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As a child growing up with his grandmother in Haiti, the artist Wyclef Jean developed an early appreciation for the idea that any worthy pursuit requires a blend of agency and preparation. On the day I spoke to him, Jean recalled a time when a missionary visited his village. At five years old, a car pulls up and a man gets out and this was like my first time seeing a white person ever. I looked at my grandma and I said, Do you know who this is? And my grandma was like, This is Jesus Christ. Later, Jean came to understand this man was a missionary, bringing rice and beans to his village. When he’s leaving, I look at my grandma, and I’m like, Yo, how come Jesus didn’t leave us the seed? Even at that young age, Jean knew the visit may have meant a meal for one day, but without the seeds to build a farming practice, little could change for him and his community. Ever since, Jean has been looking for opportunities to leave the seeds, not just the rice and beans, as a way to cultivate creativity. Wyclef Jean [Photo: Felix Glasmeyer] While hes best known as a founding member of the iconic hip hop group the Fugees, Jean has an extensive resume: Hes produced music for Shakira, Whitney Houston, and Santana; composed music for movies like Hotel Rwanda; won multiple Grammys; ran and lost a remittance business; launched a music publishing company in Africa; and even made a run for president of Haiti. Jean is boundlessly curious, and his career is a mashup of hustle and hunches. He isnt afraid to name what he doesnt know, or fumble in the process of sorting it out. Here, he shares how he frames his relationship to music, when he feels most inspired, and the value of nerding out. When I’m creating, I create in two spaces. Sometimes I like it super loud. I like people coming in and out while I’m vibing. Creation is like the pulse of the human. Humans don’t hear music. They just feel music. So that’s one part. The other part of me: When Ive gotta nerd out, I want complete silence. My inner me, my engineer, is asking, How can we take Shakira up? You know, what are we missing? To do that, it has to be, like complete silence. Its two parts of the madness, you know? I wake up and I’m a coffee head. I gotta have my Bustelo. If it’s really hot, I would go for a walk; if it’s kind of cold, I go downstairs. I like the treadmill. I just put the headphones on my ears for like an hour and a half, and literally just walk. I do very light weights, just to keep my gymnastics ability going. Then I take, like, 10 or 15 minutes to surf the net on world news. Two hundred days out of the year, I’m traveling, and I’m going to all parts of the world. and I always want to know the pulse. Whats the energy? Whats the culture? After that I hit my recording studio in the back. I’m recording, writing, looking at films, you know, building my ecosystem. I do it all at once. I could be making music, but then I have an idea for a place that I’m thinking about opening up in three years. And I’m like, what do I want that place to be like? So I could be doing the music, and then I stop. And then I start writing a little bit, put it on Chat GPT, and then get back to the music and keep on boom, boom, boom. So that’s sort of like what my days are usually like. I live in a space of creativity, day and night. My best input for output is when I travel. I’m a local head. My greatest input is the human; and not the human through any form of technologythe human touch. Last week I was in Brazil. The first thing we do, you know, we go to the local spot, and they’re doing capoeira. Then we go to another spot, you know, there’s like four or five different local liquors theyre having, and Ive gotta taste it. We went shopping. I went to the place where Michael Jackson did They don’t really care about us. Now, I could have looked at that online, but physically being there is going to do something to my brain. I call it like cultural currency, but it’s the idea of the human. My whole connection, my juju and my magic is the human connection. I couldn’t imagine someone not listening to music. Anyone who tells me they dont listen to music, I have to touch them to see if they have a heart. I always tell people, Man, tell me whatever you want about America, it’s the greatest place in the world. This is the only place I know where Wyclef could come from a hut. Snoop Dogg can come from where he comes from; 50 Cent could get shot nine times in Queens. Shakira could come from Colombia, and the next thing you know, we can appear in the forefront. And in the forefront, we get these tools, and once we get the tools, we become invincible. So whether it’s music tools, economical freedom tools, or culture currency, these tools work together and what they help us do is it helps us literally inspire and deliver an entire new generation. You get stuck because you need that pause time. You could be writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, and then all of a sudden, now you’re going into a state of forcing. So, whenever, like, I run out of it, I literally just chill. I don’t stress, I don’t be like, “Yo, whens the next bar gonna come? When’s the next idea? I feel as if it’s the universe that’s like, Just calm the fuck down. Like, chill a little bit. You have to reboot. It’s hard for people to understand that, and I’m telling you, we all have writers, block. It used to freak me out. So now if I have the block, I just chill, smoke a joint, relax, you know, play my piano, take time.
