One "must" for this week: Surprising science-based benefits of reading everyday

Reading is a human ability that hijacks ancient brain circuits that we originally used for pattern recognition in nature.

Daily reading gives us a lot of cognitive benefits including stress reduction, improved memory, stronger focus, expanded vocabulary, and better brain connectivity that can even slow the progression of Alzheimer's and dementia.

And I also like this quote from Charlie Munger: “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none, zero.”

Personal development

• Surprising science-based benefits of reading everyday

• An uncomplicated man

• Beyond time management

• Gifting

• Living intensely doesn’t mean living a busy life

• Stop making a 5-year plan (do this instead)

• The traffic jam theory of success

• What “Enough” feels like, at 18 and 48

Innovation

• How to respond to the coming AI cost shock

• Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next

• Human life in a post-AGI world

• Nvidia’s risky business

• Research: the innovation problems AI can’t solve

• Rethinking work: a reintroduction

• Seeing like a state

• The future of knowledge workers in an AI-driven world

Leadership and management

• Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers-not specialists-in the AI era

• Can more women leaders be both liked and effective?

• The architecture of connection

• The playbook for building high talent density teams

• The predictable executive career arc is over

• When employees are held accountable for AI-Generated decisions

• Your best sales tool isn't your tech stack

• “Leadership drift” is stalling your AI strategy

One book

"How Will You Measure Your Life?" by Clayton Christensen.

One “must” for this week: The IKEA effect: why effort still counts

The Ikea Effect, or how we value much more what we built ourselves.

I've found it is also true for code, as I value definitely more all the little apps that I vibe-coded for my personal use with Claude Code, even with all their little bugs and stuff that I maintain every week.

Personal development

• The IKEA effect: why effort still counts

• Give me 16 minutes and i’ll teach you how to read like a PRO

• Grip strength

• I think i’m having a reverse midlife crisis

• Improve your speaking

• LLMs reward expertise

• Relentless forward progress

• The truth about people pleasing

Innovation

• The shape of things to come

• 8 predictions for the era of continual learning

• Agentic code quality

• Design AI systems that actually strengthen human reasoning

• Tech executives’ story about AI is not an inevitability

• The subtraction instinct

• What happens once AI can automate AI research?

• Why work doesn’t happen at work

Leadership and management

• Before you delegate, ask yourself these 6 questions

• 5 ways to wield influence when you lack authority

• Perfection is a disease

• Something happened last week

• The invisible work draining your best employees

• The key to success is an error-management culture

• Why some junior employees work well with AI-and others don’t

• Zugunruhe

One book

“How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk” by Adele Faber.

One “must” for this week: How much time do your employees spend botsitting?

A lot of the promise of AI is to automate tedious work so we can focus on higher-value tasks, but the agents we delegate work to often lack the invisible context required to perform tasks correctly.

As a result, we end up “botsitting” the agent, spending nearly a full workday a week (6.4 hours) supplying context, catching errors, and reviewing outputs before the AI’s work can even be used.

This labor is mostly invisible and unrewarded, and it comes with real mental wear, not just lost time. In the end, the agents can still save us time, but only once we’ve invested a real effort into managing them.

That work needs a name, an owner, and accountability within organizations, otherwise this burden just gets silently absorbed by individual employees.

Personal development

• The courage to be curious

• A guide to thriving

• A japanese ritual to improve your habits

• Discouraged? Here’s how to stay motivated

• Is there really a global loneliness epidemic?

• The beliefs that determine whether you succeed with AI

• What if you’re not supposed to have a long-term plan?

• Why a sabbatical can change everything

Innovation

• How much time do your employees spend botsitting?

• AI’s execution problem

• Open frontier intelligence

• Open weights and american AI leadership

• So, are you really unplugging?

• The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models

• The UN’s AI turning point

• When AI makes you aggressively ignorant

Leadership and management

• How high-performing leadership teams adapt faster

• 3 questions to pressure-test your priorities

• A practical guide to looking at things properly

• Don’t let AI flatten your leadership style

• Organisational cynicism is a hidden cost of workplace inauthenticity

• The $2 hot dog on 5-star services

• Values, AI, and the future of leadership

• What 60 years of data reveals about how men and women experience leadership

One book

“The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg.

