The Stack - Issue #4
Life advice from Adam Sandler, hard problems, and guarding your focus
This was NOT the stack I intended to write…
Funny story: I started writing this post with a completely different set of links. However, as I started writing down my thoughts a much bigger concept began to take shape. More on that to come ;)
This Week's Finds
This is an older sketch, but it makes me giggle every time.
If you are sad where you are and then you get on a plane to Italy, the you in Italy will be the same sad you from before, just in a new place. Does that make sense?
There's a lot a vacation can do. Help you unwind. See some different looking squirrels. But it cannot fix deeper issues like how you behave in group settings or your general baseline mood. That's a job for incremental lifestyle changes sustained over time.
You Don’t Need to Work on Hard Problems
Ben Kuhn is amazing. He puts out some really great content and his essays just hit different.
He's a Harvard grad who most notably worked with a company called Wave, building "ways for unbanked people in sub-Saharan Africa to send and save money"; and Anthropic, a really cool AI company whose latest model Claude 3 is breaking all kinds of records.
More info on Ben below:
But I digress - back to the article!
This particular article is really shaping how I work. His primary point is to make sure your heuristic for prioritizing work is dialed in.
It can be tempting (for so many reasons!) to chase after "hard problems". For me these might be problems that are high-visibility, complicated, or exciting. Or maybe it's that problem that would just seem really impressive if someone fixed it.
Here's the problem Ben points out: there is rarely a direct correlation between the difficulty of solving a problem and the value derived from solving said problem. He encourages us instead to pursue important problems - what are the levers you can pull that would have the greatest impact?
For me, this is playing out in learning to delegate better. I'm a product manager at an insurance software company. I'm realizing I spend too much time on the tiny details of our projects - tiny details that other members of my team are much more qualified and positioned to solve.
My levers are elsewhere and oftentimes less visible, so I'm learning to listen more to Ben's advice and less to the screams of my superego 🙃
Attention is Your Scarcest Resource
Another gold nugget from Ben. In a nutshell: focus leads to productivity!
Here's the note I wrote to myself after reading this:
What are the handful of things that will actually lead to you meeting your goals?
Find ways to get emotionally invested in them
Stay focused on them even when other things seem like they would FEEL more fulfilling
Cut out, contain, or prioritize all the other bullshit competing for your focus
Ben Kuhn's Blog Recommendations
Since I'm apparently crushing on Ben today, I'll go all out here. I got giddy when I found this page. It's just a stack of super solid content. Dig in and get smart, y'all.
Closing Remarks
Please reply with any comments, links, puns, or wit you think adds to the conversation!
I'm using Readwise Reader to power this series and I put all my articles/highlights/notes in this feed.
That's all for this weekend - I hope you all enjoy this as much I did in preparing it 😘