comms consultant • voice-note enthusiast
Charlotte, Pittsburgh
Joined June 2011
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Hwhat 🤯
I've been tinkering with an AI to increase my “luck surface area” (basically, to find interesting opportunities that exist across my entire network) and the results are ... pretty interesting.
Built on my corpus of personal & professional data - everyone I’ve met with, emailed, talked to, thousands of call notes, LinkedIn connections, emails, Slacks etc. Plus it does its own desk research on my contacts overnight (did that by itself without being asked, weirdly).
Example - it suggested I introduce Marco (an insurtech founder, hiring for multiple roles) to Ben (an insurance headhunter I really rate). It pieced that together through a combo of Granola transcripts, emails, LinkedIn messages, and internal Slack messages.
Powered by a social graph algorithm that scores relationships and potential intros - based on things like relationship strength, recency, communication style, and “likely-mutual-value”, etc.
I left it running overnight, and it:
> found people who have helped me with intros & advice, but where that help hasn't been reciprocated by me - then it suggested actions I could take to repay the favours
> remembered that a colleague described her ideal mentor to me in a meeting *a year ago* - found someone in my network with the exact right experience, and drafted an intro
> surfaced a bunch of insights about my own life - like a drop-off in social & fitness activity since becoming a dad(!) - and set up a local run club on WhatsApp
The suggestions are… surprisingly good! And devoid of the usual AI slop.
I talk a lot about luck surface area - putting yourself in situations where good things tend to magically happen. This is the first time I’ve built something that actually tries to increase that surface area for me and my network.
I’m quite encouraged by the results, and it was surprisingly easy to build (with @claudeai, of course). Happy to share how for anyone who is interested in building their own.
@bcherny
Juliann Sheldon retweeted
I'm convinced that 99% of success is just the ability to outlast uncertainty. The one who can tolerate the most uncertainty is the one who will eventually win.
Juliann Sheldon retweeted
Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five "signs you have undiagnosed anxiety." She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she's describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she's avoiding situations she used to handle fine.
What went wrong?
In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled "Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem", we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms:
1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder.
2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology.
3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it.
The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like "wind turbine syndrome" produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress.
This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does.
Link to paper: michael-inzlicht.squarespace…
Juliann Sheldon retweeted
An underrated red flag in a person is an addiction to being right. The most impressive people I know change their minds often in response to new information. It’s like a software update. The goal isn't to be right. It's to find the truth.
Juliann Sheldon retweeted
The older I get, the more I realize intelligence is overrated. Intelligent people are more likely to overthink, overplan, and overanalyze. They hide behind motion that doesn't create progress. They fear the judgment of others if they're proven wrong.
The truth is that intelligence is abundant. Courage is not. The people you admire are the ones who had the courage to act. They aren’t more talented than you. They aren’t smarter than you. They just took action when you didn’t.
I often wonder how many extraordinary people wasted their entire lives waiting for permission that never came. Permission isn't granted. It's taken. You get to tap yourself in whenever you want. You can just do things.
Courage beats intelligence.
Juliann Sheldon retweeted
Chris Fleming and @sethmeyers both grew up in New England but had very different upbringings
Juliann Sheldon retweeted
Huge shoutout to this Carolina Panthers fan dressed as Clark Griswold trapped in the attic in “Christmas Vacation.”
Juliann Sheldon retweeted
I hate gay halloween what do you mean you’re @megstalter presenting the Allison Williams Cool Girl Award at the Las Culturistas Culture Awards in a diet coke corset