One “must” for this week: The Tenerife disaster of 1977: “We’re going”

This tragic event reminds us how people do not usually speak up with their concerns, and especially do not speak up again once they have spoken up and been dismissed, even when their own lives and the lives of others are at stake.

The interpersonal costs and risks of speaking up feel so large that they outweigh the benefits of doing so.

Personal development

• What if it’s not the phones?

• How to read like a scientist

• How to read more books

• The 1 thing that makes corporate jobs hard

• The end of reading is here

• We need guidelines for learning and AI

• What is the value of one hour of a startup founder’s time?

• Why I stopped arguing with people

Innovation

• AI versus the MBA

• 10 books, one big question: what does AI mean for us?

• Google’s AI search is rapidly becoming the default, new data shows

• Optimizing for the wrong metrics

• Should countries buy, build, or lease to maintain strategic control of their AI?

• The future worth building is human

• The vital few

• When flexibility becomes a liability

Leadership and management

• The Tenerife disaster of 1977: “We’re going”

• 4 hidden traps of team dynamics

• 5 reasons calendars are full of meetings

• How to avoid catastrophe: the normalization of deviance

• Queen bee syndrome: the workplace dynamic holding women back

• Research: why some junior employees work well with AI-and others don’t

• Why mentoring matters more in the AI era

• Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers-not specialists-in the AI era

One book

“Why we sleep: unlocking the power of sleep and dreams” by Matthew Walker.

One “must” for this week: The work required to have an opinion

In this week’s curation newsletter: a reflection on how easy it is to have an opinion, and how much work it takes to “earn” having one.

I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.— Charlie Munger

When we are dealing with strongly opinionated people, we can ask them to write down their reasoning. Most won’t bother, and will reveal a lot by doing so. And those who do will be willing to expose their thinking to scrutiny, and fuzzy logic has nowhere to hide on paper.

Personal development

• The work required to have an opinion

• How old will you be if you don’t?

• How to be a digital minimalist in 2026

• How to find the hidden beliefs holding you back

• How to learn creative skills

• Moral psychology is relationship regulation

• Ness letters: making friends with error

• Why Messi barely runs

Innovation

• Who’s afraid of chinese models?

• AI and the paperclip problem

• An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff

• It’s the complexity, stupid!

• Software factories, light and dark

• Sputnik AI moment

• The post-Agentic founder

• The psychology behind “Going viral”

Leadership and management

• The companies firing fastest will die first

• Can leaders count on self-organisation?

• Defensible, but not good

• Designing minds

• From hierarchy to intelligence

• Great leaders know which emotions their feedback will Trigger

• How the best teams become indistractable

• The office amenity that actually improves teamwork

One book

“Think again: the power of knowing what you don’t know” by Adam Grant.

One “must” for this week: The life-changing magic of active optimism

In this week’s curation newsletter: a reflection from Sahil Bloom on “Active Optimism”, or the belief that things will work out paired with a willingness to do the work to make it true.

Research consistently shows that optimists live longer and perform better: not because of luck, but because their positive way to see things drives them to engage with challenges rather than avoid them.

Like the farmer in the fable who only freed his wagon after heeding Hercules’ call to push, the difference comes not from faith alone, but from adding to that faith with a shoulder to the wheel and doing the real work.

Personal development

• The life-changing magic of active optimism

• America’s economic anxiety is rising up the income ladder

• Brunello Cucinelli

• How to reinvent your life in 30 days

• Stop confusing your dreams with your goals

• The cost of possibility

• The mindset expert: perform under pressure when everyone else chokes

• Why you need a tennis ball at work

Innovation

• State of the AI economy 2026

• 10 things that matter in AI right now

• A futurist’s warning: “Work is about to break”

• A global workspace in language models

• A script for Mark Zuckerberg

• Adam Brown - a deep but accessible introduction to general relativity

• On the importance of desperate customers

• The symbiotic enterprise

Leadership and management

• Where do you feel out of integrity?

• A Small Problem

• Business owners have it easier

• Great leaders know which emotions their feedback will trigger

• Looking out for the burnt-out one

• Want workers to reskill? Show them who they can become

• What 60 years of data reveals about how men and women experience leadership

• When nothing happens

One book

“The Aging Brain” by Thad A.Polk.

One “must” for this week: From a distance.

