Happy Sunday morning, friends. March is here, and it’s one of the best months of the year — the days get longer, there’s daylight at supper time to enjoy with family and friends, and the snow starts to recede for a beautiful spring. It’s fun to wax poetic about new beginnings at this time of year.
My little monologue this week: Watching children grow and learn is the greatest experience on planet earth. Our little family is slowly but surely (quickly and chaotically?) leaving the world of infancy behind and entering into a world of discovering the things they love.
My oldest daughter has had a chance to try baseball, soccer, gymnastics, dance, and skating. She’s either jumped in head-first, or she’s lukewarm and moves onto the next thing. Her thing right now is the piano — she plays and plays and plays, usually for multiple hours a day. She has worked through Chord Styling I in Simply Piano and is playing with five or six fingers at once. I’m not saying she’s a genius. But she’s learning and growing and finding joy in the piano. And it’s such a beautiful thing to behold.
My middle daughter has wonderful control of her body — you can tell by the way she runs, the way she controls her body when she dances, and even in her bodily posture. Right now, she seems to be the most athletic person in the family. And she’s catching on, learning how to skate, dance, play baseball, and more. I love the way you can see a shine in her eyes when she’s moving and exerting energy.
My youngest daughter is, well, still up in the air. She’s only two years old, and her skill so far is her mischievousness. Which is perfectly fine with me, for now. I’m excited to see what she grabs onto and focuses on.
It’s easy for any father to sit here and type endless words about their children, and it’s especially easy to lose a reader in pure boredom going down this path. The moral of the story: Watching children grow is the most amazing thing ever. Children are the absolute best. They are difficult. They poop, talk back, and need to be fed. They don’t listen. But then you see the way they act uptown, or the way they latch onto their friends and play, or the way they find a hobby and lose themselves for hours on end.
This is a core meaning of life.
Who’s using AI in the workplace?
The header link shoots you over to Matt Birchler’s blog, where he provides some colour commentary on a Pew Research report on AI use in the American workplace. The numbers (and Matt’s commentary) are fascinating, of course. Spend five seconds on the internet and you’ll be hit with three links about AI. Download three app updates and two of them will be to inject AI into the software. It’s everywhere.
And yet, somehow, the number of people actually using AI daily isn’t what you might expect. Only 10% of American works use an AI chatbot at work daily and only 7% use an AI chatbot a few times a month. That’s… far lower than I would expect.
But then here’s an anecdote: I was speaking to a gentleman this week (let’s say 50-60 year old) about how I would fire up a first draft of a letter using AI, and he stared at me blankly. He had never heard of ChatGPT. Roll your eyes and say he’s dug his head in the sand (trust me, he hasn’t), but “AI” in general was news to him. Why? Because he lives inside his world, building businesses and his community, and AI hasn’t played a role in that for him yet. Frankly, usually these are the best kind of people in the world. They’re less worried about the world and more worried about building and controlling the things they can build and control.
On my end, I use AI every day, multiple times a day. I’ll jump into the topic more another day. For now though, I:
- use Google Gemini to create drafts for letters and memos from scratch, or to find some very basic queries (like a glorified Google search);
- use NotebookLM to proofread my work, to look for notable holes in my logic, to summarize meeting notes, and to create first drafts of letters when I have an example template; and
- use Superhuman AI to hammer out quick responses — in a surprisingly nicely toned and formatted response that is clearly getting used to how I write — for bursts of email (thanks to Superhuman, I am down to 15 important emails in my inbox; I have never been able to get below 30 and I usually get to about 100 at any point in tax season.)
Our office is likely making a larger investment in an AI tool very soon and I can’t wait to put it to the test.
AI is here to stay. It’s scary as hell. But what a fun tool to get more work done in a shorter amount of time.
Professionals are consistent
Seth Godin:
We know you might be tired from an overnight shift, and authentically feel like phoning it in, but hey, this is the only aorta I’ve got, and I’d prefer it if you were the consistent, world-class surgeon you’re capable of being.
Authenticity is for friendships.
Professionals simply show up. Especially when they don’t feel like it.
This was one of those hard hitting lessons when you are the professional. Death and taxes, right. I am particularly bad at keeping it together when someone dies — first, tears of joy that they get to meet their Lord above (I truly cannot wait to meet Him myself); second, tears of joy for the life that person lived; third, tears of sorrow for what they left behind. That’s a three-pronged attack of tears, and I always succumb.
So when someone ends up in your office and needs to ensure a final tax return and an estate is handled appropriately, you have to grab onto both your technical knowledge and your emotional self-control. I find it very difficult to do both well at the same time.
Fortunately, I’m not a therapist, and usually the individual sitting across the table didn’t come to our office for words of sympathy. They came to have their affairs handled efficiently and effectively. They came to remove some stress from their plate. They came to put their problem into your professional hands.
Good life lesson. Hard to learn. Hard to grasp until you’re in it. (And there are worse problems on the planet, I’m well aware). But a good lesson nonetheless.
The Second Cup
- Pro Designer Turns an Abandoned NYC Loft into His Dream Apartment | Architectural Digest — (Architectural Digest)
– I find these videos so satisfying. It’s not some blandly modern home where someone built it by throwing money at it. There are many intentional decisions here. - "A calculator app? Anyone could make that." — (Chad Nauseam)
– Fun story. But also, “Wow, I had no idea” types of vibes. - Sigma BF Camera - Radical Simplicity — (SIGMA America)
– I own a Leica Q2, so no thank you from me. Yet, I’m really intrigued by everyone’s reaction to this camera. I hope Sigma can spark some new passion for photographers with this. Don’t hesitate to watch PetaPixel’s first look. - Grovemade’s Wood iPad Stand — (Grovemade)
– I’ve been looking for an iPad stand that I can rest my iPad in front of my keyboard and in front of my display. This could be it. But holy guacamole, look at that price tag! - Hereabout Bespoke Home Plans — (Hereabout)
– These look to be spectacular floor plans for a cabin or retreat-type home. I love the mockup designs and have this saved for a future version of Josh that has a lot more spendable money than the current version of Josh.
Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.