Happy Sunday Friends!

Welcome back to another Sunday Friends! I’m glad you’re here. Here is your Sunday Musings, dedicated to exploring and sharing thoughts and insights on productivity, technology, and life. If you find it useful, please feel free to forward this along to friends!

The Beginner’s Mindset

Do you remember how amazing it was when you first began driving? Spend some time watching a young child as they discover or learn something new.

There’s a feeling of wonder and excitement. With new things and with seeing something from a fresh perspective. I’ve rediscovered this with Clipt. Coming from my usual government cyber job(s); I know my market, I know my target demographics, and I get the nuance of niching. It’s fairly consistent, with minor changes at echelon.

With Clipt, I have been forced to get out of the comfort zone (rut) and bring this fresh perspective to old situations. How do I bring this technological solution to an industry that relies mostly on aging models?

My immediate thought was to jump into the modern markets, channels, funnels, magnets. That’s not a bad idea, but half of my two-sided market doesn’t exist there. I also am very much a novice in my understanding of funnels, magnets, and channels. So, what do we do? For me, I asked for, and received mentors. They’re experts on the areas I feel most insecure and weak. Want to know their first bits of advice?

Question your assumptions, what worked before won’t always work. Do your homework. Where does your target demographic reside? Be there with them.

Slow down, when you think you know how do to something, it’s easy to go on autopilot and go fast. The problem with that is you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, but you don’t know WHY you’re doing it this time. Be deliberate, act with intention and make decisions because your data and systems are driving you there, not because that’s what you’ve always done.

Eliminate “Should.” Demanding things should happen because of our preconceived notions and expectations ties you to a specific outcome from the past. Let go and follow the new path.

With a Beginner’s Mindset, we have no qualms about speaking up, asking questions because we don’t understand and seek clarification. It also means we can put the ego aside and not be concerned if others are “better” than we are. They should be, we’re new, and we can learn from them.

There will always be people smarter, faster, or stronger. Applying a Beginner’s Mindset lets us rejoice at finding them so that we can learn from them and improve faster than we could on our own.

Try it out, I’ll be over here eating some humble pie and trying to get better faster.

What’s Interesting?

Linus Tech Tips Hacked

Phishing → Malware Infection → Session Token Hijacking

The LTT team had a heck of a week. Watch Linus’ video on the experience and his company’s lessons learned. It’s pretty insightful.

Thoughts Directly from a GPT-4 Red Teamer

Paul Röttger was one of the members of GPT-4’s red team. He says model safety is simultaneously the hardest and most exciting aspect of NLPs.

Read it here

ChatGPT Plugins

ChatGPT is on the web and now has “eyes and ears”. Meaning the plugins developed for it feed directly into the bot. This gives it a much larger range of knowledge and information derived from a broad range of partners and, gasp, the web!

Quote I’m Musing

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows”
- Epictetus

One of the many things that makes Stoicism fascinating for me is the wide gamut of the big three practitioners. Marcus Aurelius was the emperor of the Roman Empire. Seneca, an adviser to an emperor and one of the richest people in the Empire. And Epictetus, born a slave but given permission to study under Musonius Rufus and later freed.

In this quote, he’s talking about how often we act out of habit and “muscle memory”. Assuming that the way we’ve always done things is immutably set. Epictetus reminds us to rid ourselves of self-conceit and embrace the humility of open-mindedness and the excitement of curiosity.

It’s hard to be the smartest person in the room, and tiring. It erodes your desire to learn and replaces it with the rigidity of obstinance.

When we remain open, or take on the Beginner’s Mindset the question becomes “What am I willing to reconsider, in case I might be wrong or in need of some new information?” Who are the brilliant people around me who I can rely on for effective counsel and trusted subject matter experts?

Doing this in my life has proven exponentially more rewarding and timesaving than any perceived potential hit to my being an “expert” at anything.

I would love your feedback!

Which musing is your favorite? What else do you want to see or what should I eliminate? Any other suggestions? Just send a tweet to @erichaupt on Twitter and put #SundayMusings at the end so I can find it. Or, eric@erichaupt.com for long form email.

Have a wonderful week, I’ll see you Sunday.
-e