I’ve always been fascinated by the potential of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude. But it wasn’t until recently that I truly harnessed their power to solve my own day-to-day problems. The biggest thing I’ve been obsessed with recently has been using them to create new extensions that can then further improve my productivity.

One of my favorite hacks so far is using Claude to create new AutoHotkey (AHK) extensions. I don’t know how to do app development, except for knowing python, and basically Claude can do everything if you are patient enough to copy paste and correct whatever error it makes.

I set up this nifty little extension where if I use Windows + O, I can instantly send any selected text to Claude. This simple shortcut has transformed how I approach various tasks:

1. Brainstorming in OneNote: I love using OneNote’s canvas capabilities for mind mapping and idea generation. Now, I can select a portion of my canvas, send it to Claude, and get instant feedback or suggestions to expand my thinking.
2. Real-time Spanish translations: As someone living in Spain, I often encounter emails or texts in Spanish. Instead of switching between tabs or apps, I can now highlight the text, send it to Claude, and get a translation right in the email body. It’s seamless and saves me tons of time.
3. Reflecting during daily planning: Perhaps my favorite use is during my morning planning sessions. I jot down my tasks and goals for the day, then send them to Claude for feedback. It’s like having a personal coach giving me a quick sanity check and sometimes offering suggestions I hadn’t considered.

Of course, like any tool, it’s not perfect. Sometimes Claude’s responses can be not too helpful. But overall, as a way to brainstorm and solve the blank page problem, it’s been a great help to me.

A podcast episode that I come back to every now and then is that on Transformative Experiences on EconTalk. The image that has stayed with me was when they talked about this hypothetical scenario of a man deciding whether he wants to turn into a vampire.

How do you even go about making that decision? Perhaps, you can calculate how much you would like the ability to turn into a bat versus the need to drink blood constantly. You may even ask for advice from other vampires about the pros and cons of their lives. An irreconcilable problem however is that becoming a vampire transforms you fundamentally. You cannot really imagine what being a vampire would be like unless you are already one. Becoming a vampire changes your preferences and transforms how you see the world. Similarly, the other vampires’ advice to you would be limited because they cannot anymore fully put themselves in your shoes as they are now thinking like a vampire.

A few months ago, I had the chance to finally become an assistant professor, something that I had always dreamt of becoming. It was a great opportunity. I would have great colleagues in a wonderful city. I would have my own travel funds and would be able to hire my own PhD student. I can do whatever research I was interested in. The only problem is that I would be away from my partner and it would also jeopardize my nationality procedure for Spain.

Making this decision was difficult as it would fully transform my life. I did many things. I started with a simple pros and cons list. I drew decision trees with expected values of various outcomes. I talked with my friends and mentors.

In the end, I decided to reject the opportunity and stay in my current position. It has been months now since I made the decision and honestly, every now and then, thoughts come to my head about whether I made a good decision. At the same time, I have been feeling too that if I made the move, maybe I would not also be happy.

But honestly, my biggest regret is that I spent too much time stressing about the decision instead of just making it and moving on. Recently, I listened to another podcast about making big decisions and I liked the idea of slow slow quick quick:

they took more time to gather the information, they took a bit more time to comprehend the situation, and then when it came to making the decision, they were much faster to be able to choose what the right option to them was.

Neil Shortland

My takeaway from this experience is that even when many decisions in life are difficult, things may work out either way because when you make the decision, you will be fundamentally transformed and thus, will make the best out of whatever path you choose. It might be best to just choose whatever decision resonates with you the most and find the best way to move forward.

Speaking has always been my number one weakness. I tend to talk too fast. I am always uncomfortable with silence, and so I always try to fill the gap. I tend to repeat words. I tend to do weird gestures. Speaking, whether in public or even just in small cocktail sessions, has kist never been natural to me.

If you google how you can improve this skill, one of the top recommendations you will see is to join a Toastmasters Club. It is an international club with chapters virtually everywhere that aims to help its members improve their speaking skills. In every session, there are prepared speeches, impromptu speeches and evaluation speeches.

My favorite part about Toastmasters is its openness and welcoming environment. With members having self-selected themselves, they tend to be highly motivated and driven yet also have the humility to recognize that they can still further improve. And so, the highlight of every session for me are the evaluation speeches, where members evaluate every aspect of the meeting from how it is organized to how many “uhms” people utter.

During my PhD, I was fortunate to have been part of Taste and Toastmasters in Amsterdam. The name comes from the fact that food is served in every session (which is unique to that club). I had a wonderful time there, learned tons of things and met some really close friends that I still keep in touch with to this day.

