Welcome to another edition of Idea Surplus Disorder.
This week: why naming an AI agent may make us less careful, what a perfectionism audit can reveal, why ordinary has become so hard to accept, the difference between rest and idleness, and why a pocket notebook can still beat a phone.
Plus, recipe tables, homemade wallet passes, annual reports through the ages, the history of fridge magnets, award-winning iPhone photos, and a theory about why some people schedule so many meetings.
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. My favorite this week is Charter's Why You Shouldn't Give AI Agents a Name, which makes a surprising case that giving an agent a human identity can weaken the oversight humans should bring to its work:
But giving agents names or spots on the org chart brings new risks. In the same study, managers who reviewed identical error-filled documents caught about 18% fewer errors when they were told it came from an "AI employee" rather than an "AI tool." They were also 44% more likely to forward that error-filled work to colleagues, and took on less responsibility, assigning more blame to "the technology" for not catching the mistakes. The effects were highest at companies that were already treating agents like staff.
This Week's Question
The Friction Project recommends a perfectionism audit:
In The Systems Bible, John Gall proposed the Perfectionist's Paradox: in complex systems, "striving for perfection is a serious imperfection." Pressures for perfection cause needless effort and delay, interfere with learning from imperfect prototypes, and provoke despair.
Many things that are worth doing—or are required by others—aren’t worth doing well. Or, as Gall preaches, ought to be done poorly. In that spirit, ask people to identify tasks where the standards are too narrow or too high, or that are enforced with too much zeal.
The question to consider with your team: What are we doing too well?
A Few More Things Worth Your Time
Joshua Rothman asks Why Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary?
The excellent and the ordinary coexist, but have an uneasy relationship. With phrases like "you win some, you lose some," we acknowledge how, on an ordinary day, in an ordinary life, events cluster around a medium level of quality; in theory, we could be happy in the range between not-so-bad and pretty-good.
Yet, for many people, it becomes difficult to find satisfaction in what's regular. The excellent starts to shame the ordinary, leaving it worse off. We want to play winning seasons, not average ones. Having dunked once, we'd like to keep doing it. We'd prefer "great" weekends and vacations. On the largest scales, we oscillate between wanting to lead extraordinary lives and embracing the "merely" ordinary.
Leo Umilio draws a sharp distinction between rest and idleness:
The idle hour does not exist in order to improve the hours around it. It does not recharge you for anything. It is not an investment whose return is collected later at the desk. It serves nothing, points toward nothing, produces nothing, and answers to no one, and this is not a flaw to be corrected but the entire substance of the thing.
To be idle is to occupy time that has been removed from the economy of usefulness altogether, time that will never be redeemed, time spent as an end in itself rather than as a means to some later, more respectable end. The rester is preparing to be useful. The idler has, for an hour, simply declined to be.
A pocket notebook can save your mind:
- It directs your thinking. The problem with a phone is your brain already associates it with social media, entertainment, and instant messages, making it challenging to avoid getting distracted.
- It's low friction. A pocket notebook is always on, never needs charging, and opens instantly. This lowers the friction of writing your thoughts down.
- It's satisfying. Using a pocket notebook makes you feel like a thinker. And that feeling matters. When you feel emotionally engaged with an activity, you'll naturally do more of it.
- It's anti-algorithm. The pocket notebook is the best way I've found to fight the impulse to doom-scroll.
We rarely need money to follow our dreams:
The bottleneck for most dreams is not financial. It’s a lack of confidence, willingness to take a risk, and face failure, or a lack of imagination of what is possible with current resources.
If you want to write a novel you don’t need capital — you need discipline and 1,000 words a day. If you want to start a consultancy you need expertise and a first client, not a war chest.
A lack of money is a convenient thing to blame because it feels concrete, but it’s rarely the actual blocker for achievements.
Random Things for Smart People
- RecipeTables turns a recipe link, pasted text, or even a photo of a cookbook page into an easy-to-follow prep table.
- WalletWallet turns the barcode on a loyalty or membership card into an Apple or Google Wallet pass. You can even add a location so it appears on your lock screen when you're nearby.
- This gallery of annual reports through the ages is more interesting than it has any right to be.
- Two part history of fridge magnets and the memories we attach to them.
- A plausible theory about why some people schedule so many meetings.
- The iPhone Photography Awards winners showcase.
Words of Wisdom
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. — Isaac Asimov
Believe those who seek the truth. Doubt those who find it. — André Gide
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. — Henry David Thoreau
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. — Niels Bohr
The first step of any meaningful pursuit is to severely underestimate its difficulty. — Sara Hooker
No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you. — Carl Jung
If you can’t decide between two paths, choose the one that offers no immediate feedback. — Shane Parrish
The world is not designed to give you a good life. It’s designed to distract you from building one. — Matty Fusaro