3rd May, 2026
đŁ Nuggets
Photo by mulugeta wolde on Unsplash
Well before I started writing Top Three in 2021, I had an idea for a newsletter called Nuggets. As Iâve described previously, I imagined it as a way to regularly clear out the list of snippets I tend to accumulate on various topics.
My intention is always to one day turn them into longer posts in their own right. But, maybe, some of them are better shared in their original form?
In an effort to clear the decks, here are some random clippings in no particular order. If youâd like to see any of these expanded please vote in the comments.
Letâs goâŚ
Thinking in paragraphs
From Tommy Dixonâs guide: How to end your extremely online era
We are drowning in a river of short-form video. Where the allure isnât even the content but the abundance, the infinitude of the flow. As the cultural conversation is dominated by what is fast and loud and immediately engaging, because those are the qualities screens reward, we lose the capacity to think in paragraphs, to think hard about the same thing for half an hour, to practice any kind of sustained attention. The ideas that resist compression are forgotten, cast aside, as everything has to be in bullet points, stripped of all excess verbiage.
Lies
In 2010, shortly after I finished working at Xero, I was invited to speak at Ignite Wellington. The format was 20 slides, auto-advancing after 20 seconds each. I was introduced by my former colleague, Kirk Hope:
Fifteen years later the conclusion from that talk turned into this paragraph in my book, How To Be Wrong:
Iâm not suggesting that we all become brutally honest. Most of the time when people ask âhow are you?â they donât really care to know the truth so we should probably just say whatever they want to hear. We just need to be more aware when we allow a gap to develop between what seems to be true from the outside (perception) and whatâs really true on the inside (reality). That gap always closes eventually. It may happen quickly or it might take years. The bigger the gap and the longer we leave it open the more painful itâs going to be, when gravity reasserts its dominance, for the person who has been faking it and for everybody else who believed them.
That continues to be true, I think.
Punching above our weight
This Guy Williams clip sits neatly at the intersection of several of my interests: being world class (on a per capita basis); ingenuity, invention and innovation'; and flag design:
Whenever I hear somebody bragging about how we punch above our weight in NZ, I think back to this simple tweet from 2016:
I miss ten-years-ago Twitter.1
Related: here is something that is actually remarkable about New Zealand:
On humility
Donât be humble, youâre not that great.
â Golda Meir
Redux
Iâm a sucker for a soaring guitar solo - perhaps a consequence of too many hours listening to Joe Satriani when I was young?
This hit the spot:
This extrapolation reminds me of when Nate & Charlie at Switched on Pop proposed adding a Max Martin-esque âcomplementary chorusâ to 1999 by Charli XCX & Troye Sivan (scrub forward to 10 minutes if you donât have time for the whole episode).2
I wonder what the original artists make of this sort of thing? Are they flattered or frustrated that they didnât think to do it that way themselves?
Look over there!
The truth hiding in plain sight in a number of recent tech company announcements:
Anybody using AI as the excuse for laying off engineers, while they have a product backlog (which they all do!) are quietly admitting they have a much bigger problem.
Chalant
Stop pretending like you do not have emotions!
Vibe coding vs Agentic engineering
In this excellent episode of Lennyâs Podcast, technologist Simon Willison makes the distinction between Vibe Coding - where youâre asking an AI to write software that you canât/wonât/donât read - and Agentic Engineering - where youâre asking an AI to help you write software that you can read and understand.3
He also described the awkward truth (for those of us who have been doing this a while, at least) ⌠AI is an amplifier of existing skill and experience, but experience in how long things take is a negative experience now, because these new tools have radically altered the time frames. His advice for getting over this? Ask it to do things that you donât think it can do, and let it surprise you. Because thatâs how you learn.
Ask me questions untilâŚ
Speaking of which ⌠most of what Iâve learned about agentic engineering so far is thanks to Nik Wakelin, who is the co-founder of a startup called Sterling AI.
They have built an agent which deals with the dull and repetitive tasks for finance teams. Check it out at https://histerling.com (disclaimer: Iâm an investor). If youâre in a finance team or have a finance team hit me up for a warm intro.
I recommend his recent interview on Startup Theatre:
Especially this pro tip on how to start prompting an AI coding agent:
Q: What is the first prompt somebody should use, to start thinking about building their idea?
A: âAsk me questions untilâŚâ âAsk me questions until itâs clear that I understand thisâ. âAsk me questions until I have a really crisp pitch for my businessâ âAsk me questions until I know how to approach this thing with my partnerâ "Then youâre using it as a tool, as a sparring partner, as something thatâs reflecting back on you. Rather than saying âgive me the proposalâ or âwrite me an essayâ, itâs saying âlet me ingest this context and have it in my own context window, and then weâll build something out togetherâ.
