Hey,
Here’s the menu for today:
A Doubt: Is This Newsletter Empty Calories?
My August grab bag of Recommendations, Peeves, and Things I Half-Believe got way more positive responses than usual. Many of you liked the quick-hitting variety and asked for more.
But I’m not so sure more is better, for you or for me. I’m wary it’s yet another “siren call.” [See below.]
Sure, variety is the spice of life. But spice is supposed to complement a main dish, and too many of us don’t have a delicious one. Just bland, unfulfilling poo-poo platters. Meh work that piles up to tell a meh life story. Quick-hitting variety covers up the blandness… temporarily.
If you read that previous grab bag, try this:
Without reopening it, what idea do you still remember? Did you do anything differently? Would your 95-year-old self (let alone your month-older self) give two poops about it?
I don’t want to add to your distractions. My challenge is to get you drooling over, designing, and digging into a delicious, deeply soul-filling main dish. So this newsletter is another experiment with that in mind. Appetizers, not snacks.
An Opportunity: The Best Job of Your Life, Ever
A reminder from last week: I’m recruiting.
Know an unusually talented and adventurous person who hasn’t found personal product-market-fit in life and business?
Send them my recruiting offer: https://legantlabs.com/bestjob/
A Project: My Personal Palantir
This is a rapid evolution of the Wiki-me-dia idea I shared last time.
Palantir goes into organizations and maps out the data flows and objects to model a digital twin. An “ontology”. This lets leaders get a cleaner view of what’s actually going on to inform their decisions. The ontology logs results against expectations, then corrects itself.
Whatever you think about the company’s PR profile, its unreal margins, retention, and growth indicate something’s working.
So I’ve built an ontology for my life. It holds my historical logs, the model of how I work at my best and worst, and what I’m trying to build. When I wonder, “what should I do next?” it challenges my inertia and other biases to help me come up with more exciting and aligned stepping stones. For instance, it kickstarted my initiative to recruit for the best job ever.
I still choose, commit, and act. The ontology tracks what happens and learns.
I can already see a difference when I compare these past couple of weeks versus weeks prior. It’s helping me make more exciting moves, faster.
A Theory: Scurvies and Sirens
Adam Mastroianni’s (as always) entertaining recent writing compares loneliness to scurvy. The gist: Social interaction is like vitamin C. When you become deficient in it, your brain doesn’t scream at you for more. You just fall apart and wonder what’s happening.
Rather than call my friends, I started wondering to myself:
- What are other scurvies?
Other things we need but our brains don’t beg for: fresh air and daylight, exercise, “unproductive” time like play, mental wandering, honest feedback, work that matters…
- What about the opposite of scurvies?
Things our brains want to gorge on but are bad for us. Call them “sirens,” maybe?
Gambling, most shopping, comfy couches, porn, shooting from the hip, junk food… (long list!)
- We seem to get worse with age (but don’t have to).
Both scurvies and sirens relate to interoception, which seems to desensitize with age. My kids, especially when they were babies, respond way more ebulliently to vitamin-C-esque things like time around loved ones, fresh air, and play. And they melt down fast when short on sleep.
How much of this age-related desensitization is preprogrammed versus conditioned (versus a figment of my imagination)? I suspect all of the above. But I know from personal experience that interoception is resensitize-able.
A Pet Peeve: Introverts Aren’t Allergic to People
Susan Cain is partly to blame for social scurvy.
Don’t get me wrong, I list Quiet among the books that changed my thinking (…for the better… I think). But too many of my quiet peers are getting the “introversion” concept wrong. They buy into the common wis-dumb that being introverted means social activity drains you. Using introversion as an excuse to be a loner akin to saying you’re allergic to vitamin C. We all need healthy doses of it. We all just vary in our sensitivity to its benefits.
Here’s a more accurate heuristic to understand extraversion/introversion: it’s your sensitivity to reward.
A Recommendation: The AI Agent That Keeps the Crap Off My Plate
Rave reviews from fellow skeptics who are way more adept at AI encouraged me to give Meta’s new agent product a shot. (It also helped that I didn’t have to pay anything to sign up and play around.)
I’m still playing. So far, so surprisingly good. Muse has been helping me:
- Figure out whether to listen to a new podcast or not: When a new episode hits my feed, it summarizes what’s actually discussed, suggests the most interesting-to-me ideas.
- Submit an application: It used data from my Gmail and Google Drive to find the answers to fill the form, then submitted, and paid (with my approval).
- Start the day: It pulls from my daily log archive to give me a delightful recap of what happened this day in past years, reminds me of what’s coming up today, and tells me the temperature, wind, and rain forecast.
- Track expenses: It pulls my transactions and helps me classify them every day, then updates my spreadsheet.
- Look stuff up: It’s become my go-to for questions like “I’m going to Sayulita/San Pancho. I heard I need Mexican pesos? What’s the cheapest way to get them? Check my bank account terms, Wise fees, all other options.”
It’s free for a generous amount of use every week. If you give it a shot, ask your Muse to use my referral code to get us each extra usage limits:
Code: QIE853
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That’s all. Six appies. The main course is on you.
Stay spiky,
Chris
PS – Do you tick every box for the opportunity to design yourself the best job, ever? https://legantlabs.com/bestjob/
Society sands people smooth. I call it conformity waste.
The Zag is my running investigation into reversing it: decoding what makes you different and putting it to work. I publish what I find every 2 to 3 weeks. Zero spam.
About the author
I’m on an adventure developing better systems for understanding and designing around what makes each of us different. The Zag is where I share what I’m learning.