A reflection from Rishad Tobaccowala on how the impact of many of the experiences are often best appreciated from a distance. Especially true for the people we take for granted and then realize their importance when they are no longer with us.

As Carly Simon sings in “Anticipation” that she “will stay right here because these are the good old days”.

The same that happens to me now with my kids, I am definitely living in the “good old days” already. So I’ll try my best to act so I won’t regret what I am not doing, and accept will accept the regret about something that I did instead.

Personal development

• From a distance

• How to think in writing

• In job interviews, keep your backstory short

• Reality just keeps unfolding

• The people who will thrive in the AI age

• The thing that turns a workshop into an experience people actually talk about!

• Why are you in such a rush?

• Why the healthiest generation is the loneliest

Innovation

• How long will we live in the future?

• Agentic autonomy levels

• AI-driven vulnerability discovery for frontier cybersecurity

• How a 30-year-old chart explains intel’s fall, Nvidia’s rise, and DeepSeek’s disruption

• Previewing GPT-5.6 sol: a next-generation model

• Startup founders need a new sales playbook

• The science of moral decoupling

• The twilight of the chatbots

Leadership and management

• Aspiring leaders, don’t just network up

• Inside germany’s best-kept ‘New work’ secrets

• Own the outer loop

• Principles of ethical measurement in organisations

• Sagrada familia: leadership lessons in vision, mission and innovation

• The case for performance-First management

• When developing an AI strategy, beware the urgency Trap

• Why some people notice inequality and others don’t

One book

“Subtract: the untapped science of less” by Leidy Klotz.

One “must” for this week: How do you ask good questions?

A few specific tips on asking better questions. My favorites:

• Highly specific questions are better on average.

• It is often better to preface a question with a confession of some sort, or with information from yourself. That sets a standard for the respondent. Set that standard high!

• Demonstrate credibly that you are truly listening and that you care about the answer.

• With any possible question, ask yourself in advance: can the person being asked the question respond too easily in a vague and not very useful way?

Personal development

• How do you ask good questions?

• “Don’t call it art” - an illustrated Q&A

• Did you know a bee has no blind spots?

• How do you stay motivated?

• How to find time for learning

• Identity reinvention

• The zipper test: how to stop fooling yourself

• There’s more to the mental health crisis than smartphones and social media

Innovation

• The next big breakthrough will be AI learning on the job

• AI and the future of math

• Carter rabasa on x: “File systems are the new primitive for AI agents”

• How to keep AI spend flat while token usage grows exponentially

• The network you can’t see

• The new SDLC with vibe coding

• Visibility, transparency & trust

• What Nokia teaches any company bolting AI in 2026

Leadership and management

• Aspiring leaders, don’t just network up

• 50 articles that shaped my thinking

• A Beginner’s mindset

• AI adoption is overloading your middle managers

• Great leaders question philosophical assumptions

• The case for performance-First management

• What “Creative differences” really means

• You can’t critique your way to a better organization

One book

“Multipliers” by Liz Wiseman.

One “must” for this week: The new inner game: Your unfair advantage in the age of AI

A reflection from Joe Hudson about a better alternative to being scared of the impact of AI in our work. He arguers that what’s pulling people ahead today is a set of capabilities most of us never thought of as skills at all.

1. Discernment: what to build, what to leave behind, and when to change course.

2. “In conflict we trust”: having difficult conversation and not letting time pass.

3. Willingness to fail: iterate, and see failures as information, not a threat.

4. Positive self-talk and managing our inner saboteur.

Personal development

• The new inner game: your unfair advantage in the age of AI

• 2 personal stories about focus

• 7 lies I stopped telling myself

• Ask the cognitive scientist: do Today’s kids have reduced attention spans?

• How Hershey brought his learnings “home” with him

• How to think SO clearly people assume you’re brilliant

• Ness letters: build a joy list

• Want workers to reskill? Show them who they can become

Innovation

• When AI builds itself

• Applying the athlete mindset to digital transformation

• Has AI already killed how-to nonfiction?

• Is this the dawn of the tokenpocalypse?

• The next 5 years: a supersonic tsunami

• What it feels like to work with mythos

• What strategic design actually is (and isn’t)

• Why employees aren’t transparent about their AI usage

Leadership and management

• 3 forces are redefining the transition from manager to leader

• AI doesn’t make coaching less important

• Dms: the constant ping problem

• Get ready for the “you’re it” moment

• How the best leaders respond to rule breaking

• The strange confidence of 360 degree feedback

• What being “inspiring” actually means

• What corporate leaders can learn from start-up founders

One book

“Start with why: how great leaders inspire everyone to take action” by Simon Sinek.

