Week 23 · 2025-06-02 → 2025-06-08 · 15 newsletters

Practice Over Polish

creative-practice · careers-and-growth · ai-as-personal-tool · politics-and-graft

A quiet inbox week, sixteen emails across seven days, with no dominant news cycle to organize around. What surfaced instead was a set of writers thinking about practice: how to keep one going, how to start one, how to grow through one. The strongest pieces of the week were all about the long horizontal effort, not the shiny vertical event.

Creative Practice: Tiny Acts, Big Compounding

Three pieces converged on creative practice as the actual unit of a life, not a hobby on the side. Piera Luisa Gelardi at Noomalooma ran two of them. The first, Why Suleika Jaouad Swears by Creative Cross-Training, recounted an evening at BAM watching Jaouad and Jon Batiste's tour for The Book of Alchemy, then circled back to Jaouad turning to watercolors during her second bone marrow transplant when medication made her vision too unreliable to write. The frame was creativity as life force, not as output. The second, The Joy of Micro-Drawing, introduced a series on bite-sized creative prompts. Gelardi has been doing tiny half-inch sketches in the margin of her five-year journal, sixty seconds each, capturing things she wants to remember (red nails in sunshine, a daughter cradling a magnolia, a sidewalk wipeout). The practice itself is the artifact.

Jack Butcher at Visualize Value made the same argument from the other end of the time axis in Laser Eyes. Five years of turning ideas into simple black-and-white diagrams, posted daily, grew a million-person audience and a body of cryptographically signed work that has now done $340 million in trading volume. His takeaway, borrowed from Michael Saylor: "Once you do one thing, if you have a modicum of success, and you think you can do a second, third and fourth thing, you're wrong. You can't." The discipline is the one practice, repeated.

The take: the three pieces are running the same argument across very different scales. Gelardi's sixty-second sketches and Butcher's million-dollar artifacts are both downstream of the same insight, that the practice itself is the asset, not the output of any single session. The newsletters that landed this week were the ones that took practice seriously as a noun.

Careers and Growth: Three Quiet Pieces of Senior Advice

Three writers, all working at the senior-IC and management level, wrote about how to actually grow inside an organization. Ami Vora at The Hard Parts of Growth ran Making progress on controversial problems, her playbook for the thorny strategy questions where every stakeholder has an opinion and nobody has a solution. Her frame is treating the problem like a universe: it expands as you gather context, then contracts as you eliminate options. Knowing where you are on that arc is the actual skill. The piece is also a quiet argument against the consensus-building reflex; trying to talk loud stakeholders into agreement before the decision meeting almost never works.

Rob Thomas at The Mentor wrote Graduate, a four-point letter to new grads: optimize for experience over salary, learn faster than you ever have, invest in relationships before you need them, and work hard in a world that has made being merely active very easy. The line that stuck was Susan St. Ledger's, that a career is a jungle gym not a ladder. The advice is conventional. The directness with which Thomas delivers it is not.

Julie Zhuo at The Looking Glass ran the inverse perspective in her paid subscribers post Unsent letter #47, addressed to someone whose work is competent and well-presented but missing the sparkle that more polishing cannot produce. It is a short piece about what senior reviewers actually see and rarely say out loud.

The take: Vora, Thomas, and Zhuo are the same conversation from three vantage points. Vora is teaching the technical move (how to navigate the problem space), Thomas is teaching the orientation (chase exposure, not titles), and Zhuo is naming the gap that all the technique in the world cannot close. If you are a few years into a career, read them in that order.

AI as a Personal Tool: From Vibe Coding to Real Workflow

The AI thread this week was small but cohesive, and notably absent of model-launch noise. Sahar Mor at AI Tidbits collected his May LinkedIn posts in LinkedIn Highlights, May 2025 - AI Coding Edition. The standout was the parallel AI pair-programming workflow he adopted from Anthropic: one Claude writes the code, a second reviews with fresh context, a third applies fixes. The technique generalizes to any assistant. The bonus tip at the end, an Anthropic trick to reduce cost by 90% and latency by 50%, is the kind of operator detail that does not show up in product launches.

Max Mitcham at From the Ground Up went concrete in How I Built an AI Personal Assistant That Actually Works, his n8n-based multi-agent system replacing what he was about to spend $50K on a human PA for. The first workflow categorizes inbound email into To Respond, FYI, Marketing, and Notifications. The second handles meeting follow-ups. Mitcham reports a 20-30% efficiency lift in two weeks. The piece reads like a build log, which is what makes it useful.

Carly Ayres at Good Graf wrote A designer's guide to engaging with AI, profiling Jessica Hische, the lettering artist whose work is almost definitionally non-automatable, on why she has been publicly exploring AI tools anyway. Hische's stance: you cannot critique what you do not understand, and disengagement does not absolve you from responsibility, it just weakens your ability to shape the outcome. She remains skeptical of how training data is sourced, especially when companies hide behind legality. "Just because it's legal doesn't make it ethical."

The take: the AI conversation in this inbox has moved past the should-I-use-it question and into the how-do-I-actually-deploy-it question. Mor's parallel-agent workflow, Mitcham's n8n stack, and Hische's principled engagement are three different surfaces of the same shift. The defining AI literacy of 2025 is not knowing the latest model. It is knowing how to wire one into your own day.

Politics and Graft: The Pretense Is Gone

The Last Bear Standing ran the week's sharpest piece of pure commentary in Golden Age of Graft. The argument: throughout history, the state has shaken hands with commerce for self-interested gains, but the expectation was always a certain decorum (closed-door deals, public denial, the projection of propriety). What makes this moment unique is that the pretense is checked at the door. The new investment theme, "publicly traded entities with proximity to the President," is documented through Colombier Acquisition Corp (the SPAC backed by Trump affiliate Omeed Malik merging with online firearm retailer GrabAGun, which added Donald Trump Jr to the board on April 29), Kindly MD becoming Nakamoto Holdings via a merger with crypto advisor David Bailey's firm, and a slate of bitcoin miners pricing in proximity as alpha. The line of the week came from Bailey himself: "If a year ago you put me into hypnosis and said, describe to me your deepest dreams of what could happen, this would be straight-up fantasy."

The take: this is a piece worth saving because it names a regime change that financial media has been slow to call. The TACO trade ("Trump Always Chickens Out") that Wall Street learned to price in April has reorganized the entire stock market into a patronage-proximity signal. Whether you trade it or not, the framing is the lens through which a lot of 2025 macro reads more cleanly.

Three Takeaways from the Week

The strongest writing in a thin week came from the people who took practice seriously as the thing itself, not as a means to the thing. Gelardi's micro-drawings, Butcher's five-year diagram practice, and even Vora's framing of the problem-solving arc are all variations on the same idea: the discipline is the asset, the artifact is downstream. In a week with no big news, that was the through-line worth catching.

The AI conversation has gone domestic. The pieces that landed were not about model capabilities or industry positioning, they were about how a designer, an operator, and an engineer each wire AI into their actual day. That is a healthier vector than the launch-announcement churn the inbox usually carries, and it is where the operator-level edge actually accrues.

If you only revisit three pieces from the week, I would suggest Jack Butcher's Laser Eyes for the cleanest argument about long-horizon practice, Carly Ayres on Jessica Hische for the most honest framing of how a serious artist actually engages with AI, and The Last Bear Standing's Golden Age of Graft for the political-economic frame that the rest of 2025 keeps confirming. A small inbox, but three pieces worth keeping.