TEJI TUESDAYS 
Issue #010 · 2nd Jan, 2023

Hi All!

Happy New Years! Here is your weekly dose of TEJI, a weekly round up of what I’m pondering and exploring. Feel free to forward along to a friend if you think they might enjoy.

Do more by doing less

Have you ever wanted to pick up a new habit or skill? You say you want to eat healthier and decide you’re going to cut out all sugars from your diet. Yet when push comes to shove you never manage to maintain these new habits. This is because you’ve set the bar too high. When we try to form new habits we often create unrealistic expectations for ourselves. When you fail to meet these expectations you become even more unmotivated. The solution to this sounds counter intuitive but it works. You need to aim as low as possible to reduce the friction of you doing ‘the thing’. When you decide your going to exercise once a week for only 10 minutes it reduces the immense pressure you put on yourself to maintain your new habits. However, something tends to happen after those ‘10 minutes’ once a week. You begin to realise this isn’t that bad, maybe you can go a little longer and then 10 minutes turns to 30 minutes and then it turns into an hour and before you know it you're exercising 5 times a week. I highly recommend you set a goal that may sound silly at first but could actually lead to the formation of a new habit or skill you’ve been wanting to learn.

I started reading essays 

If you’re like me you probably have negative associations to the word essay. It makes you think about all those times you had to write those gruelling 2000 word assignments in high school. Yet somehow at age 23 I’ve found myself actually enjoying reading essays online.

You see, I recently got rejected from a startup accelerator called Y Combinator that has invested in companies like AirBnB, Stripe and Doordash. In hindsight the idea I submitted was kind of trash, so it makes sense why I got rejected.

I did however discover a man named Paul Graham who was one of the co-founders of Y Combinator. Upon further investigation I found his personal website where he had hundreds of insightful essays on productivity, life, entrepreneurship, startups and design. One of my personal favourite reads was an essay on taste. I plan on reading Do Things That Don’t Scale after I finish writing this newsletter. Paul Graham is an OG of the internet and has now become a billionaire investor. I think you will find extreme value in his essays.

If you cant see it, you wont use it

Do you have tonnes of clothes but only wear the same few things on rotation? You completely forget what else is in your wardrobe because your grabbing whatever’s visible on the top?

This is a phenomena I’ve come to witness where the things most accessible become the things you use the most and yes this sounds fucking obvious. However, you can use this to your advantage if you want to structure your life in a way that benefits you.

For example, I have literally so many cameras but half of them don’t get used because they’re tucked away somewhere in a camera bag. However, the moment I started putting my cameras somewhere visible like on a shelf I was more incentivised to pick it up and shoot a video that day.

The whole aim of this should be to reduce as much friction in your everyday life as possible. If you want to run in the mornings, put your shoes next to your bed. If you want to read more, put a book next to your bed. I’m working through an idea in my head related to owning less things but knowing exactly what you have and where everything is. I don’t know exactly where this idea is going but I thought it could be something useful to encourage people to put the things they want to use on display at arms reach.

More AI = More need for The Blockchain

I think we all know by now how important AI is going to become over the next decade. AI has become the new buzzword in town and overtaken the NFT and crypto craze from a few years back. But what if I told you AI generated content is only going to create even more of a need for the blockchain.

If you don’t know too much about how the blockchain and crypto works I’ll keep things short for you: One of the main use cases for the blockchain is the verification and ownership of online assets and content.

Now, as AI becomes more intelligent it’s only going to become easier to deepfake someone with a few images and audio clips. Anyone will be able to create fake content and spread misinformation on the internet. This is already a huge issue online and the solution is going to involve some sort of blockchain.

What the blockchain will do is allow everyone on the internet to have a verifiable address that can be cross checked against any online impersonators. Along with this you may have heard some of the uproar from artists who’s work has been fed into these generative algorithms. The solution to this is to tag work to the original authors online address. By hardcoding the original author into digital files using some kind of blockchain integration we will be able to trace the lineage of generative work.

Right now there isn’t any solutions like this that exist, but this will be the future.

Learning to Code with AI

You’ve already heard me harp on about how you can use AI to help you create anything you could imagine and that’s exactly what last weeks YouTube video I made was about. Check out how I learnt how to code in less than one week using ChatGPT below:

Feel free to give me feedback on Twitter. What did you like? What do you want more of? What do you want less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know. Just send a tweet to @TEJITOPIA and put #TEJITUESDAYS at the end so I can find it.
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Hope everyone enjoys their week!
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Love
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TEJI (@tejitopia)

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