This week I had a great conversation with someone who came across my blog and reached out. An avid reader and entrepreneur, he asked for feedback, which I gladly gave. I also shared my experience building a product similar to his and some other things I’ve learned. The conversation went longer than we’d planned. He offered to make introductions to other entrepreneurs who are avid readers, which I appreciate.

My takeaway is that sharing what I’ve learned, online for free, encourages serendipity. I have no idea how many people out there are interested in the same things I am. Some of them may come across what I’ve shared, and it may be helpful. And a smaller subset of those who get value from what I share may reach out to discuss ideas.

I enjoy my habits of daily blogging and reading; I’ve grown a ton because of them. And recently I’ve realized that they’re leading to my connecting with like-minded people, which I didn’t expect but do enjoy.  

My takeaway is that sharing what I’ve learned online has little downside and, over the years, a growing upside.

I’ve read several books about decision-making this year. One of the best was What Intelligence Tests Miss. One day, I’ll write up in detail what I learned from the book, but for now I want to share some of what I found interesting. It distinguishes between IQ and rationality and explains that high IQ doesn’t equate to good decision-making.

One thing that stuck with me was what the author called “dysrationalia,” which is the inability to behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence.  

And what does rationality mean? Setting appropriate goals, taking the appropriate action given your goals and beliefs, and having beliefs that make sense given the available evidence.

You can be highly intelligent and still be irrational. This is because smart people can hold beliefs that aren’t grounded in reality and/or make decisions that don’t align with their goals. Said differently, you can be smart and still exercise poor judgment.

This book goes into a lot more detail about traps that lead to poor judgment. If you’re interested in understanding how smart people make bad decisions, you should consider giving this book a read.

I had a great conversation with my mom this week, and we talked about my childhood. Mom was an educator her entire career and has been an avid reader her whole life. She knows the value of reading in learning and child development and made sure that reading was part of my childhood routine. I'm thankful she prioritized this for me.

During our chat, she mentioned that despite her efforts, I hated reading as a child and adolescent. I did the assigned reading, but I made my dislike of it known. I told her it wasn’t the act of reading I didn’t like. The problem was that I was forced to read things that weren’t tailored to me or my interests, which felt like torture for two reasons.

First, I didn’t have control. Even as a child, I didn’t want people telling me what to do, especially things I hated doing. This is still true today. I want to drive the direction and outcomes of my life rather than let life happen to me.

Second, it’s difficult for me to do things that I have no interest in doing. I wasn’t interested in learning about Huckleberry Finn or whatever book my school wanted me to read, so it was hard for me to do it.

Combine those two issues and you have a child who hates reading and is vocal about it. Given that I love to read now, I’ll bet that if my teachers had taken time to understand my interests and let me pick books about those topics, I would have loved reading and read more than was assigned to me.

I’m rereading Think Twice by Michael Mauboussin. One concept he mentions that I’ve been thinking about this week is attributional charity, which means that interpreting others’ behavior empathetically instead of jumping to negative conclusions or morally judging them.

Mauboussin discussed this because he believes that situations play a big role in people’s decision-making processes. Many of us don’t consider or give proper weight to the situation when critiquing other people’s decisions. But when we explain our own decisions, we lead with how the situation justifies them.

Mauboussin shares a few ideas on how to think about the influence of situations on decision-making. One of them is to consider the situation first and the individual second. That is, when evaluating others’ decisions, begin by understanding the situation they’re in and then assess them and their decisions. Not the other way around.

Very interesting concept that I want to incorporate more going forward.

This past weekend, I shared a YouTube interview that I learned a lot from (see here). It was of Joe Liemandt, principal of Alpha School, an AI-driven teaching program and K-12 school. He’s also the founder of Trilogy Software and ESW Capital. Joe said that students in Alpha School do schoolwork for two hours and learn many times faster than students at traditional schools. The key is for students to read for one hour and then summarize what they read for another hour. Joe says this works so well because it leverages the learning-science “depth of knowledge” concept, a hierarchy that I set out in my previous post.

I read every day and get a ton from it. It’s been transformative, but I’ve noticed that I get the most from a book when I create a digest of it. My digest is basically a summary of the ideas and concepts I found helpful in the book. When I’ve created digests, that process has helped me retain what I’ve learned, and I use them as references that I revisit regularly. Unfortunately, I haven’t had success in developing a habit of creating these digests, so I have only a handful of them. The main hurdle is the time involved to create each one.

After listening to Joe’s interview and reading more on “depth of knowledge,” I know I need to add a daily summarization habit to my reading habit. I’m just not sure how to do both things every day without their consuming too much time. This week, I’m going to experiment with summarizing. Hopefully, I’ll learn by doing and discover something that makes it easier to develop this into a consistent habit.

A few weeks ago, I started posting, usually on Sundays, about the content I’d consumed during the last week and what I’d learned from it. I use YouTube as a podcast player, so most of what I share is links to things I’ve listened to on YouTube, although I plan to start adding content from other media once I get the habit down.

