Sharing Knowledge On Autopilot

I read physical books every day.
 
The science shows it’s better for comprehension and keeps me off digital devices.

My note-taking process involves underlining and putting three asterisks *** beside learnings that are new or important to me.

The biggest pain in the arse is sharing those learnings with our team without rewriting every word.

I’ve found a workaround that reinforces these learnings and saves me from rewriting them so I can share them easily.

Enter Super Whisper. Here’s how you can implement this process:

1. Download and install Super Whisper on your device or cell phone

2. Open Super Whisper and read the notes from your book out loud

   

   
   The transcript of the indiscernible rambling of my voice recording

3. Copy the rambling (select Command A + Command C) and take this over to ChatGPT 

4. Use the following prompt - “Can you please summarise these into learnings that can be read in under 3 minutes - please make them bullet points and simple to understand for the reader”

   

5. Share these with whoever you need to (I share them in Slack for our team to read)

   

   My voice recording turned into a succinct summary for others to read

This process automation has come from a desire to get more of my time back, spurred on by this quote from Andrew Carnegie:

“Profits and prices are cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled, and any savings achieved in costs are permanent.”

Doing this by hand used to cost me 30 minutes weekly; it now takes me 5.

Over a year, I’ve saved 21 hours (25 mins * 50 weeks).

I’ve gained another five working weeks’ worth of time over the next ten years.

Not a bad ROI.

Group-Think

I noticed the hi-tech awards happened recently. My LinkedIn feed is full of photos and acknowledgments from the show. I’m not too interested in these events, especially the ones where you have to nominate yourself. I get the free PR, the ego boost, and a chance to post something on LinkedIn. But it made me think.

Who attends these awards?

I noticed one of the winners is a fella who I interviewed for a blog post once. Who, very early in our interview declared "what entrepreneur doesn't like to talk about themselves"…

Some advice says you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. If you're a technologist or innovator, I’m not sure an event like this is where you want to be spending your time. I mean one of the finalists was roofbuddy, the company all over the news for being particularly un-innovative. Any idiot can destroy a roof.

These events remind me of old bath houses or university philosophy groups—places where ideas spread quickly but are sticky. Everyone ends up thinking and talking the same way. Not dissimilar to Paul Grahams online audience. Look at the way he's written AirBnB into entrepreneurial folk law with pieces like, Founder Mode.

For a few months there, according to twitter, founder mode was the only way to run a company. But then someone checked AirBnB's stock price and reminded us it hadn't moved for 5 years and founder mode was dead.

I prefer to spend more time with authors than people. And even though I really enjoy certain writers, I don’t let any one idea dominate my thinking for too long. Fresh ideas, at least for me, come from cross-pollinating different perspectives that seem unrelated or orthogonal.

Even if founder mode was as great as Paul said it was. If everyone ran their companies that way, it's advantage would be competed away quicker than it spread.

And I don't actually care about the hi-tech awards or seriously believe they're a danger to your thoughts—they're a chance to dress up and have fun. But I do think in general it's worth being aware of groupthink and avoiding it where you can.

My preference is a kind of quiet sovereignty. Where you shape your ideas by yourself, then test them in the real world as they're ready.

Ideas are fragile and groupthink is not gentle.