Welcome to my worldview

For weeks I’ve been disgusted by the recent AI developments, despite how I like how AI can improve much of our lives. Recently I cleared up my feelings about it.

What sickens me about recent GPT-like developments is how some company owners take shortcuts in marketing content generation. If I’m a customer, I’ll feel treated like cattle and stop being a customer immediately. What infuriates me is not the shortcut in marketing copywriting itself but the possibility and the incentive to take other shortcuts that will compromise product quality. Bro-marketers say people don’t care, but I’m no person then. I do care. The temptation is just too great to ignore, and I cannot rely on the mind-strength of others to resist it.

Happy New Year 2023 everyone! Here I come with a controversial short one. New Year's resolutions are mostly useless.

Real winners know that numbered years and named days¹ are a social construct to dance with everyone, so to speak. Being mixed in everyone’s habits and mediocrity mindset, leads to an unrewarding, uneventful life. I cannot stress this enough.

You may have seen companies claim in their marketing material that they abide by a set of values; such values might look like: Kindness, Trustworthiness, and Listeners. Somehow, they disappoint you because deep within, you know they are operating under another set of values, or I’d dare to say anti-values.

Operating under a set of unidentified anti-values is a great way to destroy the goodwill built with customers and business partners and employee loyalty.

A few weeks ago, I recommended a plumbing service to a friend, and he asked me if it was expensive. I told him these plumbers fixed my sink appropriately and that I selected them because of good public reviews.

Since we’ve already had this discussion before (the evergreen topic of how I don’t select products and services for their price tag), he asked me if I ever try to bargain with merchants. I replied that I never try to negotiate prices or ask for discounts. At first, I realised I operated like this many years ago, but I had to search my feelings about why that is. These are my findings.

Most self-explanations come from a guilt standpoint, whether you realise that or not. Did you do something wrong? And if you did, do you feel guilty? Was it ill-intentioned, or was it an honest mistake? Did you hear your gut advising something yet chose to ignore it? We’ve all been there. You needn’t worry.

Call me crazy, but sometimes I think life's timeline is a Git repository, and the different branches are Side Quests, which are (if we follow the analogy) enhancements of your central life. You can merge Side Quests into your Main Quest, integrating these improvements in a streamlined way.

Missing activities in your Main Quest may harm your later life if you keep playing the playbook of the path you're travelling to (e.g., not going to high school may hurt you if you try to enter the corporate world, but if you prefer to be an independent worker you may do well in life, given you genuinely put your heart at it).

If you’re an overthinker like me, you might think broadly about issues in your industry. Whether you’re an employee, contractor or entrepreneur, there’s always the opportunity to cause some or significant impact in your field.

This post is inspired by the Work on what matters blog post by Will Larson. Though this post only focuses on the impact part of influence, whether your impact is made visible or not, it is up to you to factor visibility in the kind of impact of your choosing. It also broadens the scope of influence in that it’s not just organizational change that you could be looking for.

It is long known in the self-help literature that mindset is the origin of our actions, in such a way that even if you repeated the same steps, these wouldn’t lead to precisely the same results because of the intent (the why, so to speak) is not the same. The origin of our expression is the mindset in any shape or form. So, it’s our most precious treasure, a treasure which cannot be stolen away from us, but it can be evolved or damaged if we allow other people that.