It’s easy and tempting to create a grand software solution with AI because you think someone might like it.

Will you make something cool in a weekend? Undoubtedly!

…and you'll burn all your tokens in the process.

Instead of thinking about an imaginary customer or billion-dollar payout, solve one business process or problem for yourself.

Make one thing that’s always annoyed you more efficient.

Rinse and repeat.

That’s how you get real utility out of AI.

Intelligent people will go to incredible lengths to be lazy.

There’s a well-known quote from Bill Gates that perfectly sums this up: “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

Smart people so detest menial work that they'll spend months working on an app that prevents them from doing one repetitive action.

It’s a silly contradiction, but an important one: Hustle culture teaches us that the answer is just to keep grinding harder and to suck it up, but with AI, we’re all searching for the tiniest inefficiencies in our workflow and finding ways to automate/solve them.

Perhaps it’s a compulsion. Perhaps it’s misguided.

But I’d rather spend months solving a problem for good than getting carpal tunnel syndrome by copy and pasting the same thing every day.

(Spoiler: I also get carpal tunnel syndrome in my elaborate efforts to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome. Life is hard.)

Once upon a time, Instagram was a place filled with nice pictures and artsy filters.

Now? It’s a non-stop visual bombardment that would make the most seasoned Las Vegas hustler blush.

If we want to stand out there, we need to speak quickly and loudly, and make sure we promise fast cash or instant health within the first second of our video—why else would someone care?

This is no place for selling the wisdom of stillness, calm, and inner peace!

But in reality? Warren Buffett, arguably the greatest investor of all time, preached the kind of restraint and educated slow reasoning that would get him skewered on social media if he weren’t already a billionaire.

Being sober and sensible doesn’t sell. But it does pay, if we can drown out the noise.

From a low-level employee to the janitor, to the cashier at the grocery store…

How do we talk to the people who can’t possibly help our careers?

There’s a well-known trick in Hollywood: If you want to make a character likable, show them being loved by dogs and children.

Want to make a character instantly hate-able? Show them being mean to dogs and children.

Simple, right? But it works.

Powerful people (and reality TV stars, while we’re at it) are great at “turning on the charm." At schmoozing with people who are important to them.

But the minute the cameras are off, their more abusive natures reveal themselves.

As leaders, it’s not how we talk to investors that matters. It’s how we talk to all the little people along the way who don’t hold our future in their hands.

If you see a leader who is kind to “important” people but different to everyone else? Run. Run far, far away.

To the Americans in the crowd: Happy 250th! May the grand experiment continue.

For a utilitarian government building, a blank concrete wall is a finished product.

But for St. Peter’s Basilica in Italy? “Finished” included painstakingly carving stone so it resembled twisted rope and other intricate textures—even in places so high overhead that most visitors couldn’t possibly notice them.

Two different contractors worked on two different buildings. And both had extremely different ideas of what “done” looks like.

So when someone charges you a cheap rate for “a website”, that’s the same as someone charging you a cheap rate for “a building.”

Generally speaking, we tend to get the level of craftsmanship we’re willing to pay for.

In the age of AI, this is more true than ever.

For a great TED Talk on the societal damage caused by people who make ugly buildings, check this out.