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Howdy, lateral pirates. We’re starting off the week with 3 interesting reads from the past few weeks instead of the casual lateral puzzle.

Full disclosure: because I’ve posted so many (hundreds!) exercises, there are not many good ones left, so I literally have to make them up. That doesn’t always work out.

I’ll keep posting ones I find interesting, but when I don’t have any in the pipeline, I’ll leave you with 3 interesting articles.

Here are the first 2. The last one, to keep you guessing, is at the end of the newsletter. It’s also my favorite article.

• Humans Are Predictable (TL;DR: German researchers created an AI called “Centaur” that predicts human decision-making with startling accuracy by training on 10 million decisions from psychological studies)

• Netflix Is Doing AI Movies (TL;DR: Netflix used generative AI for the first time in a production to create a building collapse scene in their Argentine sci-fi series “El Eternauta,” completing the VFX sequence 10 times faster and cheaper than traditional methods would have allowed)

If you enjoy reading these, please forward it to a friend so they can

Onwards to today’s topic, but not before our sponsor break:

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How To Have Dumb Luck

Let’s start at the obvious place:
If you Google the word “luck”, you mostly get two things:

• More lists than you’ll ever read about “making your own destiny”

• Motivational slop leadership from CEOs who go to Coldplay concerts with their Head of HR

However, here’s the reality you’ll never see on LinkedIn:
Most luck is boring. It means doing the exact same normal thing over and over.

It means not having anything to post about for ages. Instead of running a marathon once a year, it means running half a mile everyday for 300 days. You wouldn’t post that half a mile run, though, would you?

Fun fact, though - running half a mile daily for 300 days means you’d run the equivalent of almost 6 marathons yearly.

By doing something like that consistently, you’ll eventually have that “dumb luck” everyone’s talking about.

We Love the Fairy Tale

Most of us don’t want to hear that “good things” in life are usually the result of the kind of behavior that you can’t brag about at social gatherings.

If you want to look at it as a cycle, just keep in mind that what you do daily will define what kind of success you’ll have at the end of the year.

Why Consistency Wins (and Genius is Overrated)

Most of us are not Einstein, Zuckerberg, Altman, Page, Gates, Musk, or Bezos (but if you are, reply to this email and let's grab lunch).

Even in their case, on top of being amazing in their field, they were also simply consistent in a better environment.

For the rest of us, the only “advantage” is to pick something and just keep at it. That’s what people later call “luck.”

The Beauty of Being Boring

And for what it’s worth, stop obsessing over the headline.

Everyone talks about the guy who bought Bitcoin once in 2010, then bought an island somewhere.

The truth is almost every single wealthy person I know (including the ones from crypto) did not strike gold overnight. They just showed up every day.

The Lottery Ticket

The best way to put it is through one of my favorite jokes:

A man prays every day, for over 20 years, begging God to let him win the lottery. Each year he gets more desperate with his pleas.

After a decade of not winning, he gets fed up with it and starts yelling at God.

Suddenly, the heavens open. God yells back:
“Can you at least buy a fucking lottery ticket?”

Weaponized mediocrity: boring, simple, quietly undefeated.

Final article:

• AI Makes You Dumber - but there’s ways to fix that (TL;DR: AI dependency is literally rewiring our brains for the worse. MIT research shows that people using GenAI scored lowest on cognitive tests, while those who relied on their own thinking performed best. The brain “powers down” when we outsource cognitive work to AI - like muscles that atrophy from disuse. The best solution: critical thinking exercises)