Thank you and a free gift

Mental bandwidth, emotional availability, or whatever you want to reference, is a precious commodity. Writing this blog consumes a good amount of my available “free thinking” time. Given the changes in my other professional and personal responsibilities, it would not be right to continue to post every week. i simple cannot do the quality of work I am comfortable publishing. As a professor once told me, “Once it is printed, it is out in the world forever.”

So, i will be moving away from a weekly publishing model and to a version of the blog that allows me to post periodically when topics are of interest to me, or, as has happened in the past, you write to me ask a question or want to see an analysis of an issue. (Please keep sending your suggestions.)

As a thank you for your loyalty, there is a link to a free gift at the bottom of the page.

I have enjoyed researching and writing about a range of topics that interested me, and I hope interested you as well. The blog started out as guide to help improve decision making and used examples of bad decisions that we should consider in our thinking. More 50,000 people have read the 200+ posts over the last three years.

I like to say that 80% of success is avoiding stupidity. Many of the early posts were based on the research for my first book, The Seven Deadly Stupidities, which placed bad decision making into seven categories such as trusting family and friends, surrendering to FOMO, and getting blinded by the upside.

There was also a good bunch of posts featuring greed as a distorting factor in decision making. I used a quote from Warren Buffett on the back cover of the book that summarizes things well:

As the world evolved over the last few years so did the topics of the blog. One pundit put it simply, “AI is all we talk about.” So, for the last year the blog’s focus has been on understanding the good, bad, and the ugly about AI.

The AI posts were derived from the research from my second book, No Adult Left Behind: AI is Learning, Are You? The title was a play on The No Child Left Behind act of 2002 that mandated that school-age children were proficient in basic reading, writing, and math skills. Given that AI reaches into every corner of our lives, I thought the title captured a similar problem facing school-age children, teenagers, and adults when it comes to AI. You need to understand AI, or you may get left behind and not be able to understand what people are talking about in a few years. The Learning AI series of posts was fun to produce, and I ran across so many interesting stories.

As a thank you for your loyalty and readership, please see the link below for a free copy of the audiobook version of No Adult Left Behind. Staying with the AI theme, I cloned my voice using tools from Eleven Labs (great company) and had my cloned voice narrate the audiobook.

And now, the big reveal. The most popular posts in the history of the blog:

The Days When Elon Musk was Cool

Should AI Write Your Tinder Profile

The Danger of Edge Cases in AI

Should AI Decide Who Lives and Who Dies? Most popular post ever

The Girl Who Lived a Lie

Thank you again for bouncing along with me through this winding intellectual voyage.

Please remember the two most important messages from all of this:

• Don’t get left behind

• 80% of success is avoiding stupidity

Stay in touch.

 GP

Your free gift

 Things I think about

"Goodbye" started as a blessing. In the 1500s, English speakers said "God be with ye" when they parted, and over time it was shortened to "godbwye" (not a typo). The "God" turned into "good," probably because people already said "good day" and "good night."