Benedict Evans: “Technology is full of narratives, but one of the loudest and most persistent concerns artificial intelligence and something called “data”. AI is the future, we are told, and it’s all about data — and data is the future, and we should own it and maybe be paid for it. And countries need data strategies and data sovereignty, too. Data is the new oil. This is mostly nonsense. There is no such thing as “data”, it isn’t worth anything, and it doesn’t belong to you anyway. Most obviously, data is not one thing, but innumerable different collections of information, each of them specific to a particular application, that can’t be used for anything else.”
Dan Shipper: “What I learned from Clarissa and Michael [authors of The Anxious Perfectionist] is that perfectionism doesn’t actually lead to better performance or work outcomes. Instead living with perfectionism creates avoidance behaviors like burnout and procrastination, induces extreme amounts of micromanagement, and often causes sufferers to miss the forest for the trees. It can sometimes even lead you to try to fix all of the flaws in your co-founder rather than looking deeply at yourself…What’s most interesting, though, is that working on perfectionism doesn’t mean giving up on doing great work. It’s not the wanting to do great work that’s the problem in perfectionism—it’s that people who suffer from it are extremely rigid about what good work looks like, and how it should be accomplished. The rigidity is the problem, not the desire to do great work. If you can work on the rigidity, you can actually do more and better work—without suffering from the negative consequences of perfectionism.”
David Brooks chooses some of the best life hacks from Kevin Kelly: “When you have 90 percent of a large project completed, finishing up the final details will take another 90 percent. Anything you say before the word “but” does not count. The biggest lie we tell ourselves is, “I don’t need to write this down because I will remember it.””
