Author: alearningaday

“If you are allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer.
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Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders – not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge… the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize.” | Prof Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow

I was reminded of these paragraphs early this week (H/T: James Clear’s newsletter) and have been thinking about them since.

Optimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A couple of years back, I spotted an opportunity and went for it. It was 50-50 opportunity – hard to see how it might turn out but felt like a reasonable bet.

It didn’t go my way. I don’t remember feeling very cut up at the time. It was more in the “interesting shot that might be worth taking” category.

Looking at how that opportunity panned out from today’s vantage point, that “miss” might have been one of the better things that happened. A collection of factors led to an outcome that just wouldn’t have worked for me.

3 reflections:

(1) Hindsight is 20:20. It would have been impossible to call. But, every once a while, we get to see a “what could have been” scenario play out. And they’re typically rich in learning.

(2) “Don’t swing at every pitch” is a pertinent message to my younger self. It was a 50-50 pitch that I could have let go. Consequential swings are best done when our conviction is high.

(3) And, finally, a great reminder of an ALearningaDay classic over the years – you never know if a good day is a good day. It is impossible to tell in the moment. Best to take the ups and downs in our stride and keep plugging away.

Open AI released their new “Strawberry” system with advanced reasoning capability. The launch of this o1 model came with a couple of impressive looking charts about its performance.

I loved reading Prof Ethan Mollick’s blog post about his experience as a preview user. He shares a great example of Strawberry in action when he gives the model a challenging crossword puzzle.

The AI “thinks” about the problem first, for a full 108 seconds (most problems are solved in much shorter times). You can see its thoughts, a sample of which are below (there was a lot more I did not include), and which are super illuminating – it is worth a moment to read some of it.

The LLM iterates repeatedly, creating and rejecting ideas. The results are pretty impressive, and it does well..

He goes on to explain that it isn’t without its limitations. Errors and hallucinations still happen for example. And it still seems to be limited by GPT 4o’s “intelligence.”

But jhe ends with a thought provoking note on where we’re headed.

Using o1-preview means confronting a paradigm change in AI. Planning is a form of agency, where the AI arrives at conclusions about how to solve a problem on its own, without our help. You can see from the video above that the AI does so much thinking and heavy lifting, churning out complete results, that my role as a human partner feels diminished. It just does its thing and hands me an answer. Sure, I can sift through its pages of reasoning to spot mistakes, but I no longer feel as connected to the AI output, or that I am playing as large a role in shaping where the solution is going. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it is different.

As these systems level up and inch towards true autonomous agents, we’re going to need to figure out how to stay in the loop – both to catch errors and to keep our fingers on the pulse of the problems we’re trying to crack. o1-preview is pulling back the curtain on AI capabilities we might not have seen coming, even with its current limitations. This leaves us with a crucial question: How do we evolve our collaboration with AI as it evolves? That is a problem that o1-preview can not yet solve.

I read this with fascination as I spend a significant part of my day thinking through how to apply the power of these models to make it easier for hirers and jobseekers to get matched to the right opportunity.

And the rate of change we’re seeing in the intelligence of these models ensures the learning curve continues to be steep.

One of The Economist’s data journalists dug into data from 7.5 million collisions in 14 states in the US. He found that, for every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save in a crash, more than a dozen are lost in smaller vehicles. As a result, roads in the US are 2 times more deadly that roads in other countries.

It is a powerful illustration of the idea of “negative externalities” – when an action results in negative impact whose cost is not borne by the person taking the action.

The challenge with wide-ranging externalities like these is that there often aren’t solutions within our control.

So, awareness is the best first step.

Choices come next – choose smaller cars where possible.

And, perhaps most importantly, stay safe out there.

James Earl Jones died at age 93. He voiced two of my all-time favorite characters – Mufasa (The Lion King) and Darth Vader (Star Wars).

His baritone was something else – some of his dialogues (“Yes, Simba, but let me explain. When we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eat the grass. And so we are all connected in the great Circle of Life.”) still give me the goosebumps.

As Variety’s tribute shared, when asked in 2014 about how he’d kept his career alive for so long, Jones’ response evoked the kind of plainspoken humility that he had so often brought to his performances as well.

“The secret is never forgetting that you’re a journeyman actor and that nothing is your final thing, nothing is your greatest thing, nothing is your worst thing,” Jones said. “I still consider myself a novice.”

Rest in peace James Earl Jones. Thank you for the memories.

After watching the movie “The Boys in the Boat”, I checked out the book’s Goodreads page. I immediately found two quotes that resonated (and shared them here) and bookmarked the page for future reading. I finally got back to this and I thought I’d share a few more that resonated.

“It takes energy to get angry. It eats you up inside. I can’t waste my energy like that and expect to get ahead.”

“The wood…taught us about survival, about overcoming difficulty, about prevailing over adversity, but it also taught us something about the underlying reason for surviving in the first place. Something about infinite beauty, about undying grace, about things larger and greater than ourselves. About the reasons we were all here.”

“What mattered more than how hard a man rowed was how well everything he did in the boat harmonized with what the other fellows were doing. And a man couldn’t harmonize with his crewmates unless he opened his heart to them. He had to care about his crew.”

“Perhaps the seeds of redemption lay not just in perseverance, hard work, and rugged individualism. Perhaps they lay in something more fundamental—the simple notion of everyone pitching in and pulling together.”

Beautifully written. These were a few among many that resonated.

Weike Wang shared a beautiful essay on friendship in The New Yorker magazine. It takes about 10 minutes to read – it is worth reading in full.

