Fish Food: Episode 603
Junk info, 30 useful concepts, successfully scaling taste, high-reaching informality, AI advice from the future, and the most powerful sound in the world
If you do one thing this week…
‘In an age of information overabundance, our curiosity, which once focused us, now distracts us. And it’s led to an epidemic of intellectual obesity that’s clogging our minds with malignant junk’.
This was a thought-provoking post by Gurwinder on the proliferation of ‘junk info’, and the kind of content that (like junk food) can fill feeds but ultimately is empty of calories and adds little value to your life. He talks about how addictive this can be, and the ‘intellectual obesity’ that this diet of junk info can cause, but also draws out some useful ways of avoiding it - notably developing a ‘meta-awareness’ , or in other words paying more attention to what you're paying attention to, and using writing to filter out bad information and create some intellectual space for yourself (ABW - always be writing).
I can certainly recognise how easy it is to allow ‘junk info’ to fill up your reserve of attention, and it made me think again about the value of curation vs algorithms and being cognisant of who I follow, what platforms I use, and what I allow into my life.
Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash
Links of the week
Speaking of Gurwinder, he recently published an updated 30 Useful Concepts which is full of interesting phenomena including ‘Fiction Lag’ (or ‘Experience-taking’): ‘When people are captivated by a work of fiction, they unconsciously adopt the traits of their favorite characters’.
‘You may think that this is a recipe for disaster, the opposite of most startup advice. Rather than focus on solving a common customer problem extremely well, they do, well, whatever they want’. This was a captivating piece on MSCHF, a commercially-focused artists/fashion collective that have done partnerships with the likes of Paris Hilton, Rhihanna, and Casey Neistat but who have seemingly made a huge success from releasing a series of randomly quirky products (Croc boots anyone?) in quirky ways and actually ‘scaling taste’ (HT Zoe Scaman)
I really liked this (ultimately) positive call for the ad industry to see AI as a tool for rebirth, and the need to design AI around great people - from the founder of Springsboards.ai
This week I wrote about the idea of 'high-reaching informality' - if I had a philosophy of leadership this is as close as I can get to articulating it (it's what all the great leaders that I've worked for and with have had in common). I also wrote a post about Shane Parrish’s idea of ‘Chalkboard decisions’ - the kinds of decisions that fit the maths, but miss out on nuanced context
This is an interesting idea - researchers at the MIT built an AI-powered chatbot which is an older version of you that can dispense life advice, with the aim of helping people to be more thoughtful about the person they are becoming (let’s not forget that: ‘ageing is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been’)
And this is a terrible idea - a Chrome extension that uses AI to instantly and automatically generate replies to social media posts
It turns out that making a living as an author is as rare as being a billionaire (Editor’s sidenote: I always say to people that the financial benefit to writing a business book is not in the book sales but in the speaking gigs, consultancy and credibility that comes over time)
Quote of the week
‘You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes’.
And finally…
What’s the most powerful sound in the world? Ted Gioia thinks it’s the ‘M’ sound. And from our first word as babies, to sounds of satisfaction, to humming and Buddhist mantras he could well be right. Fascinating.
Photo by Serge Kutuzov on Unsplash
Weeknotes
This week I’ve been out in the Middle East all week working with leaders at a big healthcare business. Four days of workshopping - exhausting but so rewarding, and a real privilege to do. Next week I’m back in the UK and I’ll be running a couple of remote workshops with the African Development Bank and also doing a webinar on AI in digital commerce for IBM iX. Apropos of not-a-lot, one of the attendees of this week’s sessions told me about Kleiber’s Law, which is the observation that an animal's metabolic rate scales to the 3⁄4 power of the animal's mass: ‘over the same time span, a cat having a mass 100 times that of a mouse will consume only about 32 times the energy the mouse uses’. This effectively means that there is a relationship between the two things which enables animals to get larger without consuming huge amounts of energy. Who knew?
Thanks for subscribing and reading Only Dead Fish. It means a lot. If you’d like more from me my blog is over here and my personal site is here. Do get in touch if you’d like me to give a talk to your team or talk about working together.
My favourite quote captures what I try to do every day, and it’s from renowned Creative Director Paul Arden: ‘Do not covet your ideas. Give away all you know, and more will come back to you’.