Yesterday I saved a few interesting things that I learned, so that I could write about it for future editions of this newsletter. But today when I took another look at what I had saved, I realized they weren’t that interesting to me anymore. Why was that?
One thing I learned about was a new technology that sucks carbon dioxide from the air at incredibly efficient rates. If it continues on its current pace of improvement, it could be a really impactful technology to fight global warming. It was really interesting at the time, but looking at it again today, I didn’t know what I had to say about it, other than that it’s kind of cool that it exists.
The other thing I found and saved was a new AI technology that listens to all your meetings at work and suggests “action items” and other follow-ups. It can also listen to customer service workers and detect if someone is getting frustrated on a call. Again, pretty interesting, but not sure it’s worth a post here.
I realized my beat is probably not “futuristic technology” — even though I am pretty interested in futuristic technology. But it’s so hard to judge what’s interesting and what’s not. I think this is the reason why most writers stick to a topic area and just keep mining for gold in that zone. It makes the whole process of looking for topics and deciding what is interesting so much easier. Even if, naturally, as a human being, your interests are not so myopically focused on just one topic, in order to create you have to warp yourself.
I think next time I’m going to stick with a theme for a bit longer. Maybe business strategy. I do love that.
Open to suggestions,
—@nbashaw