One “must” for this week: How to End Your Workday: The Hemingway Principle

An effective self-regulation strategy to start your days: setting an intention and knowing specifically where you’ll start. To avoid the trap of scrolling through feeds, or “just checking email”, and the more specific, the better.

As Ernest Hemingway told the Paris Review in 1958:

“You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.”

Personal development

• How to end your workday: the Hemingway principle

• Emotional intelligence is a life skill

• How to design real connection without being awkward

• The 2 types of knowledge: real vs. surface

• The 4 types of professional time

• The alarm with no fire

• The helsinki bus station theory

• Why your brain loves games, and how to use that to your advantage

Innovation

• How people are really using AI in 2026

• Domain expertise has always been the real moat

• Father of the ipod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity

• Lost confidence

• Policy on the AI exponential

• The orchestration tax

• This week on moonshots: ray kurzweil

• When will AI be truly transformative?

Leadership and management

• The first principle

• Develop a personal early warning system

• Research: what interruptions reveal about company culture

• The coming organizational meltdown

• The difference between trust and psychological safety

• Two McKinsey partners on rewiring talent for the AI era

• What’s really behind the so-called “AI layoffs”?

• When your colleague keeps meddling in your work

One book

“Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less” by Greg McKeown.

One “must” for this week: The end isn’t nigh

I often read some anxiety-inducing headlines stating that “artificial intelligence is about to destroy all jobs (or humanity altogether), or at bring us towards a completely unrecognisable future.

But the argument Oliver Burkeman makes here isn’t about AI or any other potential cause of disaster. It’s that it’s incredibly hard, and maybe impossible, to escape the distorted perspective that’s been labelled “temporal chauvinism”: the feeling that the time we’re living in now is the most significant or terrifying one ever, simply because it’s the one you happen to be around to experience

And by the way because as human we all have the same “negativity bias” and tend to overweight the negative stuff over goodf news.

It’s also true that present-day unknowns feel the scariest, because all previous unknowns eventually resolved themselves into knowns, and every previous prediction of the end of the world turned out to be wrong, and future ones are not yet here.

What’s the good news? If radical insecurity is just how life is, then by definition, you’re already coping with it, and we have what it takes to deal with the world.

Personal development

• The end isn’t nigh

• Becoming irreplaceable

• Focus is motivation

• How to actually finish what you need to get done

• How to pay attention and care deeply in a chaotic world

• How to share your point of view (even if you’re afraid of being wrong)

• Why is AI making my job *worse*?

• Winner’s game vs. loser’s game

Innovation

• A functional taxonomy of world models

• AI is crushing startup valuations for pre-ChatGPT firms

• On the importance of desperate customers

• The Google capital company

• What remains scarce after AGI?

• Who’s adopting AI agents-and what they’re actually doing with them

• Why leaders are flying blind into AI

• Your AI budget is growing. Your returns aren’t. Here’s why.

Leadership and management

• Only variety beats variety

• Bureaucratic mass index... Heard of it?

• Designing organizational change that actually sticks

• How elite sports coaches make high-pressure decisions

• Progress is fuel: why perfectionist leaders never win

• Reading the air: high and low context communication in teams

• The strategy workshop mistake almost everyone makes

• You’re not good enough

One book

“Antifragile: things that gain from disorder” by Nassim Taleb.

One “must” for this week: The vanity trap in leadership: when the manager believes himself to be indispensable

Even with the best team and starting conditions and psycholoigical safety, when leaders occupy “too much space”, and always intervene, correct, decide, then others will gradualluy stop doing so.

So, when a leader thinks it’s indispensable, they not only become an (exhausted) bottleneck, but even worse, they fail to develop the people they are responsible for developing.

Personal development

• Why our attention spans are shrinking

• How to rest so well you never feel exhausted again

• If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you

• Motivation drift

• Research: as careers get longer, midcareer work needs to change

• The ABC goal system

• The goal gradient hypothesis

• Yes, But...

