Idea Surplus Disorder #114

In this week's edition of Idea Surplus Disorder, we look at the upside of squeaky wheels, the discipline of intentional amateurism, and the surprising benefits of stress in hiring. You’ll also find fresh thinking on subtraction as a leadership act, AI as a recruiting coach, and why questioning your expertise might unlock your next big idea.

And as always, you’ll find a mix of fun finds, practical insights, and thought-provoking quotes to help you lead, live, and think more intentionally.

I'm Matt Homann, and I'm glad you're here.

Ideas + Insights

The squeaky wheels in your organization may also be important sources of innovation:

That’s why your squeaky wheels—the people who are willing to speak up whether it’s welcome or not—may be the biggest assets your company has.

They have the double advantage of bringing a creative spark, which supports the pursuit of new opportunities, while also being willing to raise red flags that can help your company avoid losses.

This list of fifty things I know (and which I'd known earlier includes these bangers:

1. You are allowed to care about people who don’t care about you, and even people who dislike you. The way you feel about someone else can be totally decoupled from how they feel about you. In fact, uncovering your capacity to love people who will never fully reciprocate it is the definition of grace.
2. You will always feel bad about being mean to people after the fact, even if they deserved it.
3. The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get away with when it comes to how they treat different people, so pay special attention when others have sharply diverging experiences of someone’s character. Lots of variance in opinion about whether an idea is good means there’s a good chance the idea is good; lots of variance in opinion about whether a person is good is a warning sign.
4. If it’s really the path, you’ll find it more than once.
5. If you can train yourself to ask “Is there a better way to do this?” at random intervals ten times a day, you will become unstoppable.

Is the antidote to expertise overload intentional amateurism?

Consistently put yourself in situations where you are a complete beginner. Consider taking up a new pursuit outside of work, whether it’s learning a language, playing an instrument, trying stand-up comedy, or exploring ceramics. Seek out situations in which you have no prior knowledge to leverage, no past successes to fall back on, and no external achievement metrics to chase. Those are conditions that will allow your brain to rewire itself for agility and innovative thinking.

Related:

Instead of seeing your job's foundation as "I know, therefore I am valuable," consider this alternative: "I don't know, but I will find out."

This isn't about abandoning expertise entirely. It's about recognizing where your expertise might be getting in your way. Ask yourself: What positions are we defending simply because we've always defended them? What are we ignoring because we don't like the source it came from?

In a world where everyone is trying to win on expertise, the advantage might just go to those willing to admit they don't know everything—but are excited to find out.

What if every organization had a Chief Subtraction Officer?

It would be an interesting experiment for every company of over 1,000 employees to have someone where half or all of their job was just to look for things to stop doing, someone whose whole job is to ask “why are we doing this?” Someone who was empowered to look for subtraction.

How to build your AI coach.

Should AI be doing your recruiting?

AI-led interviews increase job offers by 12%, job starts by 18%, and 30-day retention by 17% among all applicants.

Applicants accept job offers with a similar likelihood and rate interview, as well as recruiter quality, similarly in a customer experience survey.

When offered the choice, 78% of applicants choose the AI recruiter, and we find evidence that applicants with lower test scores are more likely to choose AI.

Analyzing interview transcripts reveals that AI-led interviews elicit more hiring-relevant information from applicants compared to human-led interviews.

Do stressed job candidates make better hires?

When interviewing job candidates, you may look for evidence that they stay calm under pressure, and interpret signs that they are easily stressed as red flags. But our recent research shows that for cross-cultural positions, those red flags might actually signal your best hires.

Across five studies, we used a variety of methods to measure how easily people got stressed. We then asked them to learn the social norms of an unfamiliar culture through trial and error. We consistently found that individuals who were more easily stressed learned the novel cultural norms faster. Importantly, their stress levels declined as they learned the norms.

Fun Finds

• The Internet Phone Book
• Wikipedia Rabbit Hole Guide
• Illustrated Guide to Folding Fitted Sheets
• Hotel Brands of the World
• The Amazing Art of the Video Game Marquee
• Everything from a 1991 Radio Shack ad I now do with my phone.

Words of Wisdom

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. – George Santayana

Your capacity for excellence is inversely proportional to the number of your commitments. – Shane Parrish

Burnout is not about working too hard for too long, burnout is about working in the face of a goal that seems too far out, too unattainable, too abstract. – Blake Scholl

The smartest person in the room is usually the person who knows how to tap into the intelligence of every person in the room. – Scott Kelly

When your identity is what you do, then what you do becomes hard to abandon, because it means quitting who you are. – Annie Duke

If you believe the critics when they tell you you’re good, you have to believe them when they tell you you’re bad. – Earnest Hemingway

Heartbreak is the heart of all revolutionary consciousness. How can it not be? Who can imagine another world unless they have already been broken apart by the world we are in? – Gargi Bhattacharyya

Boredom is a filter. Common ideas come before it. Uncommon ideas come after it. Sit with a project long enough to get bored with it, then sit a little more. The most useful insights bubble up after you get bored. – James Clear

A dull truth will not be looked at. An exciting lie will. That is what good, sincere people must understand. They must make their truth exciting and new, or their good works will be born dead. – Bill Bernbach

Up Next From Filament

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