Wisereads Vol. 164 — Anatomy of a Breakthrough by Adam Alter, David Robinson on quitting OpenAI, and more
Last week, we shared a preview of Bill Burnett and Dave Evans's guide to finding meaning in everyday life, How to Live a Meaningful Life. This week, we're sharing a preview of Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most by Adam Alter.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
The Dot and the Swarm
Swarms of thousands of AI agents need almost no managing, which has Wharton’s Ethan Mollick walking back a year of his own advice. Call it another bitter lesson: "A lot of what we call management exists to solve problems that come from organizations being made of people... Agents have far fewer of these problems. They don't angle for promotions or protect their turf. They don't even have meetings."
I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken
David Robinson oversaw OpenAI’s safety reports for 12 frontier launches before resigning. He grants that many of his former colleagues mean well and that the labs are trying to be careful, but argues the bar needs to be much higher. "Given today's risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster."
Is Claude Conscious? Inside Anthropic's Spiritual Quest
Religious leaders and scholars, many under NDA, have been advising Anthropic on Claude’s morals and whether it might be conscious, reports Elizabeth Dias of The New York Times. "For humans, morality has rarely depended on simply following rules. Communities also shape morality. Values are inherited and imparted over time, learned as we live together in our bodies in the physical world. But A.I. models have no bodies."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
Make Your Art.
John Green remembers a friend and fellow AFC Wimbledon fan who broadcast the club's matches to a tiny audience and gave it everything he had. Green takes it as a model for any kind of work: "I want you to think of what you put into the world as art, as an attempt to refashion the raw materials of Earth into something better and more interesting than it needs to be."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
Your Entire Life Changes When You Realize Getting Rich Is A Skill Issue
Devon Canup, who says he’s made over $10 million online, argues that wealth starts with identity and a "6-month lock-in": "Becoming unconsciously rich is the same as embodying the identity of a rich person. You don't even try. You don't even think. You just show up and do the things, without even having to think or try, that make you even more money."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Kolibri: A Sovereign European Model on the Pareto Frontier
Aleph Alpha’s roughly 200-page technical report on Kolibri, its open-weight bid for European AI sovereignty, shares what failed and what the team came away with. "One of the most durable results of this work is neither a checkpoint nor a training pipeline; it is a team in Europe that has trained two Kolibri generations in a short amount of time and knows how to fail forward and learn."
Hand-picked book of the week
Anatomy of a Breakthrough
Brie Larson has an Oscar, a Marvel franchise, and more than seventy acting awards, but her list of auditions that didn't work out is far longer. Airbnb was turned down by investor after investor. Amazon was once so bad at filling holiday orders that executives pitched in at fulfillment centers, and critics took to calling it Amazon.con.
In Anatomy of a Breakthrough, NYU psychologist Adam Alter argues that this pairing of visible success and invisible struggle is nearly universal, and that people dwell on their own hurdles while minimizing the hurdles of others. Praised by Adam Grant and Cal Newport, it's a practical guide to getting unstuck.
"People get stuck in every imaginable area of life. They get stuck in jobs they'd prefer to leave, and in relationships that leave them unfulfilled. They get stuck as writers, artists, composers, athletes, scientists, and entrepreneurs. Sometimes they're stuck for days, and other times for decades. Sometimes they stumble on breakthroughs, and other times they remain mired for life. We hear relatively little about these stubborn cases of stuckness because we're bombarded by popular success stories."
If you enjoy the preview of Anatomy of a Breakthrough, you can pick up a copy wherever you get your books.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Brain Health, Decoded
Readers who liked last week's top post will find more in Brain Health, Decoded, where physician-scientist Dominic Ng turns brain research into practical tools. From How to Trick Your Brain into Doing Difficult Things: "You're not broken. You're not lazy. You're not lacking willpower. Your brain is simply doing what it evolved to do: avoid discomfort and conserve energy."