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Work becomes great when curiosity drives it beyond obligation.

Product recommendations, deals, and gift guides currently comprise a healthy chunk of many publishers’ businesses; chatbots appear poised to swallow much of that business for themselves. And to make a more obvious point, nearly all of these use cases were formerly queries that began on Google; it’s no wonder that the company is working to transform itself before it loses any more market share to the upstarts.

Time is extremely limited and goes by fast. Do what makes you happy and fulfilled—few people get remembered hundreds of years after they die anyway. Don’t do stuff that doesn’t make you happy (this happens most often when other people want you to do something). Don’t spend time trying to maintain relationships with people you don’t like, and cut negative people out of your life. Negativity is really bad. Don’t let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.

If you want to understand someone, figure out the narrative they tell themselves about themself.

“I think we have to stop talking about, ‘Everything we do is climate change,’ because it’s almost like there’s a visceral reaction to those words,” Holmgren says. “This isn’t a good time to put a red flag in front of the bull.”

Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis. The Apple that commissioned the futuristic “Knowledge Navigator” concept video in 1987 was the Apple that was on a course to near-bankruptcy a decade later. Modern Apple — the post-NeXT-reunification Apple of the last quarter century — does not publish concept videos. They only demonstrate actual working products and features.

Maybe someday, “you can do AI with it” will be a selling point for gadgets. In the interim phase, it feels like we’re wasting an entire generation of hardware while we wait for the software to catch up. And there are so many other interesting problems to solve! What if, instead of hand-wavey promises about AI, we got smartphones that lasted twice as long or didn’t break so easily? What if startups focused less on AI and more on the millions of people looking for devices that are less addictive and more attuned to a specific purpose? What if Amazon and Apple stopped waiting for some magical technological overhaul and spent time making their existing devices easier to use?

*Bikeshedding*, also known as Parkinson’s law of triviality, describes our tendency to devote a disproportionate amount of our time to menial and trivial matters while leaving important matters unattended.