 |
|
|
|||||
This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. Bland AI outputs grow stale quickly. Instead of just speeding up routine tasks, what if we used AI to slow down, challenge our thinking, and build new tools, dashboards, and experiments? Read on for creative approaches that are changing how I think about AI. 1. Create your own devil’s advocate assistant Get thoughtful pushback on decisions. Challenge ideas. The tactic: Use AI as an intellectual sparring partner to stress-test your thinking, explore alternative perspectives, and identify potential blind spots before making important decisions. Try this: Present a plan, idea, or decision to an AI assistant with instructions to challenge your thinking constructively. Identify risks you haven’t considered, consider secondary impacts, and add nuance to your analysis. Get your AI assistant to stop kissing up to you and start challenging your ideas. [Generated Photo: Jeremy Caplan/Ideogram] Prompt template “I’m planning to [decision/plan] because [reasoning] and with a goal of [objective]. Play devil’s advocate, give me multiple perspectives on this, be bold, surprising, creative, and thoughtful in your reply, and address these questions: What are the strongest arguments against this approach? What alternatives should I consider? What risks might I be overlooking? What questions should I be asking myself? What challenges should I expect to face? What could I do to gain more insight? What could I do to increase the chances of success? Pro tip: Try asking your AI assistant to role-play. It can respond as a financial advisor, family member, or competitor, for varied viewpoints. Or ask it to act like a person you admire, living or dead, real or fictional. Limitation: Your AI devils assistant will be generic if you dont provide detailed context. And you may get a predictable response if you dont instruct it to be bold. Suggested model: I have found ChatGPT 5 to be excellent for this. Gemini and Claude also work well. If youre considering anything sensitive, you may want to use a free offline private AI tool like AnythingLLM or Jan. Ill write more soon about private AI tools like these. If you have input on those, add a comment below. Example: I described a new planned morning schedule to GPT 5. The subsequent exchange got me thinking about several new issues. The conversation helped me clarify my own thinking. It pushed me to organize and deepen my own analysis. As a bonus, GPT 5 produced a tangible artifact for mea PDF with tables. 2. Learn something new Map out a personalized curriculum. [Generated Photo: Jeremy Caplan] AI tools let me try out skills I thought I was too late to develop, like coding simple applications, designing graphics, analyzing large data sets, and exploring complex docs in other languages. You can also lean on AI assistants to help you develop offline skills, like learning about photography, improving your Greek, understanding crypto, sharpening project management skills, making bread by hand, or prepping for any new coverage area for a project or team. AI assistants excel at creating structured learning and practice plans tailored to your schedule, style, and goals. Try this: Give an AI assistant context about what you want to learn, why, and how. Detail your rationale and motivation, which may impact your approach. Note your current knowledge or skill level, ideally with examples. Summarize your learning preferences Note whether you prefer to read, listen to, or watch learning materials. Mention if you like quizzes, drills, or exercises you can do while commuting or during a break at work. If you appreciate learning games, task your AI assistant with generating one for you, using its coding capabilities detailed below. Ask for specific book, textbook, article, or learning path recommendations using the Web search or Deep Research capabilities of Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. They can also summarize research literature about effective learning tactics. If you need a human learning partner, ask for guidance on finding one or language you can use in reaching out. Add specificity Mention any relevant deadlines. Note budget, time, or other constraints. Share info about your existing schedule so the assistant can help map out optimal learning time slots. Making the plan concrete increases the likelihood youll follow through. ChatGPT recently generated a calendar file with a list of appointments I could easily import into my Google calendar. Pro Tip: Ask for help setting up a schedule, setting learning targets, measuring progress, choosing resources, motivating yourself, and implementing backup plans when you fall off track. Ask for a learning plan you can print out, charts you can fill in, interactive apps to track progress, resource lists you can look up, experts you can follow, and strategies for avoiding common pitfalls. 3. Stretch your creative design muscles Try this: Use AI image generation tools to experiment with visual ideas. Start with simple concepts and iterate to add nuance or complexity. Practice describing visual concepts in text, then see them realized instantly and iterate on your prompts. Try MyLens or Napkin for creating mind maps, flow charts, timelines or various other infographics out of detailed prompts or source docs. Use Ideogramdetailed in this postor ChatGPTs new image generatordetailed in this postto describe any style of illustration, infographic or other visual. For creative video generation, try Hypernatural, which lets you turn text into moving images. Use this to: Add creative images to presentations, experiment with social media graphics, or generate infographics for teaching, publishing, or project work. Limitation: AI image generators are improving rapidly