No. 645 – September 7, 2025
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Tiny Thoughts
Your capacity for excellence is inversely proportional to the number of your commitments.
When your primary goal is to be liked, you can’t take risks. You can’t disagree. You can’t push boundaries. You become a prisoner of other people’s expectations.
When you truly understand something, you can express it at any level of detail while maintaining coherence.
The master can provide the one-sentence version, the paragraph version, and the chapter version, all of which tell the same story at different resolutions. The novice can only repeat what they’ve memorized at one resolution.
Insights
Astronaut Scott Kelly on smart:
“The smartest person in the room, I’ve learned, is usually the person who knows how to tap into the intelligence of every person in the room.”
Co-authors Rosamund and Benjamin Zander, on finding the right frame:
“Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear.”*
Jean-Jacques Rousseau on wisdom:
“Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know. Among the most necessary knowledge is the knowledge of how to live well, that is, how to produce the least possible evil and the greatest goodness in one’s life. At present, people study useless sciences, but forget to study this, the most important knowledge.”
The Knowledge Project
What if AI is just another platform shift like the iPhone rather than the civilization-transforming revolution everyone’s claiming?
Benedict Evans, technology analyst and former partner at a16z, challenges the AI hype machine, arguing that while AI represents the biggest technological shift since the iPhone, it’s only the biggest thing since the iPhone, not the new electricity or industrial revolution.
This episode will challenge what you think you know about AI.
+ Listen now on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Web/Transcript/Key Ideas | YouTube
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Thanks for reading,
— Shane Parrish
* Thank you to my friend James Clear for bringing this quote to my attention.