Have you ever noticed how some songs sound loud but strangely lifeless? That’s not just your imagination – it’s the result of over-compression, a trick sound engineers use to make music louder, but at a cost to both quality and, surprisingly, your ears. Compression “squishes” music: loud parts become quieter, quiet parts louder, making everything sound equally loud. This boosts punchiness on small speakers, but strips away nuance and, as new research suggests, may even harm your hearing.

Why am I telling you this? Yes, it’s a bit of a PSA (public service announcement) – but no, this post isn’t about music; it is about AI. Let me explain…

Just as compression flattens music, the flood of AI-generated content flattens our online conversations. The composer Claude Debussy called music the space between the notes. What’s true for music is true for content in general. And we are drowning in AI-generated slop – the text equivalent of compressed music.

Just take a look at your LinkedIn timeline – I am positively sick and tired of the telltale AI-generated post: They are all 1,000 to 1,500 characters long, broken into individual paragraphs after one or two sentences, full of emojis, stuffed with oddly specific tags, have weirdly bolded text (and em-dashes galore), and end with an engagement-creating question. A good 70% of my LinkedIn timeline is now filled with this stuff – and all it tells me is that the person posting this doesn’t care, they have nothing to say, and they are doing whatever they are doing just for the clicks.

True, engaging writing is the space between the sentences. The original thought conveyed in your voice. Warts and all.

Nobody wants or needs to listen to ChatGPT’s thoughts on whatever it is you think is important – have something to say? Say it. Next time you write, don’t flatten your voice. Embrace the pauses, the quirks, the real opinions. That’s what makes you and your content worth reading.

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It’s been a hot minute since we last spoke. I didn’t disappear; I just got busy… Busy with radical✦, my advisory firm, busy with building out our bi-weekly Briefing (which you absolutely should subscribe to – two times a week you will get our latest research and insights on the future of technology and business), our free resources (check it out – we make a bunch of our best tools available for free for you), and busy with working on GYSHIDO. Yes, GYSHIDO – the brutally honest, no-BS productivity movement we launched some dozen years ago.

On a sunny, cloudless day in the summer of 2012, I found myself sitting in one of the classically uncomfortable seats at Denver International Airport, waiting for my connecting flight to depart. At 6 feet 4 inches (or 1.96 meters), I am, by most measures, tall. I am also fairly skinny – back in 2012, while training for a series of ultramarathon races, my body fat was down to around 5%, and I weighed around 165 lbs / 75 kilograms. This means that when I encounter people who are as tall as I am, they tend to be heavier – think basketball players, rather than super tall, skinny runners.

There once was a startup. The founders, plagued by a problem they encountered in their own lives, went out into the world to seek a solution. They spoke to countless others who shared their plight, listening intently to their woes and wishes.

With determination in their hearts and fire in their eyes, they returned to their humble garage and began to craft a magical device. Day and night they toiled, fueled by the stories of those they’d met. Their creation grew more wondrous with each passing moon, for it was born from the very essence of the people’s needs.

Dee Hock, the founder of VISA (the world’s largest credit card payment system), was one of the eminent thinkers in management and organizational theory. As a lifelong student of Hock, his work and insights, I came across the following — which I thought about summarizing in my own words but realized that it’s too good to be butchered by me.

On Leadership:

“I used to have sessions with my employees once a week. Anyone could come, and we’d talk about anything on their minds. They always wanted to talk about management. ‘How do you do it?’ ‘What’s the best way?’ So I would ask them, ‘What is the single most fundamental responsibility of a manager?’

There is a fantastic story told by bodybuilding legend Arnold Schwarzenegger:

I’ll always remember the first time someone asked me questions in the gym. It was about their legs. They said they couldn’t grow, and they wanted to know which exercises to add to their routine to hit the thighs. First, I said, “Let’s see your squat.” And they said, “My squats are fantastic. I can squat 405.” They got the weight on their back and lowered it approximately 2 inches, and came back up. That’s when I learned that people have a habit of looking for the next big thing when they haven’t spent any time mastering the simple thing in front of them.

First things first—it has been a while. As you have undoubtedly realized, my Heretic posting schedule has slowed to a crawl. Which doesn’t mean I don’t post—I just happen to post (twice a week) on the radical Briefing. Check it out; you might like it! With this out of the way, let’s talk about GyShiDo.

GyShiDo?

Yes, GyShiDo. The Art of Getting Your Shit Done. 😁

More than a decade ago, Daniel Epstein, Will Butler, and I created—somewhat as a practical joke, but also dead serious—the GyShiDo Manifesto, after realizing that our individual superpowers were simply that we do get things done. I wrote down some principles, registered the domain, launched a website (all in a mad 48-hour GyShiDo …

Are you optimizing your systems? Keeping a tight ship and making sure the trains run on time? Have your OKRs and KPIs been closely tracked?

You might want to rethink this…

Reed Hastings, the uber-successful founder of Netflix (and disruptor of the status quo in the entertainment industry—a true heretic), once remarked:

Most companies overoptimize for efficiency… The nonintuitive thing is that it is better to be managing chaotically if it’s productive and fertile. Think of the standard model as clear, efficient, sanitary, sterile. Our model is messy, chaotic, and fertile. In the long term, fertile will beat sterile.

The Lie of the Entrepreneurial Dream

Ah, the glamorous life of an entrepreneur. Private jets, lavish parties, changing the world in a hoodie. It’s the stuff dreams are made of, right?

Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but that’s a load of crap. The real entrepreneurial journey is less “champaign wishes and caviar dreams” and more “lukewarm coffee and cold sweats at 3am.” It’s a gritty, messy, nightmare-fueled rollercoaster. And you know what? That’s precisely how it should be.

John Lilly, my former boss and then-CEO of Mozilla, once offered a piece of advice so obvious it seems absurd: build products that don’t suck. This was back when Firefox was running circles around Internet Explorer, delivering a vastly superior web browsing experience. Simple, right?

Apparently not. In the relentless pursuit of profits, countless companies have forgotten this fundamental rule. They cut corners, skimp on quality, and prioritize short-term gains over long-term customer satisfaction. It’s a recipe for disaster.

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