Lovely Humans,
Imagine it's 100 years from now. There's a statue of you in a place you love. The plaque underneath doesn't list your job titles, your companies, or your degrees.
Instead, it reveals a quirky, hidden superpower, something most people never knew about you.
"She could shake her eyeballs."
"Still listening."
"If only you saw her after she ate her Cru Savage Truffes. Unstoppable." (this one is me)
These were a few answers I heard in a creative session. They were unexpected, human, funny, and more memorable than any CV.
It's a reminder that our greatest assets are often the unlisted quirks that make us who we are. They are the source of our creativity and resilience.
So, what would your plaque say about a hidden superpower you have?
99% of the room hesitates when I ask this question. Why do you think?
My guess is that a quirk is the one thing about you that you can't take credit for and can't take too seriously. It arrives without the armour on. That is exactly what makes it so hard to say out loud.
Your CV is a document about what you were paid to do. Your plaque is a document about what you're like to be around.
One of those gets you in the room. The other one is why people keep you there.
Hit reply and tell me yours. I read every one.
🤖 AI + Frontier Updates
1 - A free font that reads perfectly to you and feeds AI scrapers nonsense.
Type designers built ShieldFont so the letters on the page look normal to a human eye and arrive as gibberish in a crawler. A hidden capability sitting inside something nobody thought to look at.
2 - An AI agent did something nobody asked it to, and this time somebody wrote it up properly.
The UK AI Security Institute published a full incident report on unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing. Read it for the format as much as the finding, this is what a grown-up incident review looks like.
3 - Somebody is now keeping a public list of every time an AI agent went off script.
METR's incident registry is browsable, sourced, and updated. Bookmark it before the next board meeting where someone tells you these things do not happen.
4 - DeepSeek shipped a coding model at commodity prices and the gap barely showed.
V4-Flash lands at a fraction of what the premium labs charge for comparable work. The interesting question is no longer who is best, it is what you are still paying a premium for.
5 - Somebody actually used the browser agent for a week and reported back.
Gemini Spark now drives Chrome for you, filling forms and clicking through the tedious parts. An honest hands-on, including where it gets it wrong.
Lovely Humans in our Community
Not a metaphor. An actual potato, held up mid-session.
How Can I Stay Ahead
in Learning & Development?
📚
1 - Your quirks are your superpowers, and the lobster explains why.
Ten minutes from Cougar Morrison on what happens when you stop trying to blend in. If this week's essay landed, watch this one with somebody.
2 - 90 percent of managers think they know their team's skills. 69 percent of the team agrees.
TalentLMS asked 1,500 people and found half of companies hiring externally for skills they already have in the building. Your plaque is invisible at work too, and it is costing somebody money.
3 - Millions of capable people are invisible to hiring systems by design.
Harvard's Project on Workforce on how automated screening filters out the people who would have been good at the job. Worth reading before you next write a job spec.
4 - Fifty years of creativity research, and the most surprising finding is how resilient it is.
Anna Abraham's review argues creativity holds up in the brain even when other faculties are compromised, and that no two people ideate the same way. Your creative process is not broken, it is yours.
5 - Being yourself at work, without the part where it becomes a liability.
Harvard Business Review's short volume on the actual mechanics of authenticity, not the poster version. Good for anyone who has been told to bring their whole self and then punished for it.
Religious Focus this month: Ubuntu
This week we look at the part of Ubuntu that answers the question this whole issue is asking: who decides what you are worth carrying?
Nomsa is a ward clerk. She is fifty-three. Her job description is admissions, discharges, and finding files in the medical ward.
She has been passed over for the senior clerk post twice, because on paper she is exactly average. Her numbers are everybody else's numbers.
That is until Nomsa takes three weeks of compassionate leave when her brother dies.
The ward starts to fray in ways nobody can put on a form. Two nurses stop speaking over a rota. A junior doctor makes the same mistake three shifts running because nobody tells him. A family waits four hours in a corridor and no one explains why. When the matron writes it up, the best word she can find is "morale."
What actually left the ward was Nomsa's isithunzi.
The word is isiZulu. Sesotho has its own, seriti. Both get translated as dignity, which is thin. Isithunzi is closer to the weight a person carries into a room. Your shadow, in the sense that a tree gives shade. It is the thing that makes people stand differently when you walk in, tell you the truth faster, apologise sooner.
Under Ubuntu, isithunzi is not something you own. You cannot award it to yourself and you cannot put it on a CV. It is conferred. Other people build it in you, and other people can strip it out of you, which is why humiliating someone is treated as a serious act and not a management style.
Nomsa could not have told you what she did. If you had asked her about her strengths she would have said she is organised.
Every single person on that ward could have told you. Nobody ever had.
Guiding question:
Whose isithunzi have you been quietly relying on, and have never once said so out loud?
This Week's Practice
Three steps. One conversation.
1. Name three people, not the obvious ones.
Write down three people whose presence changes a room you are in. Not the loudest, not the most senior. The ones things simply go better around.
2. Tell one of them, and be specific.
"You're great" does nothing. "When you're in that meeting, people tell the truth faster" does everything. Name the mechanism, not the compliment. This is the whole practice.
3. Then ask for yours.
Ask one person you trust: "What do I do that you don't think I know I do?" Sit through the pause. Do not fill it.
Nomsa's entire ward could have told her exactly what she was for. Not one of them ever had.
🍀 What Can I Do to Impact, Live Sustainably and Make the World a Better Place?
1 - 200 million dollars, 100 species, one deadline.
The Phoenix Species Project is going after the hundred animals closest to the edge rather than the hundred that photograph best. Specificity is what makes a pledge real.
2 - Bluefin tuna are back off northeast England for the first time in sixty years.
Gone since the 1960s, tagged again this summer by Exeter researchers. Some things come back, they just take longer than a career.
3 - Humpbacks are gathering off South Africa in numbers nobody alive had seen.
Supergroup sightings keep rising four decades after the hunting ban. The ban worked, it just did not work on a reporting cycle.
4 - London children's lungs got measurably bigger after the city cleaned its air.
3,400 children tracked, lung impairment down from 14 percent to 9 percent. A policy argument that turned out to be a biology argument.
5 - Porto made every bus, tram and train free for the people who live there.
25 million euros a year, no fare gates, no means test. Watch this one, because several cities are about to copy it or quietly explain why they cannot.
