Links

A while ago, I mentioned an executive who admitted they didn’t use AI tools themselves. In Admit You Don’t Know: Reverse Mentorship With An AI Sherpa, Jeremy Utley recently blogged about a similar observation, but turns it around by challenging leaders to admit they don’t know, then to do something about it.

His core insight is powerful: “Most leaders think credibility comes from always having the answer. In the AI era, it’s the opposite. Credibility comes from admitting you don’t know—and doing something about it.”

Acknowledging that execs and other senior people might struggle with justifying the time to spend learning, he offers two solutions:

1. Find a junior mentor who is fluent in AI, and let them teach them. He calls it “reverse mentorship”, but I disagree on the “reverse” part: a mentor is someone who shares experience they have with a mentee who lacks that experience. The concepts of “junior” or “senior” are related to experience, not age. Just because a mentor is less senior in one dimension (like tenure, age, or business experience), doesn’t mean they may not be senior in another dimension (like AI experience).

2. An “AI Sherpa”, an AI-experienced co-worker acting as a shadow who analyzes the day-to-day work of an executive, then builds custom AI experiences (i.e., with ChatGPT’s “Custom GPTs” feature or Claude’s artifacts), tailored to the exec’s workflow and specific needs.

What makes Jeremy’s approach particularly compelling is a real example he shares: Don from PCCP, LLC publicly asked for an AI mentor at a company conference, saying “I raised my hand and asked for a mentor, even though I run the firm.” When Don shared his positive experience the following week, several other senior leaders immediately stood up asking for AI mentors on the spot. One act of leadership humility sparked a movement. I wish the exec I observed had the humility to do something about their lack of AI experience!

I’m still not a fan of shortcuts, and the concept of an AI Sherpa sounds like an excuse for not doing the learning. But Jeremy positions it cleverly as making transformation “irrefusible” for resistant leaders—if they refuse world-class AI mentorship designed specifically for them, that reveals something about their commitment to change. It’s certainly better than doing nothing, and it removes the typical barriers that prevent executives from getting started.

The bottom line remains: you can’t require what you won’t do. And in the AI era, admitting “I don’t know” might be the most credible thing a leader can say.

The weather forecast for this weekend doesn’t look too great (at least for where I live in), so why not visit some strange and fun places on the internet?

Here’s something weird I recently found: Wplace. The idea is simple, but powerful: Overlay pixels on top of a world map, then let anybody edit those pixels, one pixel at a time.

The result is fascinating: from simple logos and drawings, through meme imagery and icons to the most complex and artistic pixel drawings. Though the terms of service do forbid the use of bots, I can’t imagine some of the images having really been painted pixel by pixel. There’s a 1 pixel every 30 second throttling, probably to prevent misuse or bots, too.

Some of the stuff is quite breathtaking, some just crude or immature. Kinda like the whole internet.

It reminds me of of the Million Dollar Homepage from 2005, remember?

Just finishing this course by Seth Godin on Udemy, and it’s great!

Udemy: Thriving in an AI future

The best insights on AI don’t come from the technologists. They tend to be too deep inside the matter, often missing the human connection, the creativity angle, or the bigger picture.

And that’s exactly what you’ll get from this course.

Fun fact: Seth Godin used to work with SF authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury, building interactive computer games and early digital media projects in the 80s. He says he’s basically preparing himself for the advent of AI for decades, so he has some good insights here.

Disclosure: I got access to the course for free as part of a different project Seth is working on (more on that, later). I do think the price of € 69,99 (or whatever it is in your local currency) is worth it.

Any opportunity to learn from people like Seth Godin is priceless. Don’t miss the final Q&A sections, they contain lost of nuggets of wisdom!

Update (2025-09-19): Changed the generic post picture to a screenshot of Seth Godin from his course.

Jeremy Utley, who we met here, talking about working with AI vs. “using” AI, just posted another article titled Innovation Doesn’t Have to be Hard (I Just Watched AI Turn Torture Into Play), with some great use-cases for AI during innovation workshops.

Great intro to the “why” and “how” of using AI in your everyday life by Stanford adjunct professor Jeremy Utley. His background is design, not tech, and thus, he has a very different, human-centric view on AI, which I find refreshing.

I’m a big fan of Cal Newport and his books. Currently, I’m reading his latest one: “A World Without Email”

Every email comes at a small cognitive cost to the sender, and a small cognitive cost to the recipient. It has become easier than ever to “just send an email”, instead of diving deeper, solving the issue, or using a more appropriate, more efficient, or less stressful way of communication. Multiplied by the amount of companies, employees, emails per employee, the wasted time and cognitive cost of (over)using email for everything has become enormous. And instant messaging only amplifies the problem again.

I’ve become very good at filtering and processing email over the last years. But this is just trying to solve the receiving end of the problem. Now I’m curious about learning ways to fix the problem at the source. Not just for me, but for my colleagues, too.

Kevin Kelly, co-founder and executive editor of Wired magazine, recently turned 70. Happy Birthday!

His birthday gift to us all is “103 bits of unsolicited advice”. Each one brilliant and full of wisdom. And all are free.

The paradox of “free” is that people tend to not value the “free” things, exactly because it’s free: If it didn’t cost much, it’s probably not worth much.

If somebody took these and added an anecdote or two to each one, plus some background, they could turn this into a bestseller. Probably a series of bestsellers, too.

But here they are, hard-earned lessons for all of us. Free for those who care, and who recognize the value of great advice.

Don’t underestimate “free”. Free can be valuable.

When writing my post on renovations, while mentioning automatic link checking and automatic HTML checking, I thought to myself: “Hey, how about automatic spell-checking?”. After all, OSes, word processors, etc. come with some built in spell checking.

Some research pointed me at LanguageTool. It’s free for basic use, open source, built in Europe, and has credible customers. It also supports multiple languages. And Markdown. What’s not to love?

(BTW, this is my first post in the “link post” format, popularized by John Gruber and others. These are short posts about cool, useful, or otherwise interesting links I found on the web. Just click on the post title to check it out.)