Every - essay bits inspo

Too often, we think of notebooks as a way-station: a necessary stop en-route to the perfected, polished work of art. But what if the notebook is the work of art? What if the process of taking notes is the point?

Progress in artificial intelligence has come in the form of a bag of tricks, some of which have proven to be unreasonably effective: word embeddings as a way of representing semantic similarity

Human expression was perfected into pithy thought-capsules (Twitter, LinkedIn), glamour shots (Instagram), and performative soundbites (TikTok), all perfect carriers for human emotions and — most importantly — ADVERTISING, which we were also now expected to do, newly equipped with our “personal brands.”

The dominance of these formats and mindset... See more

I don’t write to simply generate a 1,200 word output. I consider writing to be an extension of my curiosity, and the writing process itself is what turns a rough idea into a finished product. I begin with a vague idea based on some observation of the world, and I put that on paper. As I’m writing that idea, two distant synapses in my brain connect,... See more

treat the LLM as an ally in ideation, not a writer. It frees me to do the things that give me meaning (choose the right words) and work through what I don’t like (being stuck).

lasting culture cannot be automated and meaningful creativity cannot be manufactured

We all reach for tools that save us time. But used incorrectly, AI saves us time at the expense of thoughtfulness. If you had chatGPT write all your emails and a meeting bot write all your notes, you would get your work done faster, but you’d be doing a terrible job.

At Granola, our mission is to build tools that elevate you to do your best work. We... See more