Sisu
The Strength Beyond Strength
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Friends,
In the winter of 1939, Finnish soldiers faced an invading army six times their size. Frozen, undersupplied, outgunned. And still they fought on. Foreign reporters struggled for an explanation. The word they reached for was sisu.
Pronounced see-soo, it describes the strength you find when you have already reached your limit. Not resilience, which helps you recover. Not grit, which fuels the long journey. Sisu begins where perseverance ends. It is the refusal to stop when stopping seems inevitable.
The word comes from a root meaning “inner”, guts, fortitude, or an extra reserve of strength. In Finland, it is more than folklore. Each year on 28 February, the Day of Sisu, the country marks the character trait that has carried it through centuries of winters and wars. (My piece on February 29th Effect from last week is completely unrelated!)
Psychologists have tried to capture it more precisely. Emilia Lahti, a Finnish researcher, calls sisu “the strength that begins where perseverance and grit end.” Her surveys show most people believe it can be developed, even if some are born with more. She also warns of its two faces: beneficial sisu, which fuels courageous action guided by judgment, and harmful sisu, which turns into blind stubbornness. Sometimes, she argues, it takes more sisu to stop than to carry on.
That nuance matters. In business and leadership, we praise persistence. But carried too far, persistence becomes recklessness. The value of sisu is not in pressing forever. It lies in the decision to take one more step, or at times, the courage to turn away and find a new route.
This is what drew me to sisu as I worked on my book SuperSkills. Skills such as curiosity, adaptability, and principled innovation are essential in an AI-shaped world. But they will only hold if we have the temperament to keep applying them when systems fail, when roles change, when doubt creeps in.
Sisu is not optimism. It is not a slogan. It is the act of moving forward anyway.
The Finns gave it a name. Where have you found it in yourself? I found it in recovery.
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
Here are my recommendations for this week:
One of the best tools to provide excellent reading and articles for your week is Refind. It’s a great tool for keeping ahead with “brain food” relevant to you and providing serendipity for some excellent articles that you may have missed. You can dip in and sign up for weekly, daily or something in between - what’s guaranteed is that the algorithm sends you only the best articles in your chosen area. It’s also free. Highly recommended. Sign up.
Now
ChatGPT has hit 5Billion Monthly visits - The weird thing is how quickly we stopped noticing. A bit like Google dominating Search Engines 20 years ago. Talking to a machine used to feel like science fiction. Now it’s no more remarkable than Wi-Fi, contactless payment, or autocorrect. Also Are people’s bosses really making them use AI tools?
The Bubble That Knows It's a Bubble - This essay frames today’s AI surge as the bubble that knows it’s a bubble. Even Sam Altman is warning investors of “overexcitement,” with MIT showing 95% of generative AI projects delivering no returns and valuations echoing dot-com insanity. McCaskill pulls lessons from railway mania, Japan’s lost decade, and the dot-com crash: transformative technologies always overheat, collapse, then leave enduring infrastructure. The twist now is transparency — investors, founders, and regulators all see the pattern in real time, yet FOMO keeps fueling it. His conclusion is sobering: AI will endure, but patience, discipline, and skepticism are the real competitive edge.
The Four Styles of Confidence on a Team - Adam Smith breaks team confidence into four styles: overconfident, underconfident, mid, and proportionally confident. Overconfidence kills discussion, underconfidence hides insight, mid offers no signal. The gold standard is proportional confidence—sharing views with an accurate sense of likelihood. His piece shows how to fix each style and build teams that think better together.
