Just Thoughts #23: Being an Adult, Startups and Leadership

New structure for Just Thoughts. Aiming for value to the modern day leaders.

Jul 29, 2024

∙ Paid

Just Thoughts is for modern-day leaders who want to think better about business, life, leadership, and entrepreneurship every week. You are either inspired or not when reading these thoughts.

The first rule of reading these thoughts is to ask yourself:
Why should I think this way?

This article's content is “handwritten” and co-piloted with Grammarly’s spell-checking and rephrasing for the desired tone of voice. I’m dyslexic, so the tool helps me overcome my impediments.

The free content includes self-reflections from recent experiences and relatively brief mentions of content consumed (compared to paid).

The paid content includes timely and timeless thoughts for modern-day leaders.

I’m looking for better structure and reducing redundant information for readers while acknowledging that Just Thoughts may have both first-time readers and avid supporters. The interlude is shorter, stating the target audience: headlines and content of the week are described up top instead of after the free section. What do you think is this better? What could be improved?

AI AI AI

It’s been hard to keep up with AI development, with every significant player racing their release and pinning their updates against the competition. Groq is coming out with instant reaction speeds, Elon Musk’s xAI deployed the most effective AI training facility in the world in just 19 days, and Zuck’s Meta released the Llama 3.1 405B parameter model that is on par with OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o. Meanwhile, Open AI is deploying the 4o-mini, which is 33x cheaper than the “parent model.”

I’m not the one who’s going to give you weekly AI roundups. I’d defer to

AI Tidbits

for that, but we’re moving at warp speeds now. More than half of the world doesn’t even realize it, but pretty much every industry will feel the same shock the creative sector has gone through due to the rapid development of LLMs. The next one that will feel the shock is the private educational sector; the public sector is still protected from the general laws of supply and demand. Educators should start focusing on documenting what they know so that they can deploy their learnings at scale.

Kamal Harris vs. Donald Trump

While most of the business world has been occupied with overwhelming developments on the AI front, it seems my call for Kamala Harris to be in Just Thoughts #22 wasn’t far-fetched. Even if some are skeptical about her ability to win due to her association with the current administration and responsibility over the most pressing issues like the Mexican border, what I believe people aren’t realizing is that she will be overshadowed by the portrayal of her battle with Trump has a proper prosecution. She’s made a career as a prosecutor before going into politics, and Trump's a convicted felon.

As much as American politics sometimes blend with the entertainment industry, what we’ll see is some proper, real-life Law & Order. However, the ramifications of Trump's plan to fully support crypto and the American bank buying 1M Bitcoins will be interesting. I’m not for conspiracy theories, as there is no point in speculating about them. One can’t help but wonder if Russia hasn’t already positioned itself to capitalize the most of an American bull run for crypto. It seems like a viable option to get themselves out of their financial sanctions.

Give Celine a medal

The Olympics will be all the rage on social media over the next few weeks, so you can’t avoid acknowledging it. I’ve been running around Finland on helicopter business missions, but I saw the Olympic fire lit and Celine Dion making half the world cry. I follow

Ted Gioia

’s work, and he highlighted that the Olympics has had medals for Musical Artist. Someone should have had the witts to give Celine a medal at the end of the performance, after what she’s gone through, to be able to perform like that again.

On the note of the Olympics, I didn’t know Finland was the second-best country in the Olympics after the U.S. in 1924. A good piece written in the national newspaper was some great nationalistic content. Finland, running high on nationalistic morals after becoming independent, understood that when you go out and learn from the best and come back home to adopt the best training regime with people who are humble enough to follow, you’ll achieve results. That’s a lesson that doesn’t get old.

What wasn’t good was the right-wing politician making some completely idiosyncratic comment about the opening show featuring too much LGBTQIA+ content resembling a freakshow and that somehow being a political statement, in addition to stating politics does not belong with sports. Meanwhile, our President gave an interview to CNN about how Russian athletes shouldn’t be participating in the Olympics, being on point and making the remark so confidently that the American anchor seemed taken aback by the promptness. What’s a freakshow is humans trying to fit the same mold when it’s impossible, and not allowing people to be themselves is humanity in regression.

Speech-to-text

For this last piece of the free section, I'm running short on time and having to drive slash travel between places. I decided to try some speech-to-text magic by recording what I wanted to say and then uploading it to the accessible version of TurboScribe for speech-to-text functionality after a failed attempt on the free version of ChatGPT. The tool gives you three free files it works through, albeit the annoying part in my use case is that it adds time stamps that I need to remove separately.

The hard part is formulating yourself verbally how you write, regardless of the tools used, which feels very unnatural. However, I realized that speaking slowly and choosing your words before saying them helps construct text the way you write it as opposed to how you'd tell it in a discussion. Additionally, after doing the speech-to-text, it's quite easy to find the places you misspoke and edit them the way you wanted them written. I’ll continue on this subject under the “Startups” section in the paid content.

Helicopter business across Finland

We went to Jyväskylä this week, the sportiest city in Finland, as part of a trip to retrieve helicopter parts with my partner. We ran around a lake during the journey, and I realized how beautiful the city is from its outskirts. It is probably one of the most beautiful cities in Finland. Jyväskylä is also the home of basketball star Lauri Markkanen, and it's not surprising given the city's sports heritage.

Furthermore, we traveled to Kotka for Kotkan Meripäivät. Without pre-marketing lying on the city's outskirts, where we were hard to find, we still utilized word-of-mouth for marketing and had a successful second day at the event. It shows the power of having locals and customers market your product. I was genuinely grateful to witness that happening during this event.

Additionally, a random encounter included meeting SHRTY, an artist preparing for his show on "The DAY Events, Meripäivät," an event organized for a few years in Kotka. We argued whether he had time to participate in a flight because he was preparing for his show. The argument ultimately ended with him dropping the" Kobe bomb," referring to the death of Koby Bryant, who lost his life in a Helicopter ride. However, what people don't know about Kobe's incident is that it was the pilot's fault, not the dangers of the helicopter business itself. You could lose your life in a regular car ride. Helicopter riding only gets dangerous when the weather is horrible, and since most helicopter-use cases, such as rescue flights, involve flights at risk of those conditions, you wouldn't have to risk the travel in dire conditions in regular passenger logistics. Going back, I should’ve just told SHRTY he would miss a ride he’d write songs about.

Listening to his music I was impressed, he got the right beats, and would be fire if he’d do a collab with Jesse Markin.

When do you become an adult?

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