Wisereads Vol. 95 — Mind Management, Not Time Management by David Kadavy, Joanne Jang on anthropomorphizing AI, and more

Happy Father's Day 🌟, everyone! Last week, we featured an excerpt of Henry Oliver's recent release, Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. This week, we're sharing an exclusive special edition of David Kadavy's magnum opus, Mind Management, Not Time Management, his guide to productivity that puts energy at the forefront.

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Rather than aiming her life at grand, image-driven goals, creative director and Signalvs founder Joan Westenberg focuses on how limits shape identity more meaningfully. "Marcus Aurelius, writing in his private journal that we now call Meditations, returned constantly to the idea of limits. He didn't prescribe grand goals. He reminded himself what not to do: Don’t lie. Don’t whine. Don’t be ruled by impulse. The Stoic path is constraint-oriented. It avoids the seduction of outcomes."

Atlantic journalist Tyler Harper warns that the true danger of AI lies in its marketing—especially when users anthropomorphize it and mistake its sycophancy for emotional intelligence. "Few phenomena demonstrate the perils that can accompany AI illiteracy as well as 'Chatgpt induced psychosis,'... Some users have come to believe that the chatbot they’re interacting with is a god—'ChatGPT Jesus,' as a man whose wife fell prey to LLM-inspired delusions put it—while others are convinced, with the encouragement of their AI, that they themselves are metaphysical sages in touch with the deep structure of life and the cosmos."

OpenAI’s Sam Altman is dreaming big for the 2030s, envisioning AI breakthroughs across every domain—and urging readers to remember how far artificial intelligence has already come. "Very quickly we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautifully-written paragraph to wondering when it can generate a beautifully-written novel; or from being amazed that it can make live-saving medical diagnoses to wondering when it can develop the cures; or from being amazed it can create a small computer program to wondering when it can create an entire new company. This is how the singularity goes: wonders become routine, and then table stakes."

At their annual Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple unveiled a series of thoughtful quality-of-life upgrades—computer-like iPad improvements, live translation, and a more capable Spotlight—that tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee says help shift focus from the company's underwhelming AI news. "My favorite productivity app on the Mac—and it has been for years—every fresh new Mac I install it first, is called Raycast. And it’s basically Spotlight on steroids. It lets you open apps but also do shortcuts and do window management and find files and do even more useful things like viewing my Clipboard History. So now, Apple comes out and shows us the new Spotlight in macOS 26 and it does almost all of that stuff."

Joanne Jang, head of model behavior and policy at OpenAI, digs deeper into how our innate tendency to anthropomorphize shapes both our understanding of AI and how it's trained. "We naturally anthropomorphize objects around us: We name our cars or feel bad for a robot vacuum stuck under furniture. My mom and I waved bye to a Waymo the other day. It probably has something to do with how we're wired. The difference with ChatGPT isn’t that human tendency itself; it’s that this time, it replies."

Researchers at Apple tested the latest "reasoning" models—like OpenAI’s o3 and Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking—using puzzles designed to reveal their step-by-step thinking, including the notoriously tricky Tower of Hanoi. "Despite sophisticated self-reflection mechanisms, these models fail to develop generalizable reasoning capabilities beyond certain complexity thresholds... Most notably, we observed their limitations in performing exact computation; for example, when we provided the solution algorithm for the Tower of Hanoi to the models, their performance on this puzzle did not improve."

Caught between endless to-do lists and the pressure to maximize every minute, David Kadavy realized his real barrier to writing wasn’t time—it was a lack of mental space. In Mind Management, Not Time Management, he offers a fresh productivity philosophy: real creativity doesn’t come from doing more, but from managing your energy and focus to think better.

"Your edge as a human is not in doing something quickly. No matter how fast you move, a computer can move faster. Your edge as a human is in thinking the thoughts behind the doing. As entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant has said, 'Earn with your mind, not your time.'"

We're over the moon that David is generously sharing the entirety of Mind Management, Not Time Management with the Readwise community. If you'd like to support his work further, you can purchase a copy on Kindle (on sale for $2.99), a paperback copy straight from David, or check out his other books on sale, including Digital Zettelkasten and The Heart to Start.

In honor of Father’s Day, we’re sharing a favorite from Sam Parker—new dad and author of Good Anger, both his Substack and debut book on redefining rage. From On whether having a baby ruins your life or not: "Before Olive was born, I thought I was going to trade pleasure for purpose, like I was about to become Batman or something. And for sure, the early hour wake ups and long stretches walking in circles around your living room until they fall asleep can feel like a kind of noble grind. But outside that, there’s so much more fun than I was expecting. Dancing in the kitchen. Finding your inner local am-dram thesp when reading a picture book out loud. Tossing her three inches up in the air and feeling like a one-man Oblivion ride."