Innovation

• Co-Existence and the end of co-intelligence

• AI predictions: job markets, Codex beats Claude, and the death of org charts

• Big tech’s looming capability crisis

• Firsthand: seven years inside applied intuition, the quietly dominant physical AI company

• Forward deployed engineering 101

• From scriptorium to system

• Rewiring software delivery for the agentic era

• Your next customer is a machine

Leadership and management

• The vanity trap in leadership: when the manager believes himself to be indispensable

• A bouquet of wisdom

• How to cultivate your “Personal power” as a leader

• Sam Altman’s problem isn’t artificial intelligence. It’s human disagreement

• The 100-year-old math proof your leadership team doesn’t want to see

• The person you dismiss might be right

• When AI starts to think for itself

• Who gets to decide if psychological safety matters?

One book

“The Creative Act” by Rick Rubin.

One “must” for this week: Accountability

Tom Geraghty shares a reflection on accountability and how it can't be "compelled, demanded or extracted under threat of consequence".

Instead it's a voluntary act in which account-giver is willing to be seen: exposing their reasoning, their uncertainty, their errors, and their context.

Exposing ourselves in this way has an interpersonal and career risk; candour carries significant risk but little benefit, therefore most of us will prefer to err on the side of caution and silence, unless organizations create the conditions for honesty.

An interesting follow-up to the “calculus of voice” shared a few weeks ago.

Personal development

• The british army protocol for overwhelm

• 5 life learnings from 5 years of the curiosity chronicle

• Etiquette for befriending a friend’s friend

• High performers are paradox managers

• Purpose & curiosity: critical mindsets for the decade ahead

• The pratfall effect

• The quiet grief of adult friendship

• The real meaning of “The road not taken”

Innovation

• Stop renting your future

• All models are wrong

• Anthropic co-founder pope leo XIV’s encyclical “Magnifica humanitas”

• Ceos are betting on AI-driven layoffs. The data is betting against them.

• Encyclical letter of his holiness leo XIV magnifica humanitas

• Google launches antigravity 2.0

• Running lean: the AI-Native founder’s playbook

• Tech ceos are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

Leadership and management

• Accountability

• 6 ways leaders harness stress

• How people actually get to the c-Suite in S&P 500 companies

• Making meetings suck less

• Opinion: Sam Altman’s toxic ‘culture of silence’ is an overlooked risk

• Our favorite management tips on giving feedback

• The best manufacturers build AI with workers, not for them

• The keys to succeeding under a new manager

One book

“The effective executive” by Peter Drucker.

One “must” for this week: Choosing to stay human

Ethan Mollick talks about the risk of the “cognitive surrender” and how people stop thinking about problems and just let the AI do the work (even when the AI is wrong).

And I also see some things that I’d love to surrender (like doing my grocery, more on that soon 😉) and some that would not, like exploring and learning.

Personal development

• Choosing to stay human

• 10 tips for becoming a better public speaker

• EQ is not just about what you say. It’s your body language too.

• How to start a difficult conversation at work

• The cost of easy answers

• What if our ancestors didn’t feel anything like we do?

• Why I don’t write every day

• Worrying is self-fulfilling; what to do instead

Innovation

• The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

• Agentic coding is a trap

• How the GIF was invented by a software engineer

• New approach to scaling laws could change how AI models are trained

• Researchers worldwide compete to shape the future of AI in organizations

• The AI paradox: more automation, more humans, more work

• The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born

• Why I’m skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

Leadership and management

• The illusion of alignment

• Guide yourself by the stars and not the passing ships

• The false alignment trap

• The mistake of conflating intelligence and power

• The psych safety knowledge map

• What the president of ford can teach us

• Why are we actually here?

• Why leaders should let minor mistakes slide

One book

“Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great” by Eric Ries.

One “must” for this week: IC work is the new career flex

Elena Verna argues that professional success is shifting from climbing the corporate ladder to becoming a “high-impact individual contributor” who manages projects without direct reports.

This new role leverages personal mastery and autonomy to create full-stack business value that previously required entire teams to execute.

AI is the critical enabler, and allows us to operate across multiple domains at an average level to achieve significant, measurable results alone.

This is a very interesting perspective, especially considering that organizations have increasingly less layers of management and we are seeing flatter structures.