As a chaser, check out my own Startup Theatre episode from last year:
You canât beat Wellington?
There is an app for that:
https://a-good-day-in-wellington.vercel.app
Thereâs not that much wealth in the world
In an essay thatâs now a couple of years old (some of these nuggets have been sitting idle for a while!) economist Noah Smith includes this factoid:
The worldâs total net wealth was estimated at around $454 trillion in 2023.
That sounds like a lot! Itâs just under five times the global GDP, which is one way of measuring our combined incomes. But as he points out:
If you could live off of your savings for five whole years without working, that would be pretty good! But on the other hand, it isnât anywhere close to being able to retire.
The thing about savings is you only get to spend them once. To put this in perspective: the total combined wealth of all of the billionaires in the US is less than the US government spends every year. NZ is no different - the combined wealth tracked by the NBR Rich List passed $100 billion for the first time in 2025, meanwhile the NZ government spends about $180 billion every year.
Of course the other thing you can do with savings is invest them. But, thatâs a whole separate topic.
Related: According to RNZ, there are just 74,850 New Zealanders aged 30 to 64 who earn more than $200,000.4 They punch above their weight!
Iâm starting with the man in the mirror
The traits that trigger you most reveal your own unexamined shadows. The person whoâs âtoo loudâ bothers you because youâve suppressed your own voice. The âlazyâ colleague irritates you because youâre exhausted from overworking.
Your reactions are mirrors.
â Alex Mathers
Cancer? Weâve heard of it Steven!
This Insta clip perfectly captures the essence of a post Iâve tried several times to draft previously, and never quite nailed.
Isnât it weird how we feel we need to attach a charitable cause to anything thatâs physically challenging, in order to justify the effort and make it seem worthy?
There is an alternative: just do it!
Donât ask other people to donate to a charity youâve nominated in order to demonstrate their support. Donât pretend that you really donât want to do the hard thing, but have taken on the burden despite that. Donât just raise awareness, and then assume that youâve then done your part in fixing the issue.
Do it because itâs hard and completing something thatâs hard is satisfying. Do it because proving to yourself that you can do something that seems impossible teaches you that other things that also seem impossible might not be. Do it because you want to. You donât need to fabricate other reasons.
And then, when youâve done it, leverage the dopamine into fixing whatever problems you see in the world, that you can actually contribute to.
Thanks for listening to my TED Talk.
HT: Kimberley, who more than most, just does it!
Price vs Terms
Something to always keep in mind, when negotiating or when reading media reports of headline valuations:
You set the price, I set the terms. Or vice versa!
Just rooms
From Matt Webbâs excellent Interconnected:
Iâm going into my kidâs school in a couple of weeks to show the class photos of what it looks like inside factories. The stuff around us was made by people like us; itâs not divine in origin; factories are just rooms.
See also: Most People, where I quoted Steve Jobâs making a very similar point:
Best seller?
Q: What does it mean for a book to be a âbest sellerâ?
According to Anna FeatherstoneâŚ
90% of books published in the USA sell less than 2,000 copies in a lifetime.
Fewer, surely?!
The steam engine
Youâve probably heard of STEM in education (or STEAM, if we include âthe Artsâ).
How about this alternative curriculum:
Why Iâm a bad correspondent?
This explaining-is-losing post from author Neal Stephenson hits close to the bone:
If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. What replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, and that will, with luck, be read by many people, there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons, and a few speeches given at various conferences.
That is not such a terrible outcome, but neither is it an especially good outcome. The quality of my e-mails and public speaking is, in my view, nowhere near that of my novels. So for me it comes down to the following choice: I can distribute material of bad-to-mediocre quality to a small number of people, or I can distribute material of higher quality to more people. But I canât do both; the first one obliterates the second.
See also: Anything vs Everything & Long Enough
Verschlimmbessern
A German word, roughly meaning âTo unintentionally make something worse in the process of attempting to mend or improve it.â
See more: Untranslatable words
Inheritance
You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.
â Abraham Lincoln
Do, delegate or delete
Or, as my son likes to correct me: X, The Everything App.
How much longer do you reckon weâll keep dead naming Twitter?
The Searching for Max Martin Switched on Pop episode is also recommended.
Em-dashes added for comedic effect. Iâve been doing it for years, thankfully.
Related: the collective noun for em-dashes is âconcernâ but I think it should be âslopâ.
9,000 of the 78,500 are aged over 65 and so qualify for NZ Super.
Source: Thousands of over-65s earn more than $200,000 - should they get NZ Super?