When I moved to Barcelona, I was too unmotivated to join TM once again. I felt insecure about my Spanish skills and so, I did not really think of rejoining. However, now that I’m three years in here, with my Spanish having sufficiently improved, I feel like now is the perfect time to reengage. I have two main motivations:

First, it would be a great opportunity to make new friends again. I just realized that having been a few years here in Barcelona, I’ve become too comfortable with my small social circle. I have not really gone out to make new friends. TM is the perfect opportunity to go out of my comfort zone again and to meet enthusiastic people.

Second, I feel that I have settled on my way of speaking in public. In my work, I have to teach students and deliver presentations on my research. I have settled on my current style and I feel like I need to push myself out there more to experiment and improve further how I connect with the audience.

I have been the head of research at Embiggen, a corporate innovation and foresight consulting startup. It has been so exciting with our team growing and with us, getting our first clients. One cool initiative we had within the firm was to have an ask-me-anything and I was the first to take the stage. Let me share my answers to two questions that were fascinating:

What three insights in innovation can you apply to your personal life?

• Organizational Ambidexterity – A fancy term to explain how successful organizations are able to manage both exploration and exploitation activities. Explore means knowing what options are out there and exploitation means capitalizing on opportunities when they emerge. For personal success, it’s also crucial to do these two activities. If you don’t explore enough, then you don’t know what you are missing. If you don’t exploit enough, then you are letting opportunities go to waste.
• Path dependence – Organizations tend to get locked in a certain path, based on their previous decisions. A company manufacturing one product would find it hard to do something else, given that they have invested everything to make these operations efficient. Yet, this fixation can then be the cause of their future failure. Similarly, people tend to get locked in their routines, just doing what they are used to doing. It’s important to take note when one is getting stuck in one of these paths.
• Legitimation – Technologies, no matter how novel and impactful they are, can still fail if they are not validated or perceived legitimate by important stakeholders. Similarly, no matter how good a person’s skills are, the market may not properly value their skills if they cannot get others to notice them. So, instead of just building on your skills, it’s important to find a way to demonstrate these skills.

What life advice can you give to university students?

I listed a couple of things I wish I had known earlier:

• Reach out to people – The best way to find out about a career opportunity is to just message people who are in the positions you’d like to have. Don’t be afraid to send emails or Linkedin connections to people. Obviously, just don’t be too bothersome and try to provide some value in your message. It’s very low risk in general; the worst case is that they do not respond.
• Learn by doing – Don’t spend months reading books and listening to lectures just to learn a new skill. Don’t expect to be an expert after all those efforts. Instead, the best way to learn something is by doing. Think of what you plan to do with the new skill and then work backwards from there. For instance, if you want to learn programming, start from the idea of the app you want to create and then figure out what modules you need to learn to get there.
• CBT Basics – If there’s one topic I wish was thought in school, it would be the basics of cognitive behavioral therapy. People tend to have various distortions that impede them from reaching their potential. Just knowing the basic distortions can really help a lot of people deal with various anxieties they have.
• Be more strategic – There’s always an easier path to any goal. You don’t have to give 100% to everything you do to get there. In many cases, it would be best to just focus on a few important tasks and just give the bare minimum to things that are not too critical.

I’ve been taking down notes for the longest time using physical notebooks and OneNote. In college, I used to have a large notebook divided into sections for each class. During graduate school, I just printed the relevant papers and organized them into different folders. If I ever needed to, I just wrote my thoughts directly on these papers.

Reflecting back on this approach, I realize that I am prone to never looking at them ever again. In college, after I’ve taken the final exam for a course, I just typically just keep the notebook somewhere, forgetting that it even existed. In graduate school, once I’ve finished writing a paper, I just keep the relevant papers somewhere, never to be seen again. My rationale was that I was not going to use my knowledge in that specific class again. At the same time, my thinking was that I can easily find things when I need it through Google anyway. I have not been able to get much return from taking down notes. That is why I have stopped taking down notes.

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the potential of spaced-repetition systems (SRS) in augmenting learning. Michael Nielsen from Y Combinator wrote a great article of how he used it to dig deeper into machine learning. SRS is just a fancy word for flashcards. A famous app that facilitates this is Anki. You can create your cards in this app based on whatever information you come across. Dates, names, equations, pictures, mental models, frameworks… whatever information that you think will be important down the line. Everyday then, you review your cards, marking them as easy or difficult to remember. Anki facilitates what cards to show you based on how easy it was for you to remember the card in the past.

Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve been using Anki to learn different fields. I’ve made cards from data science, pharmaceutical sciences, econometrics, sociology, history of management and decision sciences. I’ve written down interesting quotes from speeches, insights from videos and fascinating stories from podcasts.

Since I’ve started, I have added 3,047 cards. It’s become a habit at this point. I spend around 30 minutes per day, reviewing around 80 cards. In my opinion, Anki has really augmented my process of learning new things. It helped me prepare for my PhD defense. Now, it is helping me in my knowledge journey.