Personal development

• IC work is the new career flex

• Dear son - a letter to my son on his 4th birthday

• Evidence: how real confidence is built

• Focus lasts 47 seconds

• The hobby-hustle trap

• The most powerful decision making razors

• The reflexive yes

• What to do if you’re not “detail oriented”

Innovation

• Anyone can build. The question is what?

• Naval Ravikant: Apple is dead, SaaS is next, you have 18 months

• Nourish and the decade of consumer health

• The AI labor debate is asking the wrong question: Citrini doomsday scenario revisited

• The country that forgot how to build

• There are always more of them before they are counted

• What if we’re already living in utopia?

• When skill is free, expression wins

Leadership and management

• AI & jobs: are companies prepared for the workforce revolution?

• Don’t be a “leader”

• From metrics to meaning

• Reframing corruption as making money without adding value

• Surprising ways to reduce turnover in high-pressure, high-skill jobs

• The best leaders embrace the role of supporting character

• What a bank, a prison, and 140 rebels taught me about hierarchy

• What are your company’s AI nightmares?

One book

“Feel-Good productivity: how to do more of what matters to you” by Ali Abdaal.

One “must” for this week: The calculus of voice

Tom Geraghty explains that before every act of voice we usually quickly and unconsciously make a cost/benefic calculation.

The question is “what are the potential costs of me speaking up, and what are the potential benefits?”

To speak up, the benefits have to outweigh the costs. And often, the cost is in the present and it’s for the person speaking up, while the benefit is in the future, and is for the group or the company.

Personal development

• The busyness trap

• 115 feet and one way down

• How to motivate yourself to do anything

• I tried to optimize my life. It made it worse

• Reducing career anxiety

• The michelangelo phenomenon

• The new opportunity razor

• Updated longevity protocols for 2026

Innovation

• Thin harness, fat skills

• An AI health coach could change your mindset

• Deep learning with Python

• How AI will “Feel” in 2 years

• How I created openclaw, the breakthrough AI agent

• Open doors

• The peril of laziness lost

• Thoughts and feelings around Claude design

Leadership and management

• The calculus of voice

• How to build a company that withstands any era

• Leaders, treat resistance to change as valuable data

• Making the shift from individual contributor to leader

• The best answer to “Can you quickly...?”

• Why effective leaders get branded as problems

• Why unlearning is vital to succeed in the AI era

• Your boss might be naked (and everybody knows it)

One book

“Thinking in pictures: my life with autism” by Temple Grandin.

One “must” for this week: Your brain’s learning rate

Peter Diamandis argues that curiosity functions as the brain's "learning rate," triggering dopamine reward circuits that supercharge memory and neural adaptation.

Research shows children go from 107 questions/hour at age 5 to nearly zero by age 11, and most adults become "frozen models" (ouch) no longer updating our mental frameworks.

What are some strategies to restart our curiosity? Scheduling exploration time, asking "dumb" questions, and teaching what you learn within 24 hours.

Personal development

• Your brain’s learning rate

• AI and career reinvention

• Flip the script: let AI interview you to stop writer’s block

• How to apply pixar’s “Three pitches rule”

• The high shoulders theory

• The pull of the new

• The streetlight effect

• What values do you really stand for?

Innovation

• Four scenarios for the world of 2050

• How to move from AI experimentation to AI transformation

• Long-running agents

• Pessimists or optimists — who actually wins?

• Red-Teaming your strategy

• Sign of the future: GPT-5.5

• The interior design of software

• Why you should use scenarios

Leadership and management

• Ambiguity, predictability, and psychological safety

• Contracting and recontracting

• From amtrak to antarctica: intention - perception - strategy

• Green boots

• How to understand what energizes and drains your team

• I got feedback every day for 10 years

• Speak in the affirmative: “Do this” versus “Don’t do that”

• Why your team won’t speak up (And how to fix it)

One book

“Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ” by Daniel Goleman.

One “must” for this week: Should you develop your leadership strengths, or fix your weaknesses?

Should we automatically choose between building strengths or fixing weaknesses?

Shannon Anderson-Finch, Konrad Lenniger and Michael D. Watkins argue that instead, we should diagnose what our situation requires by asking questions:

• What does success require in my role?

• What are my current capabilities?

• What is already compensated for?

• Where is my untapped potential?

After diagnosis, focus development on three areas: superpowers (distinctive strengths to amplify), dangerous derailers (weaknesses that damage trust and performance and must be addressed), and untapped potential (growth areas).

