias for action. The balance is tricky, but I’ve made some recent progress in my own self-awareness around it, and that gives me hope.

(2) Removing “like” and other filler words has been an on-and-off project for years, and it’s been consistently on my mind this past year. My awareness here isn’t consistent yet, and that’s usually the first step.

(3) Changing my relationship with my phone entirely. I wrote about this recently and my effort to simplify how I use the internet. I’m testing a few things and I’m excited about testing leaving the phone in one room of the house after work, so I get used to not having it on me. I’m hopeful it continues.

As with most things like this, noticing isn’t enough. I’ve made some commitments and added this to my weekly review. I’m hoping to be annoyed by different problems twelve months from now.

More to follow.