What I like most about this habit is that it forces me to do something I wasn’t doing consistently. I always save or bookmark what I consumed and want to revisit later because it contained a valuable nugget of information or insight. But I don’t revisit that saved content, at least not consistently, so a lot of those insights and nuggets go lost.

Writing this weekly post forces me to review that content and synthesize it, which cements what I learned. So, not only am I sharing info, I’m being forced to develop a habit, in public, around something I’ve never been consistent at. That wasn’t why I started writing these weekly emails, but it’s been a nice, unexpected benefit that I’m enjoying.

Continuing with my new protocol, here I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from. This week, I spent time doing general learning about a variety of topics.

What I consumed this week and what I learned from it:

• AI brings execution to the smartest people – YouTube interview with Taylor Holiday, founder and CEO of ad agency Common Thread Collective. He said that AI brings execution to the smartest people, and this really hit me. Holiday’s point is that AI now gives people the ability to execute faster than ever, so it doesn’t make sense to try to bring strategy or strategic thinking down to the people who execute. Changing their ability to think strategically may not be effective. It makes more sense to bring the ability to execute rapidly up to the people who already understand strategy. Before, it didn’t make sense for a high-level person to spend an hour executing a task. But now, they can execute it in a minute using AI, and that does make sense. Having all data in one central place allows you to use AI agents to quickly build HTML pages instead of spending a week creating a deck (see here) to answer data-related questions. Those HTML pages are essentially live dashboards that answer those data-related questions.
• Intensity transforms, consistency maintains – YouTube interview with Canadian entrepreneur Jonathan Goodman. He believes that you need to be intense about something to change or push it forward. Once a change has happened, consistency is needed to maintain it. Consistency alone won’t lead to big changes. You need intense periods of focus to change things, and then you need to figure out what you need to do consistently (but less intensely) to maintain the change. Also interesting were his insights on the differences between your job and your work (see here). A job is what you do for money. Work is what you do for yourself. Once you’ve made enough money from your job, he thinks you should stop the goal line from moving. Conversely, the goal line for work is always moving, and you should pursue your work for the rest of your life.
• How the keto diet controls bipolar and mental disorders – YouTube interview with Roblox CEO David Baszucki and his son Matt, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Fascinating interview about how Matt struggled for years and cycled through various drugs that didn’t have a material impact. Moving to a keto diet completely changed how his brain works, helped him control his disorder, and eliminated his manic episodes. I found it fascinating to learn about the history of human diets and how diet impacts brain chemistry because changing my diet had a big impact on me (though not to Matt’s level).

That’s what I learned from what I consumed last week.

Another thing I learned at the weekly AI sessions hosted by Georgia Tech was the capabilities of an AI tool I’d heard of but overlooked: Manus. It has agentic capabilities like Claude and ChatGPT, and it’s so good that Mark Zuckerberg bought the company for $2 billion last December (see here). The deal closed, and Manus became part of Meta. But the story has more twists and turns. On April 27, 2026, the Chinese government ordered Meta to unwind the acquisition (see here). It’s basically forcing Meta to accept a refund for the purchase price of Manus. We’ll see how that plays out.

Last night, I got to see how an AI engineer who knows Manus well uses it. He showed us what he’d created with Manus and how he uses it daily. I was impressed. Comparing it to Claude, I noticed a big difference. Claude has various products that can do different things, like Claude Design. Manus can do the same things, as far as I can tell, but the capabilities are all within the single Manus product.

I walked away with a better understanding of why Zuckerberg bought the company so quickly, and I’m looking forward to playing with Manus myself.

I’ve been going to evening AI sessions hosted weekly at Georgia Tech. This week’s session was great, and I learned something new. I knew Meta had acquired or licensed the technology of several AI companies and incorporated their teams into Meta’s team over the last year or so. But what I didn’t know was that Meta has quietly built and significantly improved its own ChatGPT competitor. It’s agentic and, for now, 100% free.

If you’re interested in checking out this tool before it hits the mainstream, you can go to Meta.ai to play with it.

Last week, I was chatting with someone about books and how I think about reading. I used to pick up random books to read, but now I’m more intentional about why I read. Before I choose a book, I write down what problem I’m trying to solve or what roadblock I’m currently facing. The more painful the problem, the more motivated I am to solve it. I then go find books written by people who have solved the problem, often biographies or framework books.

I use a synoptical reading approach to consuming the books. I’m not looking for the answer in any single book. I’m looking for patterns, and I’m comparing and contrasting ideas in the various books. The idea is to understand the problem and possible solutions from different perspectives so I can come to my own conclusions about how to solve the problem.

I found out about synoptical reading when I read How to Read a Book in 2023. I synthesized what I learned from that book here. It took a little bit of effort to embrace this approach, but I’m glad I did. It’s one I hope I can keep up for many years.