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- Issue No. 88: Neuroscience Says This Is an Effortless Way to Be More Innovative, Inventive, and Creative
Issue No. 88: Neuroscience Says This Is an Effortless Way to Be More Innovative, Inventive, and Creative
DuckDuckGo offers “anonymous” access to AI chatbots through new service
Jenae Spry
June 14, 2024
Productivity Express
Issue No. 88
The Best in Evidenced-Based Productivity
for Small Business Owners, Freelancers & Founders
Helping You Work Smarter and Live More
The Rundown
Neuroscience Says This Is an Effortless Way to Be More Innovative, Inventive, and Creative
Disabling Social Media Comments Hurts Influencer Credibility
How Fixing My Study Setup Changed My Entire Life
DuckDuckGo offers “anonymous” access to AI chatbots through new service
AI isn’t yet capable of snapping up jobs—except in these 4 industries, McKinsey says
Add this book to your reading list
🔥Quote/Prompt
The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best..
Use the quote as a writing or thinking prompt to finish your week strong.
A bit from mine:
(posted in our Doer Entrepreneurs Free Community — off social media)
As business owners, we often have to wear many hats that sometimes we, frankly, suck at. That's just real life as a business owner. BUT this is a good reminder that we should WORK TOWARDS doing what we do best. That also means that being a forever solopreneur may ultimately not allow us to give our strengths their due respect.
Even a virtual assistant can solve many of these issues for us to allow us to spend a greater percentage of time on what we do best and that thing is often also what we love.
What do you guys think? Agree? Disagree?
Did someone forward this to you?
📈 Performance
Let me start with the excerpt and follow it with why this concept and article is worthwhile:
The seemingly trivial activity of mind-wandering is now believed to play a central role in the brain's "deep learning," the mind's sifting through past experiences, imagining future prospects and assessing them with emotional judgments: that flash of shame or pride or anxiety that each scenario elicits. - Steven Johnson
Historically, many societies (I’m from the US but it’s certainly not limited to the US) have presented mind-wandering as a negative—something to be cured. We even say things like “oh you know Julie…her head is always in the clouds” and it wasn’t typically a compliment. Well turns out Julie was onto something.
We wrote about this here as well with some action items for channeling mind-wandering to help and not hurt you but because this is absolutely easier said than done, I don’t think we can read enough articles and perspectives about this new science that’s coming out so we can truly change this narrative and harness mind-wandering for the good of our businesses.
⚙️ Optimization
If you post on social media for your business, this is worth a quick look. Even if you’re not an influencer as a job, you’re in sales if you’re in business and we all have to admit that social media is a great distribution strategy for that — whether we like it or not. 😂
When a post turns negative in the comments, even big-time voices might be tempted to shut it down and disable comments (even Oprah is mentioned) —after all, we don’t need that kind of negativity in our lives, right? Well, since we’re all in business, maybe we do.
According to this study:
The study finds that influencers who disable social media comments are less persuasive and less likable than those who do not, even when the displayed comments are mostly negative in their content.
Recently I was listening to a podcast and the guest said one thing he tries to remember is there are a lot of people who aren’t commenting who might be getting a lot of value out of the post, so in replying to the haters, speak to the silent reader who is getting value, not the haters themselves. I thought that was a great perspective. I hope it helps you!
⏲️ Time Management
This video from Zach Highley is a winner. He explains the science behind the changes he made and if you’re someone who gets frustrated by the way their brain seems to keep sabotaging them, don’t just watch this video, bookmark this video.
Now first, this is targeted at studying but the truth is that we all need moments of focus that are similar to studying for an important test. Zach was kind enough to add great bookmarks so I’m providing them below as our “excerpt”. They are clickable.
💻 Tools & Technology
So you want to use ChatGPT…but you don’t love that you know that you’re also feeding it your info? DuckDuckGo to the rescue!
If you’ve never heard of DuckDuckGo they’re basically an anonymous web browser. With that said, apparently they have not been able to leverage the most advanced AI models in use (like GPT-4). Still, if this is a major concern for you and you still want a little nudge brainstorming here and there, it might be worth using.
Excerpt:
According to DuckDuckGo, chats on the service are anonymized, with metadata and IP address removed to prevent tracing back to individuals. The company states that chats are not used for AI model training, citing its privacy policy and terms of use.
"We have agreements in place with all model providers to ensure that any saved chats are completely deleted by the providers within 30 days," says DuckDuckGo, "and that none of the chats mad
🤖 AI
You immediately figured that AI is taking the jobs of coders and translators, right? If you did, you’d be wrong.
The jobs are: “Administrative assistance, customer service or sales, food service, and production and manufacturing.”
Still, if you’re in a different job and feel your industry is already affected, the article has some advice for these jobs that you can use, too:
The only way to self-sustain, if you work in one of the industries Ellingrud name-checked, is to continually unlearn and relearn the most critical skills, including technological skills. According to Vaz, that’s mostly because AI is “probably the biggest change humankind has seen since the wheel, or electricity.” In other words, it’s not the kind of innovation one can comfortably sit out.
👀 Read, Watch, Listen
This week’s awesome books, YouTube videos, newsletters, etc. to add to your list!
I realize this book might seem a little misplaced at first so let me explain. When I recently lost my cat, I had a hard time. I am still having a very, very, hard time. That may seem ridiculous to some but this is easily the most difficult loss I’ve experienced (and, yes, I have lost humans). As a result, I found this book and it was life-changing.
While I read it to help me understand what was happening, I wish that I had found it when I was grieving a change in my professional identity or many other times that I was experiencing grief and loss even when it was not related to death.
If you have ever experienced loss in any form — possibly even a big change that may have even meant the gain of something great but it also meant the loss of something else — this book is for you.
I hope this book helps someone the way it helped me and it is absolutely science and productivity related. :)
🎉 Celebration Corner
Every week Doers Inner Circle members do a weekly review & get help when they need it — check out the progress they made this week!
Progress in terms of website/landing page and new brand identity
Posted 2x on LI
I got more clarity on my Instagram strategy to make it more efficient.
I feel like overall, I'm quicker in moving things forward, I'm actually pretty excited about the whole website and not as afraid as I would have been in the past.
I was able to do some necessary admin and participated in the monthly planning in the group.
What did you do this week? We feature non-member successes too. Just post them here!
🔒Inner Circle: Events & Announcements
Announcement: Book club poll is up! Vote for your favorite book here
NEW EVENT: Questions & Coworking: Doers North Star Challenge RSVP here
Challenge: North Star Challenge is ON RSVP here
Monday: {EU Time} Work ON Business. Theme: 3️⃣ Sales & Marketing RSVP here
Tuesday: Work ON Business. Theme: 3️⃣ Sales & Marketing RSVP here
Monday/Friday: Goal Setting + Plan Your Week Party
Accelerators: June 21 is your Office Hours RSVP here
We will soon be adding Referral Perks — Refer now to start earning! 👇
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I hope you found this valuable!
Wishing you much productivity!
- Jenae :)
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