Wisereads Vol. 165 — Every Tool's a Hammer by Adam Savage, How to Build Wealth as a Career Person, and more
Last week, we shared a preview of Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most by Adam Alter. This week, we're sharing a preview of an on-sale title, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It, by former MythBusters cohost Adam Savage.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
if your team is too busy doing their 'normal job' to experiment with AI, you're preparing them to be replaced
Geoffrey Huntley made his name on Ralph, his agent-loop coding technique, and he now aims his warning at managers. "For somewhere in the next six months, you're going to have to start having some hard conversations. You'll have to start putting your employees on a vitality curve and ranking them. And naturally, competent employees who have been using AI will be ahead of competent engineers who haven't."
How to Build Wealth as a Career Person
Several of Asher Adeniyi’s friends built wealth working nine-to-five jobs by taking employment seriously and avoiding lifestyle inflation. "Your grades may open the first door. Your grit may move you through the building. Your results may take you to the highest floors. But it is the discipline of turning income into ownership that allows the career you built to become wealth that lasts."
How to be more ambitious: A tutorial for humans with models
Ambition with AI is capped less by the models than by self-belief, says Anthropic's Felix Rieseberg. "We humans have always been held back by what we believe possible — and what's worse, we usually trust ourselves only in very narrow disciplines. Michelangelo famously didn't want to paint the Sistine Chapel — you see, he was a sculptor, not a painter."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
Why you should look at last year's photos today
Building a Second Brain author Tiago Forte has a one-minute exercise: open the camera roll to this date last year. "Whatever you found is like a time capsule returning you to a specific meaningful moment from the past. There's a whole year of memories like that sitting in your pocket right now."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents
Before forecasting what personal agents change for companies, Stripe's Patrick Collison considers what companies already are. "Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Artificial Intelligence in the Firm: Bottlenecks in Software Production
Across 718 firms, Harvard economists Fiona Chen and James Stratton found AI's coding gains stalling downstream. "We find evidence of a bottleneck from the code review process: The average time to review a pull request increases by 49%, the share of pull requests with changes requested nearly doubles, and the number of comments per pull request increases by 35%."
Hand-picked book of the week
Every Tool's a Hammer
Adam Savage spent the 1980s as a jack of all trades in New York and San Francisco theater, then built models for commercials and films, then spent fourteen years blowing things up on MythBusters. Every Tool's a Hammer gathers what he's learned over four decades of making. It's his permission slip for readers to lean into their niche interests and get creating.
"In my experience, bringing anything into the world requires at least a small helping of obsession. Obsession is the gravity of making. It moves things, it binds them together, and gives them structure. Passion (the good side of obsession) can create great things (like ideas), but if it becomes too singular a fixation (the bad side of obsession), it can be a destructive force."
For a limited time in the U.S., you can grab the full ebook for $1.99 wherever you buy your ebooks.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Story Club with George Saunders
At Story Club, Booker winner George Saunders teaches the short story one reader question at a time. From What Is "a Character," Anyway?: "When you think of it, a 'character' is really just a sequence of sentences. The sentences add up to an arc, or an impression – and from this, we intuit 'character.' But there's no character there apart from that accruing idea in your mind, an idea that is adjusted with each new sentence."