The Friday Thing #863

I wasn't sure whether to get in my car to work this morning or await the arrival of Noah with his Ark. Yes, it's raining in Seattle today.

The Friday Thing 862 is on the topic of friction.

I've realized during this week that I think about friction quite a lot. Not personal or professional friction but friction in the sense of resistance of to a new way of working, for example. I'll come back to that in a moment, but it also got me thinking more widely about friction, what it is and how often I consider it. I thought about a few examples of friction that show up consistently throughout my week:

1. The friction my bicycle tyres have with the road surface. Here you need just enough, but not too much to slow you down.
2. The friction my car tyres have, especially in rainy conditions like today. Again, just enough, but not too much.
3. The friction required to curl a football into the top corner of a goal in the Champions League with finesse, speed and grace. Bravo Mo Salah.
4. The friction in communication when trying to communicate a technical topic to a non-technical audience.

Friction on first glance conjures up negativity I think, but it can be a good thing in many cases and sometimes you need a balance. Formula 1 is a great example of this delicate balance. Friction also allows me to share one of my all-time favourite movie quotes and how I have been wrestling with it this week. Bear with me on this....

In The Hunt for Red October, Alec Baldwin's character, Jack Ryan is trying to devise a way to have a group of Russian submariners willfully leave their submarine and surrender to the United States Navy. You see Jack Ryan, asking himself while shaving "how do you get a crew to want to get off a submarine?". He ponders. He then asks himself again, adding one key word that is a pivot for the entire movie - "how do you get a crew to want to get off a nuclear submarine?".

Bingo. He has his answer and devises a plan to fake a nuclear leak on the submarine to encourage the crew to want to get off.

It's a bit of an odd example to explain friction, but this routine of repeating a question to yourself to find an insight is the technique I have been using all week. I've been asking myself: "how do I really make AI part of my daily routine?" (and get all the benefits that go with it).

I have been rolling the question around in my head on my commute all week and spent time experimenting a lot during the week. In short, I am trying to identify the friction to I need to remove. For me that friction is forming new habits to unlock the reward.

It led me back to prompting and thinking through what "superprompts" I can devise that will help me form habits and give me superpowers. I tried one out this morning using Copilot to help me think through this post. Here is the prompt:

help me understand the concept of friction and then test me on my understanding with a small quiz

Try it out. Copy and paste the text above into Copilot or your favourite GenAI tool and see what you think. Change the topic, and if you have kids, use it this weekend when they ask you another question that you don't know the answer to.

For me, it was brilliant. Within 2 minutes I learned some new things about friction and then aced the fun 5 question quiz on the topic. Achievement unlocked. The beginning of a habit formed as this is now one of my superprompts that I use anytime I am unsure on a topic. I used it this week to understand a financial device as well as the US education system.

Back in my day job in communications, one of the most powerful techniques we can use to communicate ideas, especially complex technical ones, is metaphor. Here is another superprompt I have been refining this week.

Explain quantum computing using a metaphor for a class of 12-year-old kids such that they would understand it and have fun learning about it.

For this one, Copilot came back with a treasure hunt metaphor that I would never have thought about with Qubits as keys, superposition as a magical spell and entanglement as a teamwork spell. Amazing. It's now in my arsenal of superprompts and I used it to explain LLMs to a business audience. New habit forming.

There is another class of superprompts for me that are focused on work and productivity that I am refining and honing. Here is an example of one I use in M365 Copilot at work. Actually, here is my initial prompt:

Look at my calendar for the next week and detail out in bullet points the key meetings I have along with any notes from emails or other meetings that I should use to help me prepare for the week ahead.

It delivered good results but then I asked M365 Copilot how I could improve upon this prompt. It offered me this longer prompt:

Please review my calendar for the upcoming week and provide a detailed summary of my key meetings. For each meeting, include the following information in bullet points: Meeting Title Date and Time Organizer Attendees Agenda or Purpose Relevant Notes from Emails or Previous Meetings Preparation Required Additionally, highlight any potential conflicts or overlapping meetings and suggest possible resolutions. If there are any important deadlines or tasks related to these meetings, please include those as well.

Wow. If you have M365 Copilot, copy and paste this one and take it for a spin.

I have a whole collection of these I am now working on and considering how to share here. And of course, there are many people such as Ethan Mollick who are far more expert than I am on this topic as well as resources such as WorkLab. Please paste your own superprompts in the comments too!

But back to friction. Prompts were all the rage when ChatGPT and Copilot first arrived but there are now so many more things to explore and play with. Yet I have turned back to prompts and this is my new hobby -- creating superprompts that help me form what I call an AI Habit and accelerate my usage and gains from this amazing new wave of AI.

That's all, for now. Music for this week is Bitter Sweet Symphony from The Verve.

Happy Friday

-Steve