Happy Monday, y’all. And hope everyone’s enjoying their Labor Day extended weekend. In case you wanna (laterally) kick things into gear for tomorrow, here’s a fun stretch question/exercise:

• Name things that glow

A few ideas/answers at the end.

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Beginners are underrated

When you’re starting off, you do almost everything you can to shrug off the beginner label.

After a while, you start knowing some stuff and you’re in a rush to learn more. Something interesting happens there, often called Mount Stupid. I’m sure most of you know the now famous Dunning-Kruger chart, so we won’t go into that.

What happens when you reach a certain level of expertise? You stop being open to things you think you already know.

But as the saying goes - you don’t know what you don’t know. When listening to someone with less experience than you, your instinct is often to Han Solo it and say (or think) “I know”.

The problem is that the person you’re talking to might tell you 10 things you know and just drop a valuable insight that you didn’t think of somewhere there.

To quote of my favorite Epic Rap Battles of History episode - “A cup is most useful when it is empty”. And also “Free speech doesn’t mean just keep yapping” - but that one’s for another day.

A huge challenge you have once you become an expert on a subject is to teach yourself to be open to new information and not just dismiss it. It sounds easy, but it’s tough.

On top of all that, beginners have a beautiful gift that even most gurus don’t.

They often involuntarily summarize ideas well because they haven’t been corrupted by information overflow.

And if summarizing things isn’t a skill we all need in this day and age, I don’t know what is.

Potential answers apart from your usual suspects:

• Someone after you compliment them

• Radioactive materials

• Morning dew

I’ll admit this one was a bit trickier, but we got there.