Summary: This week, Wisereads features Oscar Wilde’s comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest, known for its clever dialogue. It also highlights the success of Moleskine notebooks and why they stand out in a digital world. Other articles include tips for managing life and a study on how AI tools improve software developer productivity.
You don’t need me to tell you what a Moleskine looks like, but you may not have considered how insistently its design sends messages to the contemporary nomad… Discreetly minimal it may seem, but the whole package is as shot through with brand messaging as anything labelled Nike, Mercedes, or Apple—and, like the best cues, the messaging works on a subconscious level. (View Highlight)
“Block it in such a way that you have focused attention on one thing when that’s important to you.” (View Highlight)
today, with a significantly weakened Yen and a country that’s put tourism at the absolute forefront of its future, you might be surprised to learn that a trip to Japan isn’t quite as expensive as you might think (View Highlight)
Content: this is about the insights & ideas you have, the proposals you make, how you solve problems, the things you ship, the metrics you move in the short-term, the business impact you create in the long-term, etc. (View Highlight)
Confidence: this is about the image you project as you do your work, do you seem to have things under control, do you seem to be able to tackle tough tasks, how you communicate, do you come across as “leadership material”, are your peers and people above / below in the hierarchy confident in you, etc. (View Highlight)
Context: this is about your sensibility around your company’s implicit culture, how you adapt your approach to your org’s power structure, that important exec’s quirks & preferences, general biases of important peers & stakeholders, etc. (View Highlight)
In most companies, if you are extremely good at just 1 of these and average / below average at the other 2, you are going to “get stuck” beyond certain levels (usually Manager / Sr. Manager will be your ceiling). (View Highlight)
To have a chance of getting Director / VP level scope, you must be very good at a minimum of 2 of these and you must not suck at the 3rd one. (View Highlight)
Unfortunately though, in any sufficiently large group of humans the idea of “just do good work and let your work speak for itself” doesn’t work optimally. In good companies it will work for you early on, but even in those companies it will stop working at some point, at some level. (View Highlight)
When you reach that level, it is fine to decide to opt out of this game (View Highlight)
combined across all three experiments and 4,867 software developers, our analysis reveals a 26.08% increase (SE: 10.3%) in the number of completed tasks among developers using the AI tool. (View Highlight)