Wisereads Vol. 109 — AI Will Not Make You Rich by Jerry Neumann, Becoming the person who does the thing, and more

Last week, we shared Emily Brontë's Gothic masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, just in time for the fall season. This week, we're sharing The Montessori Method, Maria Montessori's radical exploration of curiosity-led education.

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Investor and author Jerry Neumann contrasts computer-era investors with those of containerization, arguing AI resembles the latter: a late-stage innovation where consumers, not investors, capture most of the value. "It’s the element of surprise that should strike us most forcefully when we compare the early days of the computer revolution to today. No one took note of personal computers in the 1970s. In 2025, AI is all we seem to talk about."

Quoting James Clear and Paul the Apostle, Fred Rivett offers a valuable reminder that action follows identity: "If you identify as a failure, incapable of achievement, unfit, unlovable, destined to play a bit-part role in your own story, then by heck no matter how much willpower you put in to push that boulder up the hill, it will return to its place."

In its succinct, practical guide to building tools for agents, Anthropic highlights key practices for the best results: "When writing tool descriptions and specs, think of how you would describe your tool to a new hire on your team. Consider the context that you might implicitly bring—specialized query formats, definitions of niche terminology, relationships between underlying resources—and make it explicit."

Executive coaches Brett Kistler and Joe Hudson explore why 80% of Americans feel time-starved, even with more time-saving tools than ever. "We jump into our phones because there, we’re not thinking about the future... And so what is time scarcity really? On some level, it’s emotional overwhelm. And the other thing is: it’s just not being present. It’s being in the future. It’s thinking about the task that you have to do while you’re doing another task, which is insanely stressful."

On a mission to reinvent the modern slide deck, Grant Lee and his team uncovered key levers for profitable growth, including dogfooding: "Either you build something that's 100x better than alternatives, or you build something else. Dogfooding makes it painfully obvious if your product isn't a 100x better," and influencer marketing: "90% of your reach comes from <10% of content that goes viral. Your job: go broad with influencers and spend enough to find that 10% of content and formats that work."

As of July 2025, 10% of the world’s adult population is using ChatGPT in some form. In a working paper, the US National Bureau of Economic Research analyzes anonymized data to understand how people are prompting the LLM. "'Practical Guidance,' 'Seeking Information,' and 'Writing' are the three most common topics and collectively account for nearly 80% of all conversations. Writing dominates work-related tasks, highlighting chatbots’ unique ability to generate digital outputs compared to traditional search engines. Computer programming and self-expression both represent relatively small shares of use."

"Even so those who teach little children too often have the idea that they are educating babies and seek to place themselves on the child's level by approaching him with games, and often with foolish stories. Instead of all this, we must know how to call to the man which lies dormant within the soul of the child."

This historical text offers a look at the origins of the Montessori movement and one approach to nurturing lifelong learners.

We’re sharing the edition available for free through Project Gutenberg, the digital library founded by ebook pioneer Michael Hart. Explore their full catalog of over 75,000 titles here.

Seasoned writers gather at Works in Progress, a Stripe magazine focused on new and underrated ideas to improve the world. Topics range from economic growth and technology to history, metascience, medical research, and more. From Magical systems thinking: "The temptation will be to use this vast increase in computational power and intelligence to 'solve' systems design for once and for all. But the same laws that limited Forrester continue to bind: 'NEW SYSTEMS CREATE NEW PROBLEMS' and 'THE SYSTEM ALWAYS KICKS BACK'. As systems become more complex, they become more chaotic, not less. The best solution remains humility."