🕶️ The Friday Brush Pass | April 10, 2025
Brain food and wisdom for your weekend.
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This is the best article I’ve read in a long time. It’s a fascinating deep dive into the last 100 years of globalization, and here’s the unofficial headline: we’ve seen this movie before, and it does not end well. These are the other signature ideas from this masterful analysis:
Globalization has always created inequality in its wake. This was true in its first modern wave, in the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution established global supply chains but also clear winners and losers.
That inequality has almost always been followed by conflict. According to this analysis, globalization was one of the proximate causes of the bloody 20th century.
The world was surprisingly globalized—even by modern standards—in the years immediately preceding World War I. Predictably, a severe wave of anti-globalism followed that trauma, coupled with the collapse of most economies in the 1930s during the Great Depression.
History tells us we’re in for a terrifying couple of decades if the current backlash against globalization plays out as in the past.
What this article doesn’t address - and what makes this glimpse of the future both terrifying and incomplete - is that the seismic impact of AI on employment and identity may make globalization seem like a quaint, slow-moving tremor.
How to Use AI to Manage Your Time Better
Regular IoNTELLIGENCE readers know I’m obsessed with helping leaders leverage AI to shrink or eliminate the time it takes to perform low-value tasks. This article offers tactical and practical advice for using AI for productivity gains. Here are the highlights:
Summarize long documents. Start with this prompt in ChatGPT: “You are my research assistant. Here's a quarterly report from my company. In bullet point format, summarize the key findings, metrics, and action items.” Bonus tip from me: Ask Google Notebook LLM to turn that doc into a podcast you can listen to on the way to a meeting. Speak of those …
Prepare for meetings: "I have a meeting tomorrow with [names/roles of attendees] about [topic]. Create a meeting agenda with talking points and three strategic questions I should ask based on our goals of [specific objectives]."
Create the first draft of a project plan: "My goal is to [specific goal]. Create a detailed project plan with five major milestones, each broken down into actionable tasks that would take 1-2 hours to complete. Include suggested timeframes and dependencies.”
My experience has been that the more I use AI, the more I think of ways to use AI. Start with a few helpful use cases, and you’ll discover other handy applications for these tools.
🧠 Weekend Wisdom
We seem to be living in a year where decades happen, to paraphrase that famous line from Lenin. It’s tempting to game out where the future is headed to get there first. Do you know what’s also a good future-ready strategy? Focusing on what’s going to stay the same, as Jeff Bezos correctly points out here:
“I frequently get the question: what will change the next 10 years? That’s a very interesting question. I rarely get the question: what’s not going to change in the next 10 years? And I submit to you that that second question is actually more important of the two.” (Jeff Bezos)
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IoNTELLIGENCE by Ion Valis. I’m an executive coach and personal AI strategist for entrepreneurs and executives. To learn more about my work, visit my website or connect on LinkedIn.