This Week: Enthusiasm is Worth 25 IQ Points
Celebrate intellectual independence this weekend with ideas that can set off fireworks.
Happy 4th of July to all who celebrate! Today, let’s honor our independence from stale thinking, old ideas, and stagnant habits. It’s time for a revolution in your life, and we’re here to support it with some of those most thought-provoking things we read and listened to this week.
Book Bite of the Week
Coding should be considered a liberal art.
Computers, coding, programming—we have come to associate these terms with certain fields (like engineering) and not with others (like art). But computing is a thoroughly interdisciplinary practice that weaves every domain of life together. Scientist and author
makes the case for the magic of code. Check out his book on Amazon or listen to Samuel’s summary in the Next Big Idea app.Member Spotlight
“It’s the reaction, not the stuff.”
The Next Big Idea Club has thousands of fascinating members, and from time to time we like to introduce you to some of them. This week, we’re highlighting Adam Sandell, a former legal aid attorney and currently a GP and ER physician helping run a hospital in an Indigenous community on a remote island in the Canadian Pacific. Adam also writes a newsletter called Great Work that offers tools and ideas you can use to do “work that matters.” We strongly recommend checking out his recent post on getting through a tough week, and you can sign up for his newsletter here.
This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast
Life lessons from Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly
has made a career out of looking to the future. He helped pioneer online social networking all the way back in the 1980s, and he co-founded Wired, the magazine devoted to digital technology, when the internet was still an infant. But in his 2023 book, Excellent Advice for Living, he looks backward. It’s a collection of 450 bits of wisdom he wishes he’d known when he was young. Things like “Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points” and “That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult—if you don’t lose it.” On the show, he shares his best advice for building careers, nurturing relationships, solving problems, and finding satisfaction. He also explains why he’s more optimistic than ever about technology (yes, even AI). Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.Happy Pub Week!
Check out these two NBIC Must-Reads that came out this week: We Are Eating the Earth by
and Like by Megan C. Reynolds.Well that should keep you busy over the holiday weekend. Stay safe out there.