Wisereads Vol. 59 — Good Work by Paul Millerd, Steve Jobs' 10-Minute Rule, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Earn It, Steve Pratt's marketing handbook on creating valuable content to attract a loyal audience. This week, we're sharing a preview chapter of Paul Millerd's new book on reclaiming inner ambition, Good Work.

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When struggling with a creative problem, Apple's late founder Steve Jobs insisted on taking a walk—with good reason. "When you go for a walk, you physically move through the landscape, paying light attention to your surroundings so you don't crash into a streetlight or fall in a pothole. Which encourages your mind to pay light attention to various thoughts and ideas passing through it, too. And that, it turns out, is the ideal mental state for coming up with new ideas."

Morgan Housel defends sticking to your own approach when it suits your skills and personality. "How you invest might cause me to lose sleep, and how I invest might prevent you from looking at yourself in the mirror tomorrow. Isn’t that OK? Isn’t it far better to just accept that we’re different rather than arguing over which one of us is right or wrong?"

When a measure becomes a goal, it can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, inventor of the diffusion model, explains: "As we continue optimizing the proxy though, we eventually exhaust the useable similarity between proxy and goal. The proxy keeps on getting better, but the goal stops improving. In machine learning we call this overfitting, but it is also an example of Goodhart's law."

Károly Zsolnai-Fehér of Two Minute Papers explores OpenAI's new o1 "Strawberry" model, which uses chain-of-thought reasoning to enhance performance on complex tasks. "It can also write you a chess game real quick, but with a twist—look! What is happening here? Who is he playing against? Well, against an AI. Wait, so this is an AI that just programmed another AI. That is, I think, insanity. What a time to be alive!"

Writer Dickie Bush shares Naval Ravikant's favorite writing advice from Scott Adams, who recommends obsessing over your first sentence: "Curiosity is the crack cocaine of the writing world. Hook your readers, and they'll follow you anywhere," and keeping it simple: "Just one thought per sentence. Readers process info better when it's bite-sized and easily digestible."

Notion and Harvard Business Review explore how companies benefit from integrating AI into knowledge management. "AI doesn’t work without a rich knowledge base, which is why you need to think about data capture first and then think about AI… If you don’t have a culture of data capture, perhaps you start with a small department and use it as an example to show the rest of the organization the value of centralizing knowledge in one place, and then have AI query it. People might not believe you until they actually see how it will make their jobs easier."

Feeling unfulfilled and burnt out from job-hopping in his twenties, Paul Millerd realized it wasn't work itself that exhausted him—it was work he didn't care about. His latest book, Good Work, a follow-up to The Pathless Path, explores how to find meaningful work after breaking away from unfulfilling work.

"Good work is powerful. It can reshape what you desire from life. It can fill your days with a renewable form of life energy that you want to protect… Good work doesn’t usually happen on a factory schedule and often has a natural seasonality. But when you stop doing it, good work seduces you back. It is something you must do. Once you discover your good work, take it seriously and protect it, as it can be one of the most powerful ways to show up in the world, contribute, and feel useful."

We're thrilled that Paul is sharing a preview of his most recent release, Good Work. If you enjoy the preview, we encourage you to consider purchasing a full copy here. You can also download a full copy of his earlier work, The Pathless Path, here.

Best known for his TED Talk on embracing 100 days of rejection, Jia Jiang helps people become their best selves through his Substack. From How to Be Funny in Public Speaking: "If people are laughing at your jokes, it’s so much easier for them to pay attention and remember your lessons. If your talk is like fried chicken, and the key takeaway is like the tasteless chicken breast, the jokes you deliver are like the hot fried breading with honey mustard sauce. That’s how you make the whole thing easy to go down."