#083 – Best of 2024

Good morning everyone,

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas with your families!

Being the last week of the year, I thought I’d recap my Top 5 favourite takeaways from the past 52 weeks.

Wishing each and every one of you nothing but health, wealth, and happiness in what is going to be a massive 2025.

Let’s jump in.

read online on my website 

read time 3 minutes 

#083 at a Glance:

• Quote: Climbing the wrong mountain.

• Podcast: JRE x Gladstone AI.

• Mental Model: Sharpening The Axe.

• Hack: 6 Steps to Avoid Jet Lag Forever.

• Tweet: There’s no excuse big enough...

Quote of The Year:

Taken from Newsletter #060:

The idea of trying to ‘climb the right mountain’ has been a really big theme for me personally this year.

It has majorly influenced the way I evaluate short-term decisions through a long-term lens.

It’s not essential that we know exactly which mountain it is that we ultimately we wish to climb, for our goals and circumstances will inevitably evolve through the years.

But, at the very least, thinking of different avenues in our lives as ‘mountains’ is a helpful visual to to assist in contemplating factors which may not have a material impact on our short-term outcomes, yet are nonetheless important considerations for the future.

If nothing else, approaching decision-making using this mental frame helps to single out which mountains we don’t wish to climb through a process of elimination.

Super important.

Podcast of The Year:

Taken from Newsletter #074:

The Joe Rogan Experience #2156 - Jeremie & Edouard Harris

Jeremie Harris is the CEO and Edouard Harris the CTO of Gladstone AI, an organization dedicated to promoting the responsible development and adoption of AI.

Some of my biggest takeaways from the chat:

• The AI model (artificial brain) contains artificial neurons that essentially do the thinking for the machine. With AI scaling, you can increase the number of artificial neurons it contains and simultaneously increase the amount of computing power that is being attributed to wiring the connections between those neurons.

• The ability to scale and improve AI became exponential after OpenAI released GPT-3 in 2020, where the only real barriers to AI advancement became the size of your model and the amount of computing power used to train it. In other words, two problems which can be readily solved with money.

• This created an intense competition between some of the biggest companies in the world (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, etc). To put this into context, Microsoft is currently engaged in the single biggest infrastructure build-out in history, spending US$50 billion per year on data centres to house their computing infrastructure.

• North America is running out of on-grid baseload power to supply data centres. Wind and solar don’t quite cut it for big data centres which require huge amounts of reliable power, hence why companies are starting to experiment with nuclear energy.

• Companies at the cutting edge of this technology are currently scaling AI systems to a level of intelligence that is fast-approaching (and surpassing) human intelligence, with no way of being able to effectively control those systems.

• A lot of AI companies have lost their agency when it comes to decision-making because of the fierce competition for short-term profits and exponential scale.

This podcast is absolutely essential listening and it is imperative that we stay well-informed as this technology continues to evolve at literally an exponential pace.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

[Podcast Length: 2 hours 22 minutes]

Mental Model of The Year:

Taken from Newsletter #059:

Sharpening The Axe 

I’ve been reflecting deeply this week on a famous quote by Abraham Lincoln:

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

Yes, it’s been said many times before, but only recently have I truly become cognisant of its profound application to almost every task we encounter in the course of our lives.

The key takeaway being the importance of dedicating concerted time and effort to preparation instead of ‘action’.

Before any undertaking, ask yourself the following three questions:

1. What is the tree that I’m trying to chop down?

2. What is the axe at my disposal?

3. How can I sharpen it?

I’ll give you an example from my own life.

Last weekend, amidst a barrage of mid-semester law assignments and exams, I needed to create three presentations for one of the companies that I am doing some marketing consulting for.

Instead of diving head-first into PowerPoint or Canva without thinking twice, I thoughtfully went through the three questions and this is what I came up with:

1. What is the tree that I’m trying to chop down? 3 high-quality, thoughtful, and slick presentations that are each tailored to unique audiences.

2. What is the axe at my disposal? The knowledge it takes to create presentations that fit that description.

3. How can I sharpen it? Spend some time researching effective presentations from various industries to get different perspectives, watch YouTube videos, look through templates online, and study public speaking experts before getting to work.

Now, having explained the process I want through, it sounds incredibly simple.

But, having said that, the most effective strategies usually are…

Give it a go.

Hack of The Year:

Taken from Newsletter #074:

6 Steps to Avoid Jet Lag Forever

On the flight back to Sydney from Germany, I decided to take the opportunity to conduct a little experiment to see if I could completely avoid the effects of jet lag upon my return.

After sifting through a few different articles and YouTube videos, I was able to deduce the following 6-step protocol:

1. The morning of your flight from the departure time zone (in my case, Germany), manually set your phone & laptop times to that of your arrival time zone (Sydney). This tip is psychological more than anything but makes a HUGE difference, believe me.

2. Eat, sleep, and caffeinate in accordance with your arrival time zone. Eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the normal times you would if you were already in your arrival time zone. The same goes for sleep and caffeine consumption. Use your eye mask and ear plugs on the plane as necessary.

3. Within ~3 hours of landing in your arrival time zone, strenuously exercise. Combination of cardio + resistance. Think rowing machines, incline treadmill running, stair master, etc.

4. Sleep on time using optimal sleep hygiene (block-out curtains, non-exposure to blue light, etc).

5. Set an alarm for the following morning just after sunrise. Don’t hit snooze.

6. Sun exposure immediately after waking for at least 15 minutes.

It worked an absolute treat. Better than expected and can’t recommend it highly enough.

What I like about this is that it’s fairly easy to implement and doesn’t impact your holiday in any substantial way.

Give it a go next time you travel.

Tweet of The Year:

Taken from Newsletter #052:

There’s No Excuse Big Enough…

Huge believer in this one.

Thanks for reading! Grateful for your support.

Stay hungry, stay humble, stay curious. ⚡

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