Wisereads Vol. 101 — Smart Brevity, Seth Godin's Notes to Myself, and more
Last week, in celebration of 100 weeks of Wisereads, we teamed up with thought leader Derek Sivers to share his latest book, Useful Not True, in its entirety. This week, we're sharing a preview of Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less, a guide to clear communication by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
The Seductions of A.I. for the Writer’s Mind
Creative writing professor and poet Meghan O’Rourke is spending her summer experimenting with AI to better understand how to approach it in the classroom—an exploration that’s easing some of her "invisible labor" as a mother while surfacing deeper concerns. "I came to feel that large language models like ChatGPT are intellectual Soylent Green — the fictional foodstuff from the 1973 dystopian film of the same name, marketed as plankton but secretly made of people. After all, what are GPTs if not built from the bodies of the very thing they replace, trained by mining copyrighted language and scraping the internet? And yet they are sold to us not as Soylent Green but as Soylent, the 2013 'science-backed' meal replacement dreamed up by techno-optimists who preferred not to think about their bodies."
Notes to myself
We know you love a good listicle. In his latest, prolific marketer Seth Godin shares a few of his favorite one-liners. On competition: "The problem with the race to the bottom is you might win." On attitude: "Peeves make lousy pets." On procrastination: "There is no perfect moment to begin."
Writing is thinking
A recent Nature post urges academics, researchers, and writers not to outsource the entirety of the writing process to AI. "Writing compels us to think — not in the chaotic, non-linear way our minds typically wander, but in a structured, intentional manner. By writing it down, we can sort years of research, data and analysis into an actual story, thereby identifying our main message and the influence of our work."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
Ira Glass on Storytelling
When radio host and producer Ira Glass started out, his taste far outpaced his ability—for nearly a decade. For creatives slogging through that gap, he says volume is the only way through: "For the first couple of years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. Okay? It's not that great. It's really not that great. It's trying to be good; it has the ambition to be good, but it's not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you… it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
BREAKING: Norway's $2 trillion wealth fund ran a 12-month AI experiment
Digging into how Norges Bank Investment Management used AI to save 213,000 labor hours, author and founder Karl Mehta highlights a pivotal shift: "The first major breakthrough came with their Snowflake data warehouse integration. Portfolio managers could suddenly query complex datasets using natural language. What previously required technical SQL expertise now took seconds."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Management Time: Who's Got The Monkey?
In one of Harvard Business Review’s best-selling articles, employees’ problems take the form of mischievous monkeys that leap onto the backs of managers. Originally published in 1974, the piece was one of the first to suggest managers empower their subordinates to take on their own problems. "The monkey in each case begins its career astride both their backs. All it has to do is move the wrong leg, and –presto! –the subordinate deftly disappears. The manager is thus left with another acquisition for his menagerie. Of course, monkeys can be trained not to move the wrong leg. But it is easier to prevent them from straddling backs in the first place."
Hand-picked book of the week
Smart Brevity
Mark Twain once noted, "I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one." In the age of AI, where essays can be generated in under a minute, that sentiment rings truer than ever. The journalists behind Axios have created a practical guide to help you cut through the noise and communicate with clarity.
"What we’re arguing is this: If you want vital information to stick in the digital world, you need to radically rethink—and repackage—how you deliver it. Start by accepting that most people will scan or skip most of what you communicate—and then make every word and sentence count."
Snag the full ebook for $2.99 wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada until the end of July.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Irrational Exuberance
Will Larson—author, CTO at Carta, and former engineering leader at Calm, Stripe, and Uber—shares hard-earned insights on leadership and tech in his consistently sharp blog. From Moving from an orchestration-heavy to leadership-heavy management role: "Picking the right problems and solutions is your highest‑leverage work. No, this is not only your product manager’s job or your tech lead’s—it is your job... Generalizing a bit, your focus now is effectiveness of your team’s work, not efficiency in implementing it. Moving quickly on the wrong problem has no value."