Welcome to another edition of Idea Surplus Disorder.
This week: why getting out of your chair might make you better at your work, what happens when AI improves performance without improving learning, a random trick for making AI design less predictable, what work gives us beyond a paycheck, why writing things down still matters, and what your meetings might be telling you about your leadership.
Plus, a question worth stealing, an all-time NBA challenge, a sketch-artist game, birthday math, visible writing rhythm, and the Bayeux Tapestry as a video game.
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 about something remarkably simple: getting out of your chair.
In a study from NPR and Columbia University, participants went for gentle, five-minute walks every hour or so. The results?
After two weeks: Fatigue had dropped an average of 25%. Participants reported a 4% improvement in both the quantity and quality of their work. Positivity increased, while brain fog and difficulty focusing decreased. 82% said they liked taking movement breaks.
I've been doing this since I read the survey and love the reset my brain gets each time. As soon as you're done with reading this newsletter, take one yourself – and then set a 60 minute timer to remind you about your next one.
This Week's Question:
A quote from music producer Rick Rubin inspires this week's question:
Rules direct us to average behaviors. If we’re aiming to create works that are exceptional, most rules don’t apply. Average is nothing to aspire to.
What rules are you following that's making your work more average?
A Few More Things Worth Your Time:
In this week's "duh" research, we learn that though AI can make you better at a task, it might make you worse at doing it yourself the next time:
The cleanest evidence of AI’s negative impact on learning is an experiment by a team of researchers at Wharton. About a thousand students worked through a high school math unit, and the group with a GPT-4 tool did 48% better while using it.
But once the AI tool was taken away, the same group scored 17% worse on a test about the unit: the tool had dulled their learning.
A version that gave hints instead of answers, meanwhile, erased the harm, turning the tool into a tutor that made students do the work.
How many toxic high performers can a team tolerate? Fewer than you might think:
Yes, sometimes you do need to tolerate 1 absolutely insanely good team member that is toxic — for a while. But once in a while, there is someone so specialized, such a great role player, than you have to tolerate a Dennis Rodman for a while. For a while.
2 is too many, it feeds on itself. You can’t have 2 toxic employees. 1 toxic but hyper talented team member drives everyone nuts, but doesn’t change the culture. But 2 do. They feed on each other, hire other toxic people, and turn the company against the mission and each other.
Human fulfillment doesn't come from "meaningful" work, it comes from the social frameworks and respect that many of us find at work:
It’s very clear that humans don’t need work or anything like it to live meaningful lives. Nor do we need the things that people who talk about “meaning” mean — individual self-actualization, personal growth, serving a greater purpose. We can get by just fine without any of them, as historically most of us have.
What we absolutely can’t live without is a social framework for understanding ourselves in relation to the rest of our society and gaining the respect of our peers.
Want a quick way to judge your meeting leadership? Look at what everyone else is doing.
If attendees are on their phones throughout the meeting multitasking, that is likely a negative reflection on our leadership. If attendees are engaging in a host of side conversations, that is a negative reflection on our leadership. If we are doing most, if not all, of the talking, that is indeed a negative reflection on our leadership.
If one or two attendees are dominating the meeting discussion, it likely suggests that we did not construct an agenda highly relevant to all, that we have not created a psychologically “safe” setting in which folks can engage, or that we are not actively facilitating the meeting—all of which are not a positive reflection on our leadership.
Before we get too carried away treating AI like it's human, Ben Thompson reminds us what it doesn't have:
In short, what AI lacks is exactly what misplaced anthropomorphizing grants it: volition and a sense of morality.
Those are the things that come from humans, and they come from the parts of humans that are not and cannot be transposed to markdown files.
They are intrinsic, and until AI figures out not how to build on our superstructure of writing, but to delve into the motivations that created writing in the first place, it will always be something distinct, and something that can be directed by entities with less intelligence but an actual internal sense of self.
Want to know whether your organization really has an innovative culture? Watch what happens when someone questions the way things have always been done:
That’s why innovation isn’t something an organization has; it’s something an organization does repeatedly.
The real test of an innovative culture isn’t whether it has an innovation lab, an AI strategy, hackathons, or an R&D budget. It’s what happens when someone questions the way things have always been done.
Does the organization become defensive? Does hierarchy shut the conversation down? Does the person need permission to experiment? Is failure punished? Or does curiosity trigger exploration?
Random Things for Smart People
- 82-0 lets you build an all-time NBA roster from randomized choices and see whether your team could survive a perfect season.
- Logo Grabber pulls a company's logo from its website without the usual hunt through brand pages and Google Images.
- Unusual Suspects turns you into a police sketch artist working from some wonderfully strange witness descriptions.
- Text Music colors every sentence according to its length so you can see the rhythm of your writing.
- How common is your birthday? Birthday Rank will tell you.
- Asteroids, except you're the rocks instead of the spaceship.
- Bayeux Go turns the Bayeux Tapestry into a playable video game.
Words of Wisdom
Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed. — Bertrand Russell
The value of a company is the sum of all problems solved. — Martin Lorentzon
Rules direct us to average behaviors. If we’re aiming to create works that are exceptional, most rules don’t apply. Average is nothing to aspire to. — Rick Rubin
Opportunities shrink or expand in proportion to your enthusiasm. — James Clear
I train like I've never won and I compete like I've never lost. — Eileen Gu
If you love something, you give it a lot of attention. And if you give something a lot of attention, you very often learn to love it. — Mary Oliver