Idea Surplus Disorder #115

In this week's edition of Idea Surplus Disorder, the surprising power of simply trying in a world where effort is undervalued, whether social media is entering its final days, why cognitive offloading may be making us dumber, tips for making better email introductions, and how to spot (and avoid) terrible decisions.

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

What if you tried hard?

An odd stigma exists around trying hard as if getting caught trying is cringeworthy. Cool kids don't try! They don't care about anything! There's an idea that the true talents, the real heroes, don't have to exert effort. They float from success to success without breaking a sweat, inhabiting a world that seems off-limits to you.

The good news is that since most people don't try that hard, standing out becomes much easier for you! If you look around, you'll see that the world is filled with people barely exerting the minimum effort required. (And sometimes even less than that.)

Have we arrived at the last days of social media?

Whatever remains of genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks.

The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied. Contemporary social media content is more often rootless, detached from cultural memory, interpersonal exchange or shared conversation. It arrives fully formed, optimized for attention rather than meaning, producing a kind of semantic sludge, posts that look like language yet say almost nothing. 

We’re drowning in this nothingness.

Related: We're living in a "Stupidogenic" society:

The “cognitive offload” is the term for when you use technology to spare you some mental effort. Humans really like doing this: we are cognitive misers, and we try to expend as little mental effort as possible. Using a calculator to do a maths problem, writing down a shopping list instead of attempting to remember it, using GPS to navigate, pressing play on Spotify instead of sitting down at a piano – all these are examples of cognitive offloading.

You also shouldn’t pretend that by cognitively offloading a task, you will magically get smarter because you can focus on more advanced and complex skills. More advanced and complex skills are based on simpler ones. If you don’t have the simpler skills, you can’t develop the more advanced ones. You can’t think strategically about chess unless you know how the pieces move. And the cognitive offload makes it less likely we will get the practice that lets us acquire the basic skills.

The terrific guide to terrible decisions is targeted at the ad industry, but there's wisdom here for nearly everyone.

Start exploring in gardens vs. digsites:

At a digsite, such as some ancient Mayan ruins or a Cretaceous era fossil bed, Archeologists and Paleontologists dig to find what was already there without regard to the current conditions of dirt, sun, and moisture. In fact, the current conditions are a nuisance to be removed as quick as possible so that the ancient and immutable truths can stand on their own without being disrupted. Such ancient truths have remained unchanged for centuries or millennia, and in fact will never change. Truths cannot be changed by the current context, they can only be obscured by it.

By contrast, a gardener isn’t uncovering hidden truths about a seed. The plant isn’t a mystery to be solved; the conditions necessary for growing the plant are the mystery. The question is always about how to shape the context to get the desired response out of this living organism which can respond so differently depending on the mix of dirt, sun, and moisture. In some conditions the plant will grow tall and fast, in another short and slow, and in yet a third, it will wither and die.

A new metaphor for thinking about AI tools is as an Amazon for Thought?

You could think of LLMs as “Amazon, but for thought”. Suddenly you have access to, more or less, all of the thinking, in one convenient place. Experts and pundits can talk about whether that’s really more efficient, but users are speaking, and I think there is real value there, whether it’s “officially” captured or not.

Write more to benefit from Kidlin's Law:

“If you can write down a problem clearly, you’ve already solved half of it.”
Writing is a powerful tool for problem-solving, because writing is thinking. You cannot write clearly if you aren’t thinking clearly.

The best intros are double opt-in. Here’s the five-step dance:

• The Ask: you email the connector requesting an intro.
• The Forward: connector forwards your email to the target with a “thought you two should connect” vibe.
• The Reply: target says “sure.”
• The Connect: connector loops you both in.
• The Schedule Ask: you swoop in and book time.

This is a great Before- and After Conference Toolkit that includes several new-to-me tips, including this model for writing a post-conference 1-pager for your boss that answers these questions about the event:.

• What topic kept coming up in discussion, but there wasn’t a session for it?
• What questions do you still have about what you learned?
• What surprised you to learn about how others do things?
• What do you think your team is doing better at or worse at, compared to the methods and techniques you saw/learned about?
• Based on what I learned, what is my new goal for myself or my team or my [organization]?
• What do I want to try first?
• What seems like low-hanging fruit that our [organization] can try or experiment with?

From Randall Munroe's What If 2 book:

If you built an iPhone with vacuum tubes instead of transistors, packed together with the same density as they were in UNIVAC, the phone would be about the size of five city blocks when resting on one edge. Conversely, if you built the original UNIVAC out of iPhone-size components, the entire machine would be less than 300 microns tall, small enough to embed inside a single grain of salt.

Is your nonprofit board too collegial?

Many boards mistake collegiality for agreement rather than the respect and trust that allows for candid debate. When that distinction gets lost, harmony takes priority, dissent gets sidelined, and accountability fades. As a result, tough conversations are avoided, critical decisions are delayed, and the discussion no longer reflects what members are willing to say outside the boardroom.

If you're a manager, don't let your subordinates leave you with their monkeys:

Subordinate-imposed time begins the moment a monkey successfully leaps from the back of a subordinate to the back of his or her superior and does not end until the monkey is returned to its proper owner for care and feeding. In accepting the monkey, the manager has voluntarily assumed a position subordinate to his subordinate.

Got a school or sports schedule with all the games in a single document? Try this AI prompt:

Please extract all the dates from this PDF and make them available to me as an .ics file so that i can import them into my calendar.

Fun Finds

• The Creative Cheat Sheet is a curated collection of dozens (hundreds?) of design and creative resources.
• Fifty Ways to Unplug and Feel Human Again.
• Business Name Generator
• Everything that happened in the 1970s.
• The Periodic Table of Videos.
• ExplainPaper helps you understand sections of scientific papers.
• CalligrapherAI generates handwriting from your prompt.

Words of Wisdom

You were born with everything you need to answer the call of your soul. — Marie Forleo

Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. – Robert Hughes

We should never be so old as merely to watch games instead of playing them. Let us play is as good as Let us pray, and the results are more assured. – Will Durant

May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears. — Nelson Mandela

If you don't get what you want, it's a sign either that you did not seriously want it, or that you tried to bargain over the price. –  Rudyard Kipling

What you believe a "life well lived" looks like has a pretty transformative impact on both what life you end up building and how well lived it looks. – Fred Rivett

Up Next From Filament

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