💎 Friday Gems (Ask great questions, A Map of GenAI, List of Truths, Chili-Lime Cashews, and much more!)

Freshly squeezed insights on mindset, mindfulness, and resilience for your creative potential.

Jun 07, 2024

Low Fidelity is a free weekly newsletter that provides Freshly squeezed insights on mindset, mindfulness, and resilience while empowering you to show up, thrive, and achieve your full creative potential.

🏳️‍🌈 Love is Love, Happy Pride Month!

I hope you are having a wonderful week so far and staying cool. I survived the Heat Dome here in California. This is just one more natural weather pattern to add to the list along with atmospheric rivers and bomb cyclones. Fun times!

This week I’m continuing with exploring questions as the topic keeps popping up wherever I look. I also came across a map of GenAI. This massive map is a great way to see all the critical parts and the role humans play as well as the environmental challenges brought on by having the ability to create images and text seemingly out of nowhere. This was eye-opening to say the least.

On a side note, I’d love for you to join Low Fidelity on Notes to stay connected and up to date with the latest insights shared and discussions in the community. Also feel free to share Low Fidelity within your network, friends, and family. 💜

On to this week’s gems!

In this edition of Friday Gems:
👂🏼 Listen, be curious and ask the great questions!
🗺️ Cartography of GenAI
✌🏽23 Truths I Wish I Knew at 23 - But which are never too late to learn
🥗 Recipe: 5-Ingredient Chili Lime Cashews
🌟 Wisdom: On Letting Go
🎵 Tune: il vento d’oro by Yugo Kanno, plus a note on Spotify

💎 Listen, be curious and ask the great questions!

Last week’s theme for the Friday Gems was the importance of questions in our lives, big thanks to Adam Haesler for sharing the additional questioning frameworks. This week I am sharing another gem related to questions.

Asking the right questions for the need is a continuous practice. By developing our question-asking muscle we can move past our opinions, biases, and judgments to open up to new ideas and possibilities.

Although this post is geared towards Agile coaches, it has insights we all can learn from to apply in our daily lives.

Before we can become good at asking questions, we need to become good at listening, specifically ‘active listening’.

There are three levels of listening:

Level One - This is where your focus is on yourself, your world, your strong options, your past experiences.

You end up being the one talking, sharing your own experiences and giving advice.

Level Two - This is where you are focused on the other person in the conversation. You make eye contact with them and listen deeply.

You are trying to understand the perspectives and intentions of this person by letting yourself see the world from their position.

Level Three - This is where you reflect back what you are sensing about the other person in the conversation.

You are also sensing the feelings; the happiness, frustration, the sadness of the one in front of you – and you reflect those feelings back.

Practice time

So how can we move from level one to level two to level three in our conversations?

Listen for keywords.

Keywords are words that stick out in the conversation – words with a deeper meaning. When identifying keywords, you can repeat them to yourself to memorize them and use them to form new questions. In that way, keywords help to unlock the understanding of the topic you currently are discussing.

As you listen for keywords that stick out to you, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Don’t take any keyword for granted
Become curious about the keywords
If you’re not sure whether a keyword is important, simply ask!

We can build up our question-asking muscles by leaning into our curiosity, being present and aware, and leveling up our active listening skills.

Read the full post on Agile 42

💎 Cartography of GenAI

I thought I had an idea of GenAI's processes, but after looking at this map, I realized how little I knew. Just look at all that goes into producing the images and text with a simple prompt.

As GenAI eats our world, it's good to peek under the hood to see what exactly is going on in there.

This fascinating map of the underpinnings of GenAI helped me realize just how much is involved in delivering that perfect image, text, idea, or insight and how vast the landscape is from the supply chain of raw materials to energy consumption to human labor to webscraping to data extractivism and much more.

