Good morning everyone. I hope everyone had a great end of January. About half of Southern Manitoba is down in Mexico right now, so it feels quieter than normal. I’m excited for the month ahead.
The theme of my week: hard work. On at least three occasions, the topic came up about the energy required to work, run a household, and parent young children. One gentleman suggested he has no idea how he and his wife got through their 30s with young kids. Another lady talked about how it was the good ol’ days of flying by the seat of your pants. And an elderly gentleman warned me about burn out.
Of course, the commonly accepted answer here is to heed the advice.
But I’ve also never met anyone in their 50s, 60s, or 70s who are living comfortable retirements, have legacies that they’re leaving behind, and have the ability to give their time and wealth away who didn’t work their tails off in their 30s. Not one. Decades of sacrifice led to what people view from the outside as “luck”. That type of legacy building isn’t something that just happens.
Update, Sunday morning: Hard to wake up this Sunday morning, read the national news, and not be at least a little anxious about the coming weeks and months ahead. I’m sure we all became experts on tariffs and trade wars overnight, so I won’t add fuel to the fire. If you’re feeling moderately anxious about Canada’s current economic situation, you, of course, are not alone.
Here are a few links to enjoy over a morning cup of coffee.
How AI can help in User Research
Here’s a fun look at how Vidit Bhargava used Google’s NotebookLM AI product to do research for his thesis. Like many, I discovered the link via Federico Viticci at MacStories, who discussed how he is using NotebookLM himself:
For the past two months, I’ve been using it as a personal search assistant for the entire archive of 10 years of annual iOS reviews – that’s more than half a million words in total. Not only can NotebookLM search that entire library in seconds, but it does so with even the most random natural language queries about the most obscure details I’ve ever covered in my stories, such as “When was the copy and paste menu renamed to edit menu?” (It was iOS 16.). It’s becoming increasingly challenging for me, after all these years, to keep track of the growing list of iOS-related minutiae; from a personal productivity standpoint, NotebookLM has to be one of the most exciting new products I’ve tried in a while. (Alongside Shortwave for email.)
There are a bazillion AI products available to try today, but oddly, NotebookLM is the only AI product that has consistently stuck for me as well. I think the reason it has stuck for me is twofold:
- I can feed each notebook the specific sources I want, rather than having the AI model scour my entire Notion library or scour only, say, taxation sources (à la BlueJ). This provides for more flexibility, albeit a tad extra work to siphon down to the specific sources I want the AI model to work with.
- I like the breadth of source options in NotebookLM. You can feed each notebook PDFs, URLs, copied text, audio segments, and more. A number of other AI models that I would otherwise use won’t read a PDF, for instance, or they don’t look at the content behind the URL.
I use AI more and more each day. I use it regularly in Superhuman to help write emails. I use ChatGPT to generate letter and memo templates, or to provide ideas on how to build a standard operating procedure or a policy.
And I use NotebookLM extensively for research projects. Once I’ve finished writing a case, I’ll drop sources into the notebook that pertain to that case and ask NotebookLM to review my paper. NotebookLM will then address logical concerns, fallacies, and incorrect language. Sometimes, NotebookLM will even provide the start for the case writing, to at least provide some structure to otherwise sporadic thoughts on a topic.
NotebookLM is an incredibly powerful AI tool that is quickly becoming one of my more-used tools on a daily basis.
In the NHL, boozing is out. Edible cannabis and video games are in
Times are changing in the NHL — professional sports at large, I’m sure — and it’s fascinating to watch from afar. Winding down from a hard day has to be at least as important as firing up at the start of the day. And I’m more convinced than ever that this is how alcoholism starts for many people.
My business partner and I will regularly start our days at 6:45AM-7:00AM at the office. We’ll both walk through the door, perhaps do our morning spiritual exercise, and then hammer through a few emails. Around 8:00AM, the coffee starts to brew, and we both find ourselves hunkering down until about 10:00AM. That routine — spiritual exercise, email, and coffee — has quickly become our fire up.
But that 6:00PM end-of-day clock strikes early many times, and it’s not like a clock striking 6:00PM automatically shuts down the mind. We quite regularly have a beer together at the end of the day, discuss the day that was, and then go about our evenings with our families. That beverage takes off a fast-paced edge at the end of the day. I promise I’m easier to deal with when I get home if that edge is gone.
Obviously, this isn’t good though, right? Every person is going to look at this situation and say I’m walking a bad path, or worse, a terrible father. You are welcome to feel that way and judge me all you want. But that wind down is such a key part to ensure focus on my family at the end of the day and a level of relaxation to get a good night’s sleep.
So many folks will read this article about these NHLers using edibles to calm down, shake their heads, and find a way to feel better about themselves when they look in the mirror. But I don’t blame these NHLers one iota. The physical and mental grind these guys put their bodies through each day is something few people understand. Coming down from it — well, I sympathize if you get creative in your methods.
The Second Cup
- 5 Best & Worst Value For Money Photography Destinations (2025) — (Snaps by Fox)
– I swear you can see the difference in Fox’s photos where he was enjoying the location and where he wasn’t enjoying the location. Enjoyment exudes from the photography. - Sotheby’s Is Auctioning Custom iPods from the Late Karl Lagerfeld’s Massive Collection — (MacStories)
– This is a collection I bet you didn’t expect to see one day. - A Simple and Intuitive Day Planner — (Flowmino)
– I’m a big believer in time-boxing. This is a neat little iPhone app to visualize a time-boxed day. - One New Desk, Three Modes — (The Cramped)
– I love how Shawn is using a Vision Pro as his main computer. I could probably pull this sort of thing off at home with my personal computing (which is how I use the iPad right now), but I’m not sure if I want to spend $5,000+ CAD for the opportunity to try.
Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.