Welcome to another edition of Idea Surplus Disorder.
This week: why the ability to do almost anything makes strategy harder, the danger of tossing an AI “slop grenade” to your colleagues, a simple way to tackle the tasks you keep avoiding, what finishing makes possible, and why getting more efficient may only make you busier.
Plus, five sharp lessons about business, creation myths from around the world, a personal search engine, and a daily dose of poetry.
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 building strategy in an infinite world:
For most of business history, scarcity imposed strategic discipline from outside. A company could not pursue every attractive market, build every capability or satisfy every customer. Capital rationed ambition. Factories rationed production. Shelf space rationed assortment. Geography rationed distribution. People rationed organizational complexity. What remained after those constraints had done their work was a relatively short list of choices.
As AI and related technologies remove more of those constraints, the strategic challenge changes:
Clarity therefore used to come partly free. Now it has to be chosen. The scarce thing is no longer capability but choice: the ability to select among hundreds of plausible possibilities and refuse profitable ones because they do not belong to the company you have chosen to build.
This Week's Question:
One line from Cotton's piece has been rattling around in my head: "What must we refuse in order to become this company?" So, this week's question:
What attractive, easy-to-execute opportunity must you refuse because it doesn’t fit the company you’ve chosen to become?
A Few More Things Worth Your Time:
Shane Parrish has coined a name for what happens when someone lets AI do their work and expects everyone else to deal with the consequences: a Slop Grenade:
A Slop Grenade is when you let AI produce the work and pass it on without adding any value (including checking it). Someone else has to wade through it, catch the mistakes, and clean up the mess. You save time and look productive but someone else pays for it.
Have something that's been sitting on your to-do list forever? A Power Hour might be just what you need:
A Power Hour is not for regular, recurring chores or tasks with a hard deadline. Only add a task to your list if: It has no fixed deadline, no one else is tracking it, and it won’t get taken care of as part of another habit.
The world rewards those who finish – as it should. If only we could earn money and accolades for thoughts we've never shared, ideas we haven't brought to life, or things we've only half-built.
Creations can't be consumed until they're crafted. Innovations can’t have impact until they're implemented.
Oliver Burkeman reminds us that getting more efficient might not make you any less busy:
Work expands to fill the time available – which is why people who transform themselves into 26-lane highways of productivity often find they’re no less busy than before.
Longtime readers know I'm a sucker for lists. Ten things I know about business includes these favorites:
- Focusing on making a partnership work is more profitable than focusing on making money.
- The best new business is your current business.
- Price projects by asking yourself what the client's lawyer would charge.
- It's better to be hired for your work than your price.
- In order to love your work, take vacations.
Finally, I’ve been taking this advice from Jacob Tomsky's book Heads in Beds for a decade or more, and it often works at hotel check-in:
At this point here is how I do it: I walk up, smile without showing teeth, give the agent my CC, drop a twenty on the desk, and say, “This is for you. Whatever you can do for me, I’d appreciate it.” Boom. If I am after something specific, I will include that as well: “This is for you. Whatever you can do for me, I’d appreciate it: late checkout, wine, whatever."
Random Things for Smart People:
- Hister is a private search engine for your own browsing history that saves the text of pages you've visited on your computer.
- Only Poems Daily sends you one poem every day.
- Ologies interviews scientists about the things they're obsessed with.
- Lie Predictor estimates how likely someone is to lie in response to common questions.
- Origin Myth Map is an interactive map of the stories cultures have told about the world's creation.
- Are you a font nerd, too?
Words of Wisdom:
Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal, and yet if a melody has not reached its end, it has also not reached its goal. — Friedrich Nietzsche
One of the worst qualities a person can have is the need to show how smart they are by catching others' mistakes. In some areas, this may be useful, but in general life, it's a disaster. — Shane Parrish
The first step of any meaningful pursuit is to severely underestimate its difficulty. — Sara Hooker
To listen impatiently is to hear nothing at all. — Rick Rubin
The hand is the cutting edge of the mind. — Jacob Bronowski
Nothing is more exhausting than the task that’s never started. — Gretchen Rubin
The hardest thing is not doing what you want—it’s knowing what you want. — Naval Ravikant