What I Read This Week - 5.19.24
Weekly finds from across the internet.
Hey Everyone,
Happy Sunday and welcome back!
I recently returned state-side from a trip to our complex down in the Dominican Republic. After 5+ years of traveling down there, there is a common theme that emerges in the aftermath of each trip: I always come back with a newfound energy. A purity exists to the game on the island that is hard to replicate elsewhere, and it never fails to recharge my batteries while giving me an appreciation for the fortune we have here in the United States. And not to mention a respect for the great impact sport has on our world.
Speaking of sport, what a great week. This is one of the best times of the year to be a sports fan with the MLB regular season in full-swing and the NBA/NHL deep into their respective playoff brackets. Dallas specifically is brimming with a special buzz right now, as both the Stars and Mavericks are on their way to the Western Conference Finals and will be alternating games in the AAC over the upcoming weeks. Add that on top of the World Series run from last year (with hopefully another to come this fall), and it’s hard to find a time where it’s been better to be involved in the DFW sports scene.
With that said, let’s transition into this week’s newsletter. This week:
What Scottie Scheffler’s journey teaches us about the bright - and dark - sides of competitive fire in high level athletes
OpenAI’s big GPT updates
A refreshing alternative to networking for networkings’ sake
Decisions as ‘day trading’ against our futures
Hope you all enjoy, and see you back here next week!
- CG
P.S. - As a reminder, you can find the master database of Weekly Read resources here.
Sports/High Performance
Scottie Scheffler’s Secret: How a ‘Venomous’ Trash Talker Became the Best Golfer in the World - The Athletic (~13 min)
What an epic weekend if you have any sort of affinity for the sport of golf.
It’s shaping up to be an incredible day at the PGA Championship with an absolutely stacked leaderboard heading into the final round, and the storylines have been spectacular up to this point. Heading into the day, there are 13 players within 5 strokes of the lead, - including some big names like DeChambeau, Hovland, Rose, Thomas, and Finau - all chasing Schauffele and Morikawa at 15-under. We’ve seen the major championship single-round scoring record bend but not break twice, with Xander Schauffele and Shane Lowry narrowly missing out on history with 62s. We’ve also seen 50+ hole-outs over the course of the tournament so far, making for some spectacular highlight clips - including this beauty from Justin Thomas yesterday.
And somehow, with as good as the golf has been, those storylines pale in comparison to what happened Friday morning when Scottie Scheffler - the world’s #1 golfer - was arrested due to a traffic misunderstanding while trying to pull into Valhalla Golf Club. It was one of those headlines that you couldn’t believe reading, one of the crazier storylines in sport I can remember. And the best part? He went out and shot a 5 under 66 after teeing off within 2 hours of being released on bail. Can’t make it up.
Moments like these often lead to unforgettable content, and the internet rose to the challenge. Friday gave us some absolutely incredible memes, including my personal favorite that was too good not to share:
Back on Thursday morning, I had no idea what was in store for us all when I came across this profile of Scheffler from the New York Times and planned to include it in this newsletter. Given everything that has happened since Friday morning, I think it shines a revealing light on the competitive traits that helped him go from jail cell to a 5 under round at a major championship in the frame of a single day.
Yet while the piece tells us a great deal about Scheffler himself, I find it also reveals an important lesson about competitive desire in high level athletes as a whole: at the highest level of sport, competitive fire is necessary but not sufficient. When the desire to be great is merely the bar for admission, separation lies in the ability to channel that fire in way that is productive rather than destructive.
This is because competitiveness is a double-edged sword: the emotions that drive us to be great and help us arrive at the precipice of victory can be the same ones that derail us from capturing it. Too many times, athletes let emotions overwhelm them in high pressure situations. It is in these moments where the desire to win burns most hot - they sense the opportunity in front of them, the chance to capture that which they most desire: victory. Yet if left unchecked, that fire can quickly spill over and cause things to go up in flames. The nerves escalate as result of too much desire, rather than too little.
The best learn to walk this balance delicately; they string a tightrope between fire and ice, shifting back and forth between the two depending on what the moment requires. They develop a knack for adjusting the temperature in both directions, an ability to distinguish between the moments that call for the dial to be turned up and those that call for it to be turned down.
But as Scheffler’s story teaches us, this balance often comes as a result of a process along the way. Few, if any, are born with the ability to recognize the line in the sand, the point at which competitive desire becomes destructive rather than productive. Instead, this line is often revealed through experience: athletes must overstep, at times, falling short in competition as a victim of their own expectations. They must be consumed by their fire in order to learn how to tame it.
As both a fan of sports and a professional within it, that is what I love the most about watching high stakes sporting environments. In pressure moments, we get an opportunity to distinguish between those that have taken this lesson home already and the ones yet to learn it.
So cheers to championship Sunday - here’s hoping it continues to provide great storylines and a lens into what it takes to perform at the highest levels.
The Future (AI, Tech, etc.)
GPT-4o and OpenAi’s Race to Win Consumers - Every (~8 min)
In case you missed it, OpenAI made some big announcements this week that centered around two main things relevant to this newsletter: (1) GPT-4o, an updated Large Language Model and (2) a Mac desktop app. From my perspective, both of these are enormously valuable (and long overdue) updates made that address some specific pain points of OpenAI’s products.
First, on the topic of GPT-4o. As Dan writes in this article, OpenAI’s new model builds upon prior iterations by bundling functionalities that previously existed in separate models. This new ‘omnimodel’ allows video, audio, and text to be processed all at once instead of in separate models running in the background. The old way of keeping these different functionalities separate presented a host of problems - if you needed to blend any of these processes together, ChatGPT was either (a) very slow or (b) very inaccurate.
As an example, I’ve been a frequent user of the audio feature in the app for a number of months, using it to dialogue back and forth on ideas. One of the more frustrating aspects of interacting with ChatGPT in this way was its inability to deal with natural conversational patterns such as interruptions, pauses, etc. It would often cut me off mid point if I paused too long, or struggle to switch gears from idea to idea. After reading about these updates, it now makes sense why this was happening - it had to record my voice, transcribe it, send it to GPT-4 for an answer, and then convert that answer back into audio format as a response. Now, since all of these functionalities are contained in the same model, ChatGPT can deal with these natural conversation patterns much, much better. The results for back and forth conversation with the app are now pretty staggering, opening up new exciting use cases such as real time translation.
Secondly, on the desktop app. This would appear to be a big step towards something I’m very bullish on - personalized AI assistants. One of the key insights to LLMs is that they thrive off of the data they are given - the more they have, the more specific they can be in response. Running ChatGPT in a browser, while generally beneficial, creates some problem - it is constrained only to the things that we specifically give to it. Things like conversations, files, and more that we must manually upload as context. But imagine what becomes possible when it is now an app, running in the background on your computer. Suddenly you can ‘feed’ it more much data without requiring any added effort at all. As a result, a host of whole new things becomes possible.
I am a big believer in the ability of AI tools to help us lean into our individuality, as companions for our minds. By providing them with information specific to us - think highlights, book notes, things we’ve written, projects we’ve built, and more - we will be able to draw deeper connections and reveal insights that were previously hidden.
Both of these updates are big steps towards this future, and I’m personally excited to see what comes of them in the near future.
Personal Growth
The Anti-Networking Guide - Sahil Bloom (~9 min)
I loved this guide from Sahil, which takes an ‘inversion’ lens to a well known but somewhat polarizing topic: networking.
The concept has always felt superficial to me, as I think there is something inherently shallow to accumulating connections for connections’ sake. I’ve always found relationships to be infinitely more rewarding the deeper they are, and traditional networking - especially in the LinkedIn era - has always seemed to stand in opposition to that.
Sahil gets at that in this piece, writing:
“You don’t get anywhere by accumulating thousands of transactional personal and professional connections. You get somewhere by building genuine relationships:
- Giving with no intention of receiving in return
- Acting in the service of others
- Creating value for those around you
Those who invest in building (rather than networking) will reap most of the valuable long-term rewards - health, wealth and happiness.”
To counter hustle-networking culture, he suggests we lean into what he calls anti-networking, in four specific ways:
Find Value Aligned Rooms - Put yourself into rooms that have a high-density of people who are aligned with your core values, hobbies, and interests.
Ask Engaging Questions - Once in the room, build connections by focusing on being interested rather than being interesting.
Become a Level 2/3 Listener - Shift from relating everything you hear to your own life to being deeply focused about what the other person’s words say about theirs.
Use Creative Follow-Ups - In the aftermath, work to deepen the relationships you find worthwhile by following up on specific notes/ideas you had from your initial conversation.
Overall, this framework was refreshing to read as it feels like a much more ‘authentic’ way of building connections by leaning into depth over breadth.
Mental Models/Principles
Day Trading - Jack Butcher (~1 min)
I loved this visual from Jack Butcher at Visualize Value, which he called ‘Day Trading’. I think it provides an interesting commentary on the interplay between our decisions and time, and it got me thinking: what if we evaluated all of our decisions as ‘day trading’ against our futures?
In theory, each decision is a choice to do something at the expense of something else - the concept of opportunity cost from economics. And when we aggregate these decisions together, they amount to something quite powerful: us. As James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, has said, “What you repeatedly do forms the person you are”.
But decisions are not only discreet, beholden to a singular moment in time. Instead, many come with significant repercussions down the line - what we often call second order consequences. As Jack hints at in his visual, time is an important variable in the context of our decisions. Depending upon the frame in which we operate, results can vary drastically.
Here, the order matters. An interplay exists between the concepts of pain and gain, such that one often precedes the other. Many decisions exists that cause short term setbacks for long term growth - what the red to green coloring in the visual represents. Think of these as things like setting aside financial savings, eating a health diet, exercising regularly, etc. They are not necessarily the most pleasurable in the moment, but the payoffs come in spades down the road.
An interesting insight here, however, is that by inverting these habits we also invert the visual. Rather than working from red to green - from pain to gain - we can very easily for from green to red - from gain to pain. These are the traps of life - the decisions that make us feel good in the short term but come with negative repercussions down the road.
If we think more deeply on Clear’s quote from above, we recognize that the way to improve the direction of our futures is to shift our focus from the outcome level to the decision level, from the macro to the micro. We can think of each decision we make as ‘day trading’ against some version of our future - we get to determine both what that future is and what order it comes in.
So in theory, we would have the above visual not just for the broad arc of our life but also for each aspect of it. Think about having a ‘day trading dashboard’, from which you could monitor the short-term vs. long-term trade offs of various decisions across different domains of your life. Each of us would likely have the same basic starting template - a chart each for areas of life such as health, personal finances, relationships, work, etc. But along with that initial version would come a ‘customize’ option - an ability to add your own charts that monitor the health of your various interests and hobbies.
I have some more to think about on this concept, but in general I find this to be a helpful framework for creating the big picture results we want: if each you make decision is a trade against your future, what bets are you willing to make?