Morfternight #79: A week off before a big change
The one announcing a fork on the road.
👇 tl;dr
Today we keep it short as I am taking some time off within my time off :)
As you know, I’ve been in Palermo, Sicily, for a month, and my daughter Z. has come to visit this week. Also, I have been thinking quite a bit about the best direction for Morfternight in the coming months, so I’ll share where I am at just below.
Finally, I leave you with one of the funniest SNL sketches I have seen.
🤩 Welcome to the seven new Morfternighters who joined us last week.
I love having you here and hope you’ll enjoy reading Morfternight.
Remember to share with a friend by clicking this button if you do.
📷 Photo of the week
Palazzina Cinese, Palermo - More Photos
👋 Good Morfternight!
I introduce Morfternight on the blog as follows:
Stay ahead with insights on the latest trends in personal productivity, leadership, remote work, and technology. Every Sunday, you’ll receive a carefully curated selection of thought-provoking content, including a photo, writing, and online destinations that will stimulate your mind.
And the best part? You’ll also gain exclusive access to my perspectives on Artificial Intelligence, Product Management, Distributed Leadership, and Technology.
On the About page for the newsletter, I say something similar:
I talk about personal productivity, leadership, distributed (a.k.a. “remote”) work, technology, and anything that tickles my brain and could do the same to yours.
I share a photo I made, something I wrote, or a place to visit in each issue, and a few links and reflections sparked by my readings.
These descriptions are broad enough to cover all the subjects I generally write about, but there lies the problem I have been trying to untangle recently.
I feel pulled in different directions. On the one hand, I love to share photos, but I would also love to write about photography more. Conversely, the conversation about Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models is fascinating but polarizing. Last but not least, although I have taken a slight step back from product, leadership, and the distributed world during my sabbatical, I’ll be back to work and those subjects in a month.
Speaking of product, if there is one thing I know is that trying to please everyone means becoming average and mediocre and not loved by anyone.
As a result, I decided to split Morfternight into three sections:
One focused on photos, where I’ll keep sharing my images and thoughts about photography in general, gear, and pictures I like made by others.
One exclusively focused on AI and my hands-on experience with all the tools in the space.
One will fit the original Morfternight description about personal productivity, leadership, and distributed (a.k.a. “remote”) work.
I’ll send them on different days to be determined.
You won’t have anything to do if you are interested in all of them. But, if not, you can unsubscribe from the one(s) you don’t want to receive and keep the other(s).
Hopefully, I’ll reach more readers by being more focused than with a general format like today.
🗺️ Three places to visit today
From How It All Works (A Few Short Stories), a blog post by Morgan Housel on Collab Fund:
” Henry Ford had a rule for his factories: No one could keep a record of the experiments that were tried and failed.Ford wrote in his book My Life and Work:
I am not particularly anxious for the men to remember what someone else has tried to do in the past, for then we might quickly accumulate far too many things that could not be done.
That is one of the troubles with extensive records. If you keep on recording all of your failures you will shortly have a list showing that there is nothing left for you to try – whereas it by no means follows because one man has failed in a certain method that another man will not succeed.
That was Ford’s experience. “We get some of our best results from letting fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” He wrote: “Hardly a week passes without some improvement being made somewhere in machine or process, and sometimes this is made in defiance of what is called “the best shop practice.”
The important thing is that when something that previously didn’t work suddenly does, it doesn’t necessarily mean the people who tried it first were wrong. It usually means other parts of the system have evolved in a way that allows what was once impossible to now become practical.”
As people return to the office only three days a week, Remote Work Is Costing Manhattan More Than $12 Billion a Year. The same happens in other big cities but to a lesser extent. That money is not lost, of course, but saved by people not commuting on Mondays and Fridays, but it’s hard for shops and restaurants in the cities.
As a side note, if you have to go to the office some days of the week, I always found that choosing to stay home Monday and Friday is terrible for optics: regardless of how productive you are, you’ll still project a “five-day weekend” image.“If you hear hoof beats outside the window, don’t conclude that it’s a zebra; it’s much more likely to be a horse.” Steven Pinker, a Harvard professor, explains Bayes’ rule in a five-minute video.
📺 Traffic Altercation on SNL
Here’s another much funnier video that offers great insight into how we behave when we feel protected by our cars or computer screens.
Remember, this is played live…
👨🏻💻 From the blog, last week
It was NOT a quiet week for the blog, but not in the most visible way.
I relaunched paolo.blog with a new theme that is much lighter and faster than previously and works much better on mobile devices. The content hasn’t changed; you should find everything in the same places.