A Learning a Day

I appreciated a note in Bill Gates’ blog post with his commitment to wind up the Gates Foundation and give away all his wealth by 2045.

One of the best things I read was an 1889 essay by Andrew Carnegie called The Gospel of Wealth. It makes the case that the wealthy have a responsibility to return their resources to society, a radical idea at the time that laid the groundwork for philanthropy as we know it today.

In the essay’s most famous line, Carnegie argues that “the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” I have spent a lot of time thinking about that quote lately. People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that “he died rich” will not be one of them.

I appreciate the clarity of thought.

His foundation and his giving has been the subject of a lot of criticism because of the influence it has given him on global health. I’ve seen passionate arguments about how he’s doing it for tax purposes and how he’s just buying influence with his money.

I chuckle at these notes.

First, he was the richest person on the planet. I think he was pretty set on influence with that money and status. And if he wanted to avoid taxes, I’m sure there’d be entire organizations who’d help him.

Second, we can blame capitalism for his wealth. But his money is his money. He can choose what to do with it. And he’s chosen to focus on preventing the death of children… and do this.

What would you rather him do? Buy yachts?

Finally, this isn’t to say the man isn’t without his faults. Nobody is.

I just appreciate he chose to put his incredible wealth to use to attempt to make the world a better place.

I also appreciate that Warren Buffett followed his lead with over 40 billion dollars donated.

I hope we have more billionaires who choose to do this.

There used to be a joke in the technology community that “Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is always a decade away.” AGI was said to have arrived when the intelligence of a machine possessed the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can.

The reason it was a joke was because AI always seemed to be a few years away from the next promised breakthrough.

It is now clear the joke has to be retired. Whatever your bar for AGI, you wouldn’t want to bet against it being here in the next decade.

I was in conversation with a wise friend who pointed out that today’s AI is already smarter than most people most of the time.

That’s an understatement. Whether it is ChatGPT or Claude, I’m just consistently blown away by their ability and how quickly they get better.

So I agree with his line of thinking – for all practical purposes, AGI is here. And considering these models are the dumbest they’ve ever been, they’re going to continue to get smarter and smarter.

That brings with it a collection of first, second, and third order consequences. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll dig into them. Most of these will be in equal parts wondrous, scary, and exciting.

But it starts with that simple and profound assertion – AGI is here. Now let’s get to figuring out what that means.

Imagine a wonder drug that…

• Boosts heart health
• Helps burn calories and improve our metabolism
• Strengthens muscles and bones
• Improves balance and coordination
• Boosts our immune system
• Reduces stress
• Boosts mood and creativity
• Improves sleep quality

How quickly would we be buying this wonder drug and adding it to our routine?

It turns out this wonder drug exists and is accessible to most of us – walking.

We start getting its benefits when we walk a minimum of 7000-8000 steps per day. And we start seeing significant goodness when we get to around 12000 steps per day.

Wishing us all plenty of walking today, and this week.

No matter how linear the path might look, if it is meant to go some place meaningful, it will always end up being squiggly in reality.

So much of maturity is making peace with the fact that many won’t like you or be approving of what you do or the way you do it.

When tasks in our jobs become easy because of the tools available, they become less valuable over time.

We should definitely master the tool and make our jobs easier.

As soon as we do that though, it’s important we figure out the next hard/unique thing we’re able to do with the freed up time.

The only sustainable competitive advantage is the ability to keep identifying and tackling new hard things.

When we face challenging circumstances, it is easy to fall prey to a default reaction – wishing the circumstance changes.

The more effective path is to respond to challenging circumstances by refusing to attempt to wish it away and instead letting the challenge inspire us to change ourselves and become better versions of ourselves.

That focus on what we control changes how we feel about the challenge. It is so much better to learn how to dance in the rain rather than spend all our time whining about not having shelter and complaining about being wet.

It turns out that the act of letting the circumstance change us often results in the circumstance changing in productive ways.

Focusing on our circle of influence enlarges it.

We re-watched “King Richard” with our kids recently. The movie is about Richard Williams and his quest to train his daughters – Venus and Serena – into world beating tennis players. We loved the movie the first time we watched it. The second watch was just as good. 3 reflections –

(1) “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” is a line we see often in the movie. It is just wild to see the amount of immaculate planning that went into shaping Venus and Serena’s childhoods. Richard Williams had a 80+ page plan written before they were born and he just went about executing it methodically.

Both Richard and Oracene Williams were athletic and he clearly bet on their genes passing on to their daughters.

But it did bring forth two questions. First, what if Venus and Serena didn’t take to tennis – what would that counter factual scenario be?

And second, how much of this is really applicable to most people – especially given what happens when parents overdo this sort of extreme planning for their kids?

(2) All focus on tennis excellence notwithstanding, it was fascinating to see how much Richard Williams focused on Venus and Serena simply being kids and having fun while maintaining strong ties with the family.

Both sisters attribute this upbringing to their resilience on the court.

It is a fascinating paradox – intense structure around making the world champions accompanied by a lot of thought and care for their happiness – both short and long-term.

Maybe it isn’t a paradox after all?

(3) The movie does a great job showcasing Richard Williams’ complex personality – with all its eccentricities. He is stubborn in executing his plan, flexible when he realizes he’s driving his daughters crazy, incredibly tenacious in finding the best coaches for his daughters, remarkably prescient in his predictions about his daughter’s success, often annoying even if frequently right in the way he goes about bringing his plan to life, impatient for success and fame, tremendously patient in getting the right first endorsement deal, and so on.

The success of the Williams sisters was ground-breaking across multiple dimensions – champion sisters who competed both together and against each other while also being the first African American women grand slam winners.

Richard’s vision was for Venus to be world number 1 and for Serena to be the greatest of all time.

It worked out that way.

My guess is that unprecedented achievement of this magnitude wouldn’t have been possible without that kind of complex personality – for all the good and all the challenges that came with it.

I had the opportunity to attend a talk by Dr Fei-Fei Li – one of the pioneering researchers of the AI platform shift we’re all experiencing. A few reflections:

(1) When someone asked Dr Li if AI would take away all jobs, she had a thought provoking reflection from her current experience as a start-up founder. She shared that jobs don’t just provide income, they provide humans with dignity.

Our goal with any technology should be to increase overall human dignity, not reduce it. So if AI’s impact is going to be counter to that, we need to think and act differently.

She repeated this idea again when someone referenced a race between humans and AI. Her belief was that we’re using the wrong frame. It would be similar to say there was a race between humans and wheels (which we’d lose). Instead, we used wheel technology to make progress toward villages and cities and so on.

At a time when I repeatedly hear prediction from technologists about AI taking away most jobs (vs. the inevitable displacement that occurs with technological shifts), Dr Li’s response felt both thoughtful and refreshing.

(2) Her reflection on education was that we seem to be training students to take a couple of tests that AI can pass with flying colors. It feels more appropriate for us to rethink this and ensure the baseline is where AI is right now rather than simply getting to the current baseline.

It resonated.

(3) My biggest reflection from the talk was how she made me feel. She came across as a leader who was thoughtful, intelligent, considerate, bold, curious, and humble. The kind of inspiring leader whose quiet and soft-spoken notes rung loudly because of the insight packed in them.

The kind of leader we’d be lucky to follow.

Pilots have a standard line on the runway – “We’ve been cleared for take off.”

I was on a flight recently where the pilot framed it differently. He said – “We‘ve been cleared to defy gravity.”

That simple turn of phrase invoked wonder and gratitude.

The words we use frame the conversations we have. And the frames we use are powerful because they invoke emotions.

Use them thoughtfully, we must.