Wisereads Vol. 161 — Finish What Matters by David Kadavy, The contagion of fear, and more
Last week, we shared a preview of Angela Duckworth's new release, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best. This week, we're sharing a special preview of David Kadavy's conclusion to the Getting Art Done series, Finish What Matters: Make Your Creativity Count.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
White Collar PEDs
Colossus writer Jeremy Stern profiles Mark Zuckerberg and the ancient trap that power sets for the powerful. "Yet perhaps it is that simple, intolerable fact—that new technologies are always being invented; what remains broken is us—which requires a scapegoat. And who could ask for a better one than him? He is, for millions of people, a hideous mirror of both modern technological capitalism, and the resistance of history and human nature to perfectibility by it."
The contagion of fear
Oxide Computer CTO Bryan Cantrill recalls a shameful college prank to explain how fear spreads. "When those domain experts sow fear, it is the fear that takes root, propagating much more readily than any evidence that may follow it... as the fear takes hold, the sheer number of frightened experts becomes its own kind of evidence, with contrary voices drowned out by the din of an apparent consensus."
We Must Pace the Frontier
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei now argues for slowing AI development, an idea he dismissed back in 2023. "The question was always: what would you do with the extra time? The AI models of those days... were not capable of significant deception, manipulation, cheating, or cyberattacks. Slowing down in order to address their alignment risks felt like trying to study the psychology of humans by performing experiments on bacteria."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
I studied creativity for 365 days & here’s what I learned.
Cozy entrepreneurship, the anti-hustle approach to business YouTuber Deya champions, puts creativity rather than output at the center. Drawing on her favorite reads, she argues the creative work is exactly the part that can't be tracked week to week. "Creativity is not a straight line where you can track the progress and measure the progress week over week. Creativity is a messy process of trying and failing and learning and trying again, and every attempt teaches your brain something new."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
What if AGI is already here, and it's made of... children?
Pseudonymous creator Pascio, who writes widely read threads on AI and productivity, rethinks what AGI looks like. "The frontier is not 'one big model gets smarter.' The frontier is many small models, coordinating, spawning, dying, reporting back. The architecture of the most capable AI systems on Earth in 2026 already looks more like an ant colony than like a single mind."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Detecting And Countering Misuse Of AI: September 2026
Anthropic's Threat Intelligence team details eight months of disrupted operations in its latest AI misuse report. "AI has collapsed the labor and tooling gap that used to separate well-resourced, state-sponsored operations from individual operators... a hacktivist using stolen API keys, disparate financially motivated individuals, and a state espionage operator each sustained multi-victim campaigns that, even just a year ago, would have required many skilled operators and specialist knowledge."
Hand-picked book of the week
Finish What Matters
We remember Leonardo da Vinci for the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and forget that he finished only about a dozen paintings in his life. Raphael, working at the same time, left behind well over a hundred. One was the master of exploration, the other the master of execution. In his new release, Finish What Matters, David Kadavy closes out his Getting Art Done trilogy by walking creatives through the balancing act between the two: discerning which pursuits deserve the commitment, then seeing them through.
"The world rewards those who finish – as it should. If only we could earn money and accolades for thoughts we've never shared, ideas we haven't brought to life, or things we've only half-built. But what's the use of a novel never written, an app never uploaded, or a product never produced? Creations can't be consumed until they're crafted. Innovations can’t have impact until they're implemented."
If you enjoy the preview, you can pick up Finish What Matters as an ebook or paperback. If you missed either of the series' first two books, The Heart to Start or Mind Management, Not Time Management, they're available too!
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Only Poems Daily
Only Poems Daily is what it sounds like: a poem every morning, and nothing else. On Tuesdays, poems from dead poets. On Fridays, a translated poem. Every other day of the week has a theme of its own. From Hawks by James Stephens: "O little bird! there's many have a nest, / A hard-found, open place, with many a foe; / And hunger and despair and little rest, / And more to fear than you can know. Shield the nests where'er they be, / On the ground or on the tree; / Guard the poor from treachery."