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E-Commerce
The founder of Slack once deemed email the cockroach of the internet. He wasnt the first to lament the extreme survivability of our inbox. From text messages to social media to office messaging platforms, all sorts of communication technologies have teased the promise of killing email by connecting us to others in faster, richer ways. And yet, more than 50 years after its invention, ye olde email is more popular than ever. Some 1 billion people spend three hours a day in emailadding up to more than a trillion hours collectively per year, according to the email app Superhuman. And theres no sign of this slowing down. More people use Gmail every single month than ever before, says Blake Barnes, head of Gmail product, who oversees the experience of more than 2.5 billion users on the worlds most popular email platform. To some, email is an endless guilt machine: The average person receives dozens of messages each day but takes action on fewer than five, according to Yahoo. And the range of emails we receive is wild to comprehend: personal notes. Newsletters. Amazon package updates. Dinner reservations. Jira tickets. LinkedIn invites. Passwords weve sent to ourselves. Strange conspiracy theory chain letters forwarded along by a second cousin once removed. Email has become the junk drawer for our digital lives. A catchall for intimate and automated messages, our inboxes contain too much information for most people to process. Your last 100 emails are more unique than your fingerprint, says Anant Vijay, product lead behind the encrypted-email platform Proton Mail. Even if youre using another app to do something, theres an imprint left in your email. And therein lies the opportunity. Not only is email refusing to go away, its becoming more important than ever in our new, data-hungry world. And startups and incumbent tech companies alike are vying to control it. A slew of email apps have launched in recent yearsincluding Notion Mail, from emerging productivity giant Notion, and the organization-minded Shortwaveeach with a different set of handy UX features for juggling your inbox. At the same time, giants like Yahoo and Google are racing to maintain their dominance. But nowhere is the value of email more evident than writing-assistance titan Grammarlys acquisition of email startup Superhuman for an undisclosed amount over the summer. (Superhuman was last valued at $825 million, in 2021, according to PitchBook.) In October, Grammarly rebranded itself as Superhuman. Ultimately, these companies arent so much betting that email will be the future of communication but that its treasure trove of data contains all the information needed to create the personalized AI systems of tomorrow. By owning email, they plan to claim your whole life. The ‘Overwhelming’ inbox The promise behind most email platforms is sanity. The average person faces 400 unread emails at any given moment. And given that the subject and first few lines of any email tend to be generic, it can be hard for people to extract insights at a glance. Its just overwhelming, says Kyle Miller, GM at Yahoo Mail, the worlds second-largest email platform, with hundreds of millions of users. Some users dont see [inbox zero] as a goal, and thats okay. What were trying to do is help them get out this clutter so then they dont miss the stuff thats important. To help users tackle the mess, Yahoo recently started gamifying the task with a daily Inbox Challenge that gives users trophies for triaging their messages. Other email platforms are supercharging the auto-sort function. Eleven-year-old Proton, which relaunched its security-focused email app earlier this year, not only compiles your newsletters into one stack, it also displays your average open rate for each, so you can decide if its time to unsubscribe. Notion Mail, launched in April, distinguishes itself by letting you sort email by any content criteria you can think of. For instance, you can ask Notion to label incoming job applications as Job Candidates or have your home renovation emails sorted to Home Improvements. Superhuman offers similar features, along with an auto-reply service that drafts responses tailored to recipients and in your own voice and tone. All you need to do is hit send. Modern AI makes these advanced features possible. When Superhuman founder Rahul Vohra was fundraising 11 years ago, an investor asked him how he planned to realize the magical interactions hed teased in his investment deck. Frankly, I dont know, Vohra said at the time, though he, like many, trusted that the technologies would eventually arrive. Today, Superhuman says that its users reply to 72% more emails per hour after signing up, thanks largely to a combination of auto-sorting and auto-writing tools. [Email has] always had all this data, but up until large language models, there was no way for the computer to access that information, says Andrew Lee, who launched the email client Shortwave in 2022 to pick up where Google left off when it folded its short-lived Inbox app (which bundled messages into categories and allowed you to snooze messages). You can go through and read [your emails], but its a huge amount. We have people with 10 million emails in the system. And now the computer can just go and read 10 million emails! Email apps are going beyond mere sorting to use LLMs to extract data and surface insights that allow users to make faster decisions. In the case of Yahoo Mail, that means emails now have action buttons placed right below the subject line. Those actions might be copying a security code or RSVPing for a birthday party or paying a bill, so you dont even have to open the email, Miller says. Superhuman and Shortwave, meanwhile, let you manage the deluge by querying your mail directly. You can ask the AI straightforward questions (Where is the Q1 off-site? or What time is my flight to Denver?), and these services will analyze your email for the answers, much like Perplexity will hunt for information across the internet. Proton Mail, which encrypts email to offer a higher level of security, is the rare exception: The company sees cloud-based LLMs as an inherent security risk. But product team lead Anant Vijay believes that within a few years, high-quality AI models will be able to run on your phone or computerallowing them to analyze your emails securely. A growing number of email users, however, seem willing to hand over their most precious data in the name of unlocking new efficiencies. To set up a new Shortwave account, for example, you first have to copy over your inbox for analysis on the companys servers. Shortwave, which has enterprