The essential skill to master across life and business

The most valuable commodity in today’s market is not oil or gold or even Dogecoin. It’s people’s attention.

If you’re reading this right now, research says I’ve got about 8 seconds to capture your attention. How am I doing? The explosion of content across the Internet has launched a fierce (and heavily-financed) battle for people’s focus.

The natural question that follows: how do you win this high-stakes game?

The answer, like so many things in life, is simple — but not easy. Tell good stories. Jack Raines, the Young Money writer, makes a compelling argument for the renewed importance of storytelling in his latest essay. I fundamentally agree with his premise: companies (both big and small) — as well as individuals — that master this art will thrive. Those who fail to adapt risk irrelevance.

Key quote: “If you want to explain history, lead with stories, not statistics. If you want to raise funding for a startup, land a new job, secure a second date, rally people to your cause, or just plain make someone care about what you have to say, don’t bombard them with facts. Treat them to a story. Stories are effective because they are a delight to their audiences. A story should engage its reader’s mind, transporting them to the world that its narrator is describing. If you rely on stats and facts and numbers to prove your point, you are force-feeding your audience a conclusion without first setting the stage and preparing them to accept it.”

How to improve your brain? Sleep

I’ve come to believe there are, generally speaking, three methods to generate better ideas in life. I wrote about two of them earlier this year. The first is through walking — literally — through nature. The second is through wandering — figuratively — through pursuing research among many fields (e.g. art, science, engineering, philosophy, history, investing, etc.)

The third method is something we all do (but probably not enough). Sleep. In a recent essay, the writer and neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff wrote about the creative powers — and brain science — of getting a good night’s rest.

“Sleep plays a vital role in memory consolidation, a process essential for learning and innovation,” Anne-Laure writes. “During sleep, particularly during slow-wave sleep, the brain transfers information from short-term to long-term memory.” She continues:

Key quote: “This process not only helps in retaining new information but also in making connections between seemingly unrelated concepts, which is crucial for creative thinking. This in turn impacts cognitive flexibility. These skills are essential for knowledge workers who often need to adapt to new information and make complex decisions. Research has shown that sleep-deprived individuals tend to make riskier decisions and have difficulty adjusting their thinking in the face of new information. Adequate sleep, on the other hand, enhances our ability to think flexibly.”

Special Note: Michael Cordaro of Alliance Wealth Advisors recently invited me on his podcast to chat about everything from surviving brain surgery, optimism as a long-term investor, and my core belief that AI could be the best thing to happen for knowledge workers since the early days of the Internet.

Mike writes a smart investing newsletter, Earn After Reading, which you can sign up for here.

A few more links I enjoyed:

The Plummeting Cost of Intelligence – via Tanay Jaipuria

Key quote: “While foundation models are often perceived as costly and inference bills are rising, the reality is that the cost of intelligence is in free fall — and this trend shows no signs of slowing. Elad Gil shared this chart on the cost of GPT-4 equivalent intelligence from Open AI, which has fallen 240x in the last 18 months, from $180/million tokens to less than $1.”

Eleven Predictions: Here’s What AI Does Next – via Ted Gioia

Key quote: “‍But it’s going to get even more interesting, and very soon. That’s because the next step in AI has arrived — the unleashing of AI agents. And like the gods, these AI agents will give us everything we ask for. Up until now, AI was all talk and no action. These charming bots answered your questions, and spewed out text, but were easy to ignore. That’s now changing. AI agents will go out in the world and do things. That’s their new mission. It’s like giving unreliable teens the keys to the family car. Up until now we’ve just had to deal with these resident deadbeats talking back, but now they are going to smash up everything in their path. But AI agents will be even worse than the most foolhardy teen. That’s because there will be millions of these unruly bots on our digital highways.”

Christopher Tsai Reflects on Timeless Values in Investing and Life – via MOI Global

Key quote: “When we’re thinking about investing in a business, we pay a lot of attention to the people and the culture of the business. We’re looking for a management team that can pivot quickly and adapt to change and is willing to shelve a project after years of investment, for example, because that’s the best thing to do. Elon pivots quickly. He’s not worried about optics. Reed Hastings is another person who comes to mind. We prefer asset-light business models because they can usually pivot more quickly than asset-heavy businesses, though there are exceptions.”

How networks really work – via Henry Oliver

Key quote: “Often the best place to be in a network is neither the limit nor the centre, but somewhere in between. Albert Einstein was building on the work of several other physicists, recombining the ideas of thinkers like Ernst Mach, Max Planck, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré — as one sociologist said, those others were ‘too familiar with, and too committed to, what had come before to see how Einstein’s new combination could be something greater than the sum of its parts’. Einstein was sufficiently detached to make the insight. He was familiar with the ideas but still willing to reinvent them. Had he been right at the core, he might have been too attached to the prevailing consensus.”

From the archives:

1,000 True Fans – via Kevin Kelly (2008)

Key quote: “To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.”