In this week's Idea Surplus Disorder, we'll explore the case for keeping your distance from strangers' inner lives, what happens when AI unbundles wisdom from synthesis, and why the things you think you understand might be fooling you.
We'll also explore ways AI is reshaping the road between Point A and Point B for consultants and lawyers alike, why one small word can change your entire relationship with difficulty, and what Nintendo's legendary CEO would ask when something seems impossible.
As always, I'm Matt Homann, and I'm glad you're here!
My Favorite Find:
I read hundreds of blogs and dozens of newsletters every week, and I always find more ideas than I can share. Today's favorite find was a reminder to spend less of my own time inside the minds of far-off strangers:
As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han points out, the internet – contrary to the dreams of its hippie pioneers – hasn’t created a flourishing, supersized, wonderfully democratic public sphere in which we all get to constructively debate the issues of the day.
Instead it erodes the public sphere, by connecting our minds directly to the unedited neediness, rage or fear inside everyone else’s minds, which in turn trigger such reactions in us. And so to follow American politics at the moment isn’t merely to follow the activities of Elon Musk, but to feel overly familiar with his twitchy and emotionally reactive inner life as well.
This isn’t healthy. To get along successfully with each other, Han argues, we need a certain psychological distance, some cognitive privacy. There’s some appropriate level of such privacy between me and my wife, for goodness’s sake, so you’d better believe there’s one between me and Musk.
A Few More Things Worth Your Time:
Have we always attributed to wisdom what was really synthesis?
Over time we’ve come to confuse synthesis (or coordination or bureaucracy) with wisdom, and built our authority structures accordingly. How much of what we called expertise was synthesis we couldn’t otherwise afford, and how much was judgment that actually deserved the authority we gave it?
AI splits that package open. AI asserts – those taxes and tolls for pattern recognition in complex domains no longer apply as much as they once did.
Right now, a small farmer in rural Minnesota has the same access to synthesized complexity about soil chemistry, commodity futures, climate modeling, and loan structures as an ag economist at Land O’Lakes, Inc. The farmer still lacks the time and maybe the framing. But the raw cognitive resource? It’s there.
My friend Jordan is talking about lawyers and AI, but I feel his "Point A to Point B" analogy is true for consulting more broadly:
The road from Point A to Point B has been the lawyer’s terrain. The lawyer figured out the best route, gave the client a rough map of the journey, told the client to follow closely behind, and proceeded to lay every brick on that road (in six-minute increments) as they made their way slowly towards the destination.
Now, thanks to Generative AI, clients have their own car, they can see their destination more clearly, they can draw their own maps, and most importantly, they can build much of the road themselves and travel a good distance on their own. Many short legal trips won’t require a lawyer’s involvement at all.
Stuck? Embrace the Power of “Yet”
A growth mindset turns “I can’t do this” into “I can’t do this yet.” One word, but it changes your whole relationship to difficulty. When students learn they can strengthen their brains through effort, their performance improves. And there’s a physical difference: brain scans show that growth-mindset brains light up when reviewing errors, while fixed-mindset brains show no activity at all. One brain is engaging with the mistake. The other is ignoring it.
Don't confuse familiarity with understanding:
You’ve used a toilet every day of your life. You can picture one. You can identify its parts. That deep familiarity makes it feel like you understand how a toilet works. But try explaining the actual flushing mechanism step by step, and most people quickly discover that familiarity and understanding are not the same thing at all.
This is an example of a well-studied phenomenon in psychology called processing fluency: the subjective feeling of ease you experience when processing information. When something feels easy to take in, your brain interprets that ease as a signal that you understand it.
This Week's Question
This week's question comes from the book Ask Iwata: Words of Wisdom from Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's Legendary CEO:
When Miyamoto hears someone state a reason something is impossible, he counters with the question, “What would it take to make it possible?” And from there he establishes the necessary conditions. This is about “cornering the opponent and jabbing at the weak points they can’t block.”
What seems insurmountable to you or your team? Spend an hour answering the question: What would it take to make it possible?
Random Things for Smart People
- This Color Recall game is super hard.
- The fabulous engineering of Duct Tape.
- The case for doing nothing.
- Everywhere Tools is a collection of free resources for creatives.
- World Championship of PowerPoint Karaoke
Words of Wisdom
A good reputation is acquired by many actions; and can be lost by one. – Philip Dormer Stanhope
Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. — Abraham Lincoln
Make it simple, but significant. — Don Draper
Never speak of yourself to others; make them talk about themselves instead; therein lies the whole art of pleasing. — Edmond de Goncourt
If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. — Wayne Dyer