Three tips for your work week, and de-hyping AI

👋 Welcome back to the Medium Newsletter
Issue #179: the top highlight on Medium last week + a clear-eyed perspective on AI
By Harris Sockel

Here are three pieces of wisdom to carry with you this week.

1. One of the toughest skills for me (and many people!) is asking for help. I’m great at gritting my teeth to finish something in isolation, but delegating is harder. If you, too, struggle with letting go, former engineering manager Vinita offers one piece of wisdom: Map the right problems to the right people. And make sure you’re giving them something that’s actually worth doing (not just something that seems like it should get done). “A crucial mistake most managers make… is delegating work that shouldn’t be done at all.”
2. The term “impostor syndrome” was coined in 1978 by two self-doubting psychologists who named a feeling they’d had their entire lives. But it’s usually a sign you’re doing something right. You’re shedding your skin and becoming someone new.
3. Motivation is not the cause of an action; it’s the effect. If you want to feel motivated to do something, take one small step toward it.

We’re also reading: 30 observations about AI

According to AI researcher Alberto Romero, the next wave of generative AI tools will obviate the human need to be “the best” at anything. The most defensible human activities of the future? Ones you’ll never possibly optimize. Sympathy. Humor. Imperfection. Writing surprising stuff instead of smart-sounding stuff.

Recently, Romero published a list of 30 observations about the past, present, and future of AI. You may not agree with all of them, but they’ll probably make you think. Here’s one worth noting, true of AI and many things: “Those who over-hype in the extreme and those who anti-hype in the extreme are often cut from the same cloth.”

Your responses: On building great teams

Last week, we published a newsletter about how monogamy is overrated (at work!) and why tech teams should operate more like film crews. Many of you disagreed (we love to see it). Here’s one of our favorite responses, via Younghee Kwon:

Movies are fundamentally different from software (and often hardware) products in the tech industry. While movies are produced once and can be enjoyed for years / decades without changes, software is continuously developed, maintained, and updated, making it more like a service rather than a static product…

We also asked: What’s the best team you’ve ever been part of? Jeffrey Pillow replied:

I was a senior marketing manager at a Fortune 500 company for years. Our community development team also reported directly to me. […] My team and I led a collaborative effort with Feeding America and Remote Area Medical (RAM) to provide take-home grocery boxes to everyone who attended a large medical clinic in Far Southwest Virginia one weekend…

The appreciation and gratitude from medical clinic attendees was perhaps the most fulfilling moment of my work life.

We came together with an idea. Met over a two month span. Transformed the idea into a reality. For me, that’s how most projects should be.

Lastly, in response to this story about how The New Yorker goes hard on edits, Jeffrey Anthony wrote:

I’ve found that editing is the difference between an okay article and a great one. Now, I spend as much time editing as I do researching & writing, sometimes even more. I can easily spend 6–8 hours editing a 3,500-word piece, often over two days. This allows some distance so when I return, I’m seeing it with fresh eyes.

It’s similar to recording a song: you might spend 10 hours in the studio laying down a track and doing a rough mix, convinced you’ve recorded a hit. But it’s the next morning, when you sit down in front of those monitors and hit play again, where the distance produces the necessary space for honest reflection, and in a matter of seconds you know whether or not you have something.

✨ The top highlight on Medium last week

“True vulnerability requires that you don’t know. You don’t know how your share will be received; you don’t know how others will perceive you for sharing it; you don’t know if there’s a happy ending yet.” — Ally Sprague, “Fake Vulnerability Is Keeping You Stuck,” featured in issue #174.

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Edited by Scott Lamb

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

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