I found myself smiling and nodding as I read it. She starts by sharing her experience as a teacher talking to her students about their friends. Kids, especially in their pre-teens and teens, are all about friends and friendship. They can’t imagine a world otherwise.

She, on the other hand, has only been experiencing attrition. As she’s grown up, she shares how marriage, kids, and work reduce the number of friends – true friends – she really has.

She then goes on to reflect about the gift and curse of friendship – choice.

“The wonder, and the curse, of friendship is choice. You can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends. For me, common qualities and habits help. Female. About my age. Sense of humor. I would not choose a friend who went out dancing all night on Ecstasy. No offense to dancing or Ecstasy, but in comparison with those things I would be a total bore. I would not choose a friend who had a second home somewhere like the Hamptons or Lake Como or Austria. Of course, it is superficially nice to be invited to garden parties or SoHo lofts, but I don’t want to be the lone Asian woman in that garden wearing a cotton dress and sensible shoes, my only topics of conversation being work, the grind, and not that new art gallery down the street. In other words, the supposed freedom of friend selection goes only so far, and, given how deeply my choices are informed by my background, family, and upbringing, I wonder if they are choices at all.“

It is beautifully expressed – especially “I wonder if they are choices at all.”

She then goes on to describe the truth behind friendships – friends grow apart… and growing together is not the norm.

“All this to say that friends grow apart. Commonalities change. Common habits diverge. Qualities that you didn’t much like in a friend amplify, and your own traits, priorities, shift. A friendship is not stagnant, and growing together is usually not the norm. It’s nice to have writer friends, but then all you talk about is writing and how insane you have to be to do it. Nice to have friends with other jobs, but then all you hear about is their work, which you might not understand or care about. Work colleagues can never be true friends, and neither can one’s students. A fake friend is easy to spot, and even easier is the friend or acquaintance who, after a long period of no contact, emerges from literally nowhere with the message Hey! Just saw you published a book! Here’s a picture of that book in a bookstore. Let’s grab coffee and catch up.”

And she ends her essay by making peace with that beautifully temporary nature of friendship.

“From the lobby, I entered the elevator with my dog. A pair of summer students came in, too, with their suitcases and totes, and my dog and I were pushed into a corner. I was annoyed that summer students were already moving in, less than two weeks after the regular ones had left. I imagined more weed, more parties, full washers and dryers, rank trash drips in the hallways for workers to clean up. Then the two students started talking about their afternoon plans. Today, they were going to go to Central Park, sit on a blanket, make friendship bracelets, and braid each other’s hair. They were earnest. I heard no sarcasm. An interloper to this casual, wholesome moment, I was reminded that, though most friendships are temporary, they are very beautiful in bloom. The friends left the elevator laughing, tote bag to tote bag. All my annoyance went away.“

As I started writing this blog in my teens, I’ve thought about friendship a lot over the years and written about it plenty over the years. I’ve experienced the phase where friends are everything and then also experienced the attrition she talks about.

The one idea that has stayed with me over the years (decades?) is that friendships last for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. As they’re a two way street – even with your best intentions, you can’t make a seasonal friendship last a lifetime.

It is a painful lesson to learn. But it doesn’t change how true it is.

But, to Weike’s point, though most friendships are temporary, they are very beautiful in bloom.

Enjoy that, we must.

Mark Manson’s “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” was one of the more practical and useful happiness/life advice books I’ve read in a while. A few reflections:

(1) Mark’s liberal use of profanity to make his point made me chuckle at various points. It is thus fitting that the biggest lesson I took away from the book was a point he made early on in the book (paraphrased) – We all walk around giving too many f*cks. We let far too many things bother us – none of this is going to matter when we look back years from now. Leading a good life is about learning to give a f*ck about the few things that matter.

I’ve thought about this a lot over the past weeks since reading the book. Even today, I faced an incident that I might have reacted to. But “don’t give too many f*cks about random things” came right to mind. I smiled and moved on.

(2) “Often, the only difference between a problem being perceived as painful or powerful is whether we feel we chose it. With great responsibility comes great power.”

With great responsibility comes great power is a wonderful flip of the famous Spiderman quote “with great power comes great responsibility.”

(3) “Wanting positive experience is a negative experience. Accepting negative experience is a positive experience.”

As I reflected on a sub-par first half of this year during my mid-year break, I realized that I’d let far too many things get to me. I’d lost perspective and equanimity over an uncharacteristically long stretch. So, Mark’s wisdom came at a time when I was just working out how to take action on that realization.

It is short and impactful – a book I’ll be recommending.

I went to our neighborhood “Sports Basement” the other day with our bikes. I wanted to check if they needed a tune up.

These tune ups can be expensive services in most bike shops and it had been a while since our last one. So I wasn’t sure what to expect.

The guy at the bike section checked all four and said they’re all in good shape. No tune up necessary.

He could just as easily have done something on the margin and charged us. I would have been none the wiser.

But, by deferring that bit of business in the short term, he immediately won my trust. I won’t be going anywhere but sports basement for any future tune ups.

Many stores write up values and mission statements. I’m sure Sports Basement has something about customer service or trust. Like every other competitor.

But values are only values when they cost you money. They only make it down from the wall to the office floor when we’re willing to trade-off short-term gain.

“The main theme of human history is that we become steadily more specialized in what we produce, and steadily more diversified in what we consume: we move away from precarious self-sufficiency to safer mutual interdependence.” | Matt Ridley in How Innovation Works

I’ve often pondered about the gradual increase in the amount of specialization in our society. I think of it every time I marvel at a complex gadget or some amazing piece of infrastructure.

I thought this note on specialization and the move from “precarious self-sufficiency to safer mutual interdependence” was well put.

It resonated.