but still struggle with precise text placement, detailed charts, and maintaining brand consistency across multiple images. Most dont let you select specific image dimensions, though Ideogram does. Examples: I generated the images in this post with ChatGPT and Ideogram, and Ive used Hypernatural to make video versions of past posts, like this 2-min video about Raindrop, which I wrote about last week. 4. Create a personalized dashboard Build custom tracking tools and mini-applications Without knowing anything about code, you can generate simple web applications for tracking anything important to you. Prompt your AI assistant to help you keep tabs on reading or eating goals, fitness metrics, project progress at school or work, or stats for Wordle or your game of choice. Try this: Ask AI to create a dashboard or tracking tool tailored to your specific needs. Experiment with Claude 4 Artifacts, Gemini’s code canvas. Also try vibe coding tools like Lovable or Bolt that specialize in creating apps and sites based on prompts. For advanced projects, consider Windsurf Cascade. Pro tip: Plan to iterate. It almost always takes multiple attempts to get something workable, because you realize your needs when you see the first prototype. Start with simple tracking before requesting complex features. Ask for additional functionality with follow-up prompts. Herea a Prompt Example. Limitation: The simplest versions of these mini applications work in your browser only. To use an application on multiple devices, youll need to save the code and host it with a service that allows you to create a database. For that, try Lovable, Bolt, or Windsurf. Example: Im working on a content planning and workflow app to organize and track my newsletter work. This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.
Category:
E-Commerce
People often say that a single spark can light a fire. In careers, that spark is often a person. It might be someone early in life who cracks open a door, offers encouragement, or quietly shows what success can look like. Whats less obvious is how profoundly that very first connection can shape everything that comes afterward. Consider 23-time Grand Slam tennis champion Serena Williams. Williams has often spoken about the crucial role played by her first coachher father, Richard Williams. His belief in her abilities and his willingness to expose her to competitive tennis from an early age ensured she gained experience long before most of her peers. In this, shes not alone: In sports, a first coach can recognize potential before anyone else does. Or consider Misty Copeland, the American Ballet Theatres first Black female principal dancer. When Copeland was 13, a Boys & Girls Club teacher, Cynthia Bradley, recognized her potential and brought her into formal ballet training; within four years Copeland earned a spot in ABTs Studio Company. In 2015, she became ABTs first Black female principal, a milestone built on that early mentorship. Those first advocates opened doors to elite training, scholarships, and professional networks that sustained a long, barrier-breaking career. Anecdotes like these are powerful, but they also raise questions. Do early connections cause long-term success, or do they simply come more easily to people already positioned to succeed? After all, a young athlete with supportive and affluent parents might have access to better training and competition regardless of who their first coach is. This chicken-and-egg problem is hard to untangle, unless you look at a setting where chance plays a role. Thats where my research comes in. Real estate as a natural laboratory Im a professor of real estate finance, and I noticed that the residential real estate brokerage industry can mimic a random experimental setting. Since only a small number of people are active in housing markets at any given time, agents cant choose exactly who they work with. That means a new agents first counterparty brokerthat is, the agent on the other side of the deal depends on who happens to be representing clients at the same time and place. In many cases, that first connection is essentially a matter of luck. So my colleagues and I analyzed more than 20 years of home sales data from Charlotte, North Carolina, covering more than 40,000 unique real estate agents and 417,000 home sales from 2001 to 2023. We found that new agents who land their first deal with a well-connected power broker are about 25% more likely to still be in the business a year later. Since many agents struggle to close a second deal within a year of their first, this significantly boosts their chances of building a lasting career. The first handshake and lasting spark What makes these first encounters so powerful is not only the transfer of skills but also the shaping of confidence and identity. A young musician invited to join an orchestra by a respected conductor begins to see himself as part of that world. A student encouraged by a scientist to enter a national competition begins to imagine a place for herself in research. An athlete who trains with an Olympic medalist begins to visualize competing at the highest levels. In each case, the first connection changes the sense of what is possible. Our study also found that new real estate agents at the greatest risk of leaving the field (those with fewer early sales) benefit the most from starting out with a well-connected partner. The same dynamic appears in sports, where struggling athletes often flourish under coaches with deep relationships and credibility, and in education, where students on the verge of disengaging can be reenergized by respected teachers who open doors to programs, competitions, and networks. These mentors do more than teach. They change trajectories. The lesson for those just beginning their careers: Seek out people who are respected and generous with their experience. Observing how they work, think, and solve problems can shape your own professional identity. For those who are more established, the takeaway is equally important: Offering a hand to someone new, making an introduction, or simply offering encouragement can set in motion a sequence of events that shape a life. Soon Hyeok Choi is an assistant professor of real estate finance at the Rochester Institute of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
