Four For Friday | April 18, 2025
LF169 | Start with Who, 5 enterprise AI tips, Naval's top 30 books, need for big policy ideas in health + N8N Chat
Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week, together with a bonus: AI Tip of The Week.
1. Start with Who
An interesting take suggesting that for community builders at least, starting with why, isn’t as important as starting with Who.
It suggests ‘building a nucleus of people that is a microcosm of the desired future from the beginning’.
The piece suggests people join a community because they resonate with its vision, but stay (or not) because of its people.
Tips for building a co-creative community:
1. WHO are we and what do we stand for?
Articulate who you are and who you want to become together
Invite a nucleus of people who embody the desired future
Inquire what creates value for you and how you want to be together
Define a coherent set of shared values & principles
Identify who is missing and how to weave them in
2. WHY do we exist and what is our ambition?
Presence the bigger context you are in
Explore what connects everyone
Inquire what wants to be born through you
Crystallize the world you want to build together
Define what success looks like
3. HOW do we work together to realize our ambition?
Clarify the needs to realize your ambition
Surface everyone’s gifts and connect with needs
Identify what’s missing and how to fill the gaps
Create a mechanism to honor everyone’s contribution
Agree on roles, rhythms and rules for working together
4. WHAT’s our concrete offering to the world?
Articulate your unique value proposition
Define the concrete offerings you want to make
Clarify the give/receive relationship
Build prototypes and test with actual users
Evaluate success and adapt quickly
The So What? I’m interested in whether folks agree with this. In my experience, it is indeed the other people who inspire loyalty and commitment, but a North Star Why is an effective PR and recruitment tool.
2. Five step guide to getting started with enterprise AI
Every Consulting’s framework for what to do if your boss tells you to start using AI:
Start using it everyday. Integrate it into your workday as a teammate and assistant. Don’t assume to know what to do - ask it how it can help.
Know how you provide value. Use this as an opportunity to figure out your key contribution and accelerate it with AI. Ask yourself: What would your team miss if you disappeared for a week? What problems do people ask you to help solve? What feels easy for you but hard for others? What do you, yourself, want to accomplish?
Develop a documentation habit. AI is great at automating workflows, so the first thing AI consultants will ask is ‘what is your process? I’ve been using increasingly using Notion to document process workflows, making it easier to then build the process flows for AI automations (e.g. an automated meeting notes based knowledge base here).
What you repeat, you can automate. Find yourself doing the same thing over and over again - trigger an automation to save time in the long run. “Your expertise in your actual job is your advantage. You know the problems worth solving because you live them every day.”
Share what you learn. Experimentation is quicker and more effective if you do it collaboratively. Share insights with the team, or more publicly, and be surprised at how quickly ideas will iterate and improve.
The So What? AI is so fast-moving and broad that it’s defying simple categorization. Like better running shoes, it’ll help you get to your destination faster, but doesn’t have an opinion on where you’ll run.
3. 30 life changing books according to Naval Ravikant
A hitlist of books for life, curated by modern day philosopher and polymath, Naval Ravikant. Here’s 8 that speak to me:
The Beginning of Infinity – David Deutsch. Optimism, science, and solving everything.
The Sovereign Individual – Davidson & Rees-Mogg. Future of power in digital age. Bit of MAGA treatise, but worth a look.
Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari. Big history, bigger human questions. Anything by Hariri is time well spent. I particularly rate his latest, Nexus.
The Lessons of History – Will & Ariel Durant. Patterns across civilization and time. (The only one here’s I’ve not read.)
Lifespan – David Sinclair. Aging reimagined as curable condition. Read together with Peter Attia’s Outlive.
The Psychology of Money – Morgan Housel Emotions behind money and decisions.
Range – David Epstein. Generalists thrive in complex worlds. This rationalizes (too well?) my squirrel / FOMO mentality.
The Art of Learning – Josh Waitzkin. Mastery through struggle and awareness.
The So What? As the world gets faster and content speeds up, slow down with timeless classics.
4. Searching for big ideas in health
Commentary on how small the ideas for radical change around our broken health system is, this one about the upcoming Australian election, but it could apply to most western countries at this stage.
The So What? Humans are naturally short-term focused - how else could we have survived in the wild. Unfortunately, we’ve also built short-term political institutions, and there’s too little appetite for collective imagination. Will be sharing some thoughts on this next week.
Bonus AI tool: N8N Chat
I’m enjoying N8N, an automation tool like Zapier - but better and free (at least on the self-hosted version am using). However, it’s still a bit tricky to master, which is where N8NChat helps - you can chat with it about your workflow (it’s a Chrome browser extension) and get immediate tips. Am still comparing it to OpenAI as a support tool, but worth trying out.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome, especially on the new audio features.
- Stephen