Personal development

• The tinkerer’s mindset: how to win more

• 7 AI tools to power your job search

• How to motivate yourself to exercise regularly

• The (Real) beauty of self-Employment

• The real price of success

• The real reason clients don’t come back after your workshop

• When your ambition starts to exhaust you

• Work anxiety

Innovation

• The 2026 AI index report

• AI in the workplace: what separates adopters and holdouts

• Build the right thing

• Claude cowork tutorial for non-engineers

• Not all AI agents are created equal

• Vivienne ming on building robot-Proof humans

• Why do we tell ourselves scary stories about AI?

• Your strategy is a flashlight, not a business plan

Leadership and management

• Should you develop your leadership strengths—or fix your weaknesses?

• Build a corporate culture that works

• How to hire people who are better than you

• Listen to outsiders

• Signposting: how to reduce cognitive load for your reader

• Silicon and soul: be the most human person in the room

• The high cost of conversational debt and how to break free

• What’s stopping the 4-Day workweek?

One book

“Nobody wants to read your sh*t: why that is and what you can do about it” by Steven Pressfield.

One “must” for this week: Some things just take time

Armin Ronacher argues that some valuable things, like trust, quality, and community, simply cannot be rushed or automated, and that the obsession with speed in modern tech culture, especially thanks to AI tools, is producing short-lived software and diminishing long-term commitment.

Some worthy things come from sustained effort over years, not “weekend sprints” or instant output.

And yes while I love vibe coding and building stuff, I see I also see the risk of “Vibe Slop At Inference Speeds”.

Personal development

• Black coffee theory

• Calm in the storm

• Just make the coffee

• Reluctantly influential: inside Lenny Rachitsky’s demandingly chill life

• The humanities: 5 leadership skills that business schools don’t teach

• The illusion of clarity: how to test whether you really understand something

• The machines are fine. I’m worried about us.

• When using AI leads to “Brain fry”

Innovation

• Some things just take time

• Exploring the futures of technology-2-0

• From UBI to UHI (In 3 steps)

• How science actually progresses

• Is the parking lot just a polite way to say “shut up”?

• Openclaw: the complete guide to building, training, and living with your personal AI agent

• The displacement of cognitive labor and what comes after

• The robot training for the 2028 olympics

Leadership and management

• Jobs are a phase work is going through

• Aligning strategy and culture: the magic is in the middle

• Another evening lost to PowerPoint

• Bosses: stop telling staff that AI won’t take their jobs

• Great ideas are dying in silence. It’s time to fight back.

• How to build a superteam that keeps getting better

• Leaders underestimate the value of employee joy

• What really sank the titanic

One book

“Poor Charlie’s Almanack” by Charlie Munger.

One “must” for this week: Reed Hastings from the mountaintop!

In Rishad Tobaccowala’s first episode of his new podcast "Unbossing," Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings shares 10 key insights.

The three that resonated more with me:

• “Best Selves” not “Whole Selves”

• ”Radical Candor” should not mean just radical.

• Luck is far more central to people’s success than it appears.

And the core message: in a world of reinvention and rapid change, we must more than ever unlearn old rules and shift from control to influence.

Personal development

• How to improve your information diet

• Four scenarios for the future of smart rings

• How to guarantee a life of misery

• The opposite of burnout

• The spotlight effect

• Thinking deeper

• This is how I feel Today

• What bananas and strawberries can teach you about your job title

Innovation

• From skeptic to true believer: how openclaw changed my life

• An AI state of the union

• Ariane 5’s “Reused code” catastrophe

• Claude dispatch and the power of interfaces

• Head of Claude code: what happens after coding is solved

• Product management on the AI exponential

• Thoughts on slowing the f*** down

• Why garry tan’s Claude code setup has gotten so much love, and hate

Leadership and management

• Reed Hastings from the mountaintop!

• Burnout looks different across the org chart. Watch for these signs.

• How leaders can have effective conversations

• I’m an introvert. This is how I get myself to speak up.

• Stop being overlooked: how to get the credit (and promotion) you deserve

• The skills that strengthen marriages—and make better managers

• Want to accelerate change? Focus on what doesn’t change.

• Your teams are too big. Science proved it in 1880

One book

“Thinking in systems: a primer” by Donella Meadows.