Our built environment contributes to a mental health crisis. Were not living in a natural outcome of human needs and behavior. The built environment as we know itbuildings and the spaces betweendoes direct damage to our minds. Land use planning has had devastating impacts on Americans: economically, socially, and culturally. But Im not a doomer and I know these things are fixable. Not overnight reversible, but certainly fixable. Copycat plans Typical land use rules are written, updated, and enforced at the local government level. But as you might expect, agencies copied each other over the years because why wouldnt they. Years ago, when I learned some photography techniques that were new to me, I made cheat sheets for other photographers. Much of what Ive learned as an adult (podcasting, publishing, public speaking, etc.) has been taught by generous people who themselves had learned tips and tricks. So of course public agencies copied each other with their rule-making. That worked for a similar river city? Lets try it here. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"green","redirectUrl":""}} Planning departments at city and county levels werent setting out to guide development in a way that would purposefully harm people. Quite the opposite. If a new Sears distribution center was coming to town, theyd want to map out a plan to accommodate all the new employees and subsequent traffic. In the middle of the 20th century, planners were still very much concerned about separating dirty and/or dangerous land uses from residential areas. The result was that all across the country, local development rules required or incentivized development patterns that spread everyone and everything across the landscape. A work zone, school zone, shopping zone, entertainment zone, and a sleep zone were established. And then each major category started getting more prescriptive subcategories. Residential morphed into single-family, multi-family (apartments), and condos. But wait, theres more! Residential land uses started to be regulated by local governments according to lot size: garden apartments, planned unit developments, and subdivisions were each given rules. Residential was also regulated by the type of people living in a place: public housing, group dwellings, age-restricted dwelling, renters, and owners. Local regulations created (and continue to create) sprawl in cities, not just the suburbs. The traffic factor Land use planning requires traffic engineering analysis, a process prioritizing speedy car movement above all else. Wider roads and intersections are not just suggested but required with the express goal to move vehicular traffic from zone to zone as quickly as possible. This has been going on for nearly 100 years without taking a foot off the brake. The obvious outcome of modern land use planning is that Americans drive everywhere all the time. Not just work commutes, but all the errands before, during, and after work. Half of our car trips are less than a few miles long. A quarter are less than one mile. Less than a mile in a car by ourselves. The mental health connection Life in a single-occupant vehicle has its perks, like singing along to music or listening to podcasts uninterrupted. It also has its pains, like separation from other humans and mental deterioration. Loneliness is a significant variable affecting depression. Its a predisposing factor. Cigna conducted a study of 20,000 Americans, and reported a jaw-dropping finding: nearly half of adults sometimes or always feel alone. 40% said their relationships arent meaningful and they feel isolated. Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University. She says the health risks of missing out on social connection is like smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Worse yet, theres a causal relationship between social isolation and suicide. Conversely, having a crew (social support in doctor jargon) has a protective effect against suicide. For every suicidal death, another 20 people attempted suicide. The takeaway So what do you do with all this heavy information? First, remember that the built environment is deliberately planned for us to drive in cars from zone to zone. Planners arent trying to destroy our minds, but the built environment increases anxiety, depression, isolation, loneliness, and suicide. Second, understand the land use catastrophes are reversible. Compact development won’t be legalized overnight, but reform can come as quickly as local leaders are willing. Walk-friendly, bike-friendly, transit-friendly places are good medicine, and theyre made possible at the local level. Third, and most important of all, know that things can get better in the end. Americas built environment does not fit who we are as humans, but we can turn this around with something as boring as reforming land use planning. Start by legalizing healthy infrastructurea variety of land uses within walking distance of homes and streets designed for safe walking and cycling. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he exploresideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"green","redirectUrl":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||