Here are a few of the areas within the map that stood out for me:

Refugees are used to tag, annotate, moderate, and label the data

Deepen AI, trains Syrian refugees to annotate data for the likes of Google and Amazon. Sama trains refugees in Uganda, Kenya, and India to complete short data tasks

The lack of transparency, reports of child labor, human rights abuses, and deep sea mining for the extraction of raw materials within the mining industry

Cobalt is used in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. There are reports of the use of child labor and human rights abuses in the Congolese cobalt mines
Deep sea mining: Impacts: destruction of ecosystems, compaction of the sea floor, and creation of sediment plumes that disrupt aquatic life

Digital Colonialism - Western corporations dump tons of hazardous waste in African countries

More than 50,000 tonnes of e-waste, which takes millennia to decompose, is sent to Africa every year. It ends up in informal dumps like those in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, where hazardous materials are burned, exposing people to toxic fumes and radioactive elements
Mercury, copper, lead and arsenic leach into soil and waterways, causing a build-up of harmful chemicals in the ecosystem and its food chains

This is a massive map that will take some time to take in and understand but it is critical we realize not just the amazing content and efficiencies it “creates”, let’s not get into web scraping and copyright laws, but all the damage it is also doing to humans, communities, nations, and the world.

View the full map

💎 23 Truths I Wish I Knew at 23 - But which are never too late to learn

I have learned many truths in my life so far, such as our emotions color our behaviors or that the mind is a terrible place to store information, so get the ideas out of your head and visualize them so when people share the lessons, they have learned, I’m all ears because it’s a way to bypass the trial and error and go straight to the insight.

I like Gurwinder’s list of 23 truths because they challenged me to think differently instead of confirming my beliefs.

Here are a few that stood out:

If you want to be right, don’t try to be right, try to be less wrong. If you want to be smart, don’t try to be smart, try to be curious and humble.

It’s not about outward appearances but being true to ourselves.

Don’t believe everything you think. The voice in your head is not you, and it’s not honest.

This is a big one. We should not depend on the inner critic who lives in our heads to be objective and rational. We must challenge the thoughts and verify their validity by seeking proof.

Make a habit of reading writers you expect to disagree with. One idea that challenges your beliefs is worth a hundred ideas that confirms them.

Getting out of our bubble and comfort zone is critical for real growth. By challenging our beliefs, we can ensure that we are not falling into biases and outdated ideas.

You give the power to whatever you blame.

It’s easy to blame someone or some event for our situation. I used to blame everyone for my lack of skills. It wasn’t until I took responsibility for my actions that I was able to change my predicament and start to enjoy life.

Read the full post on The Prism

💎 5-Ingredient Chili Lime Cashews

I have found my new favorite guilt-free snack. I had a jar of plain unsalted, unexciting, and uneventful cashews, so I decided to spice them up, and wow, just wow! These are delicious. I have already run out of these cashews.

The ingredients you need:

Cashews - plain and unsalted
Chili powder - 🌶️ Be careful with this!
Cayenne pepper
Salt - Use sea salt or Himalayan salt for added depth
Lime juice - to bring it all together and stick the spices to the cashews
🕵🏼‍♂️ BONUS SECRET INGREDIENT: Smoked Paprika - This brought the OMG into the taste.

Note: Please don’t blame me for getting addicted to eating these. :)

Happy Big Eyes GIF by Rosanna Pansino — This was my exact reaction when I tasted these delicious cashews

Read the full recipe on Glue & Glitter

💎 Gem of Wisdom: On Letting Go

This is an important philosophy to embrace. For things that are out of our control, why overthink, ruminate, worry, or become anxious about it? Why take on the added stress that comes with grasping at things that we have no control over?

By stopping the mental grasping we can enable mental clarity and use those calories for creativity, curiosity, and personal growth.

💎 A Gem of a Tune: il vento d’oro by Yugo Kanno

Before I get to the tune, an aside:

Apparently, Spotify uses “fake artists” to populate their mood-related playlists.

Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter (DN), ran an expose on Sweden-based indie label Firefly Entertainment, and how it makes its money by releasing music by lots of fake artists.

The composer’s name is Johan Röhr and his music has been released on Spotify under “50 composer aliases and at least 656 invented artist names”.

What are your thoughts? Do you think this is unethical practice by Spotify or as long as the music is good, who cares?

I personally think this is wrong as it pushes out real human artists from the opportunity to be included in the mood playlists.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I learned about this eclectic and energetic song from my son, who is an avid fan of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, a Japanese manga series on Netflix. I love the tune’s fast-paced mix of rock and hip hop and saxophone, guitar, and piano solos to get you moving.

Here is a sampling of the lyrics.