There Is Now Clearer Evidence AI Is Wrecking Young Job Prospects
Young workers face rising AI competition in fields like software development, but some also benefit from AI as a helper, new research shows. AI is hitting young workers hardest in jobs it can easily automate. Software developers aged 22–25 are down nearly 20% since 2022, with similar patterns in customer service. Older workers, buffered by hard-to-automate skills, are faring better. The paradox: if AI wipes out entry-level training grounds, who becomes tomorrow’s experts? Still, the Stanford study notes a silver lining…in fields where AI augments rather than replaces, youth employment is actually rising. The challenge ahead is redesigning pathways so young workers build skills AI can’t erase, while harnessing AI to amplify human capability. If this is your area, then. the 50 page Stanford paper is a must read - Six facts stand out: A new Stanford study finds that AI is hitting early-career workers the hardest: employment for 22–25 year olds in exposed fields like software development and customer service has fallen 13% since late 2022. Older peers are more insulated, with tacit knowledge and on-the-job expertise offering protection. The distinction between automation and augmentation is key — jobs where AI automates tasks show steep entry-level declines, while those where it augments human work see growth. These effects persist even after controlling for firm-level shocks, industry slowdowns, and remote work trends. Importantly, the adjustment shows up in headcount rather than wages, pointing to sticky pay. And the patterns hold across robustness checks, from tech firms to non-college jobs. AI isn’t flattening the entire labour market, but it is hollowing out the bottom rung, squeezing young, inexperienced workers and putting traditional entry-level pathways under pressure. Also, The death of the review? Cultural criticism is at risk of erasure
Mass Intelligence - Ethan Mollick describes the arrival of Mass Intelligence, a moment when powerful AI becomes as cheap and easy to use as a Google search. More than a billion people now use chatbots, with GPT-5’s router system and plummeting compute costs bringing Reasoner-level models to free users for the first time. Energy efficiency has improved 33x in a year, making ad-supported access viable. Interfaces have also matured: no more elaborate prompts, just plain language. Google’s “nano banana” image generator shows how easy and strange this gets—tuxedoed astronauts, otters on laptops. The result: AI in every pocket, powering creativity, distortion, companionship, disruption, and chaos. Institutions built for scarce intelligence now face a billion people wielding it at once.
Next
Will all our drugs come from China? - Alex Telford argues that Chinese biotech may soon dominate drug discovery, echoing how its EV makers shook Western car giants. Once known mainly for generics and ingredients, China now originates more novel drugs than Europe, with trial approvals cut from 501 to 87 days after 2015 reforms. Talent returning from the West, deep manufacturing expertise, and heavy venture funding fuel this surge. Big Pharma is already licensing Chinese assets, Pfizer, Merck, and Lilly among them. The losers may be Western startups, as licensing dollars shift East. Survival will require frontier science bets or radical automation to compete on speed.
Nvidia’s new ‘robot brain’ goes on sale for $3,499 as company targets robotics for growth - CNBC reports Nvidia is pushing deeper into robotics with its new Jetson AGX Thor, a $3,499 “robot brain” developer kit. Based on its Blackwell GPU, Thor is 7.5x faster than the last generation, packing 128GB of memory to run large AI models critical for humanoids and autonomous machines. Big names like Amazon, Meta, Boston Dynamics, and Agility Robotics are already using Jetson chips. Robotics still represents just ~1% of Nvidia’s revenue, but sales are growing 70%+ annually. For Jensen Huang, robots alongside cars are Nvidia’s next trillion-dollar bet: not building machines, but powering the infrastructure that makes them think.
TIME100 AI 2025 - Meet the innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping our world through groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence.
The Robots Are Here to Fix Your Relationships - Allure explores how AI is entering the most intimate parts of our lives: relationships. Couples are turning to apps like Agapé and Paired for daily prompts and coaching, while platforms such as Arya market an “AI intimacy concierge” that tailors experiences and even discreetly delivers sex kits based on your “Erotic Persona.” Some users find these tools help with communication, especially in long-distance relationships or with partners who struggle to express emotions. Therapists, however, warn about “skill erosion” — outsourcing emotional work to algorithms instead of learning to self-soothe and navigate conflict. The consensus: AI may support connection, but it cannot replace human touch, vulnerability, or the challenges that make intimacy real.
The Hidden Costs of Coding With Generative AI - MIT Sloan Management Review warns that while generative AI can make developers up to 55% more productive, careless deployment piles up technical debt that undermines scalability and stability. In “brownfield” legacy environments, AI-generated code often duplicates, conflicts, and compounds existing problems, especially when used by junior developers. Research shows AI usage improves documentation but cuts delivery stability by 7.2%. The risks mirror costly failures like Southwest’s 2022 meltdown or the 2024 CrowdStrike outage. The authors argue firms must treat technical debt as a strategic risk, set clear AI coding guidelines, and train developers to use AI responsibly, or today’s speed gains will become tomorrow’s failures.
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