April 24, 2023
Good morning! Happy Saint George’s Day — to our friends in Newfoundland and Labrador! A $330,000 parking ticket keeps increasing for a Russian plane parked on the southeast corner of the tarmac at the Toronto International Airport.
(This fascinates us because we’ve witnessed the big jet itself as it just sits there.)
For thirteen years I was bathed in the Benedictine way of life, basic lessons in stability, humility, patience, persistence, perseverance, and a whole bunch more.This came across my desk the other day from a good friend who is still being bathed in all of it and I thought it might be worthy of these pages.“A basic requirement for any effective family, community, or organization is stability. At the end of the day we need people who consistently show up, who are there, and who will remain.” (Oates)Data tell us the #1 cause of (mental health) depression is the lack of sustained, meaningful, in-person human connections, not the virtual kind, but the real kind.
- We are suddenly being inundated by truckloads of information related to artificial intelligence; e.g., ChatGPT
- And, we shouldn’t be surprised, but we are astonished by the rapidity of it all and the enormity of it all.
- A few thoughts informed by Grennan, NYU, 2023:
- The person who knows nothing or very little about technology and/or artificial intelligence might be the best at using ChatGPT because it is easier to learn something than it is to un-learn something — or to be stuck in an intellectual or creative rut.
- ChatGPT is not Google or Alexa or any of those other voices… those platforms provide answers to fact-based questions such as, “What is the population of Wichita?” With ChatGPT you seek to answer questions starting with why.
- ChatGPT can role play your ideas from a variety of perspectives and backgrounds. Ask it to be Steve Jobs or Abraham Lincoln or Plato or Voltaire — and it will — or your next door neighbor.
- Think of Freaky Fast (Jimmy John’s) and creepy. ChatGPT is built to think — and to think creatively in ways not typically possible with mere mortals. The more specific you address the why and hypotheticals, the better the platform will serve you.
- Talk to it like a friend. It will perform to your wildest expectations, but only if you ask it; e.g., exactly where are all of the lost socks of the world and how did they get there?
- Like all of life: Draft, Re-Write, Amend, Edit, Start Over…
- If you only use a calculator to add and subtract you’re missing 99.999% of its potential — and it won’t tell you what you’re missing unless you ask it.
- Number one (#1) predictor of employee attrition — three times (3x!) second place — is a toxic work environment/ culture…
- … and, here’s the bad news: Unless you have both eyes, both ears, and your sixth sense attuned to it, it will be too late when you find out. (Informed by MIT Sloan, 2023)
- “While we expected that well-being and optimism would matter to performance, we were taken aback by just how much they mattered.” (Lester, Diener, Etc., et al., 2023)
- We don’t normally pay attention to the underworld drug trade, but this caught our eye:
- $450,000,000 worth of cocaine was found floating off the coast of Italy, presumably dropped there for a later-in-the-day collection; whoa!
- Who gets more credit, DeNiro or Kander and Ebb?
- The iconic 1977 mega-hit, New York, New York was a Kander and Ebb (Minelli/ Sinatra) chart-topper, but it would have never happened without Robert DeNiro.
- DeNiro rejected the duo’s first attempt at a song for a Scorsese movie — and demanded something better.
- Kander was so perturbed and emotionally vulnerable, he wrote the music for the version we now know in less than 45 minutes. (Ebb added the lyrics.)
- Take that, Bob!
- We’ve all experienced times when we are challenged to the very core of who we perceive ourselves to be — and our response makes all the difference.
- Credit for almost everything is usually shared, but the better publicist often wins; Marco Polo had a good publicist — as did Bill Bradford… and millions of others.
- “A lot of folks have felt that the nature of the post-COVIDs period and economic shock mean that we can go back to the old way of the talent value proposition…
- … I think that’s a mistake. The world is moving and adapting, and companies need to adapt with it.” (Segel, 2023)
