2026-11-05 Thu
My Thoughts
- Cal Newport's Person/Cal Newport/Pod/26/10 Do Hard Things retells Jerry Seinfeld's answer to the McKinsey question: "Are they funny?" I take Newport's point to be that efficiency can undermine comedy and other work whose value comes from hard thinking, and that AI tools can pull us toward busywork without our noticing.
- I remembered the story as coming from Acquired/Pod/26/10 Seinfeld. Acquired read it aloud, but it comes from Seinfeld's 2017 Harvard Business Review interview, and the McKinsey question came from the interviewer.
- Person/Nufar Gaspar's advice on Person/Nathaniel Whittemore/Pod/26/11 How to Deslopify Your AI fits with it: before opening an agentic tool, stop and decide what I want to do, then open it and give it the context it needs.
- The question I want to discuss with colleagues is when the difficulty of a task is the point — learning, judgment, practice, writing, creative work — and when it is friction we should remove. Some difficulty is waste, and removing a barrier does not always remove the learning.
- Cal Newport's Person/Cal Newport/Pod/26/10 Do Hard Things retells Jerry Seinfeld's answer to the McKinsey question: "Are they funny?" I take Newport's point to be that efficiency can undermine comedy and other work whose value comes from hard thinking, and that AI tools can pull us toward busywork without our noticing.
Filed
- Person/Nathaniel Whittemore/Pod/26/10 What Anthropic’s IPO Filing Reveals
- Person/Nathaniel Whittemore/Pod/26/10 What Anthropic’s IPO Filing Reveals/Takeaway
- Zoom/Q/Can a Zoom meeting recording deep-link to a specific timestamp?
- AI/Security/Attack/Prompt/Injection/Instruction File Poisoning
- My/Pref/Writing/Call coding agents AI engines
- Person/Cal Newport/Pod/26/10 Do Hard Things
- Acquired/Pod/26/10 Seinfeld
- Person/Nathaniel Whittemore/Pod/26/11 How to Deslopify Your AI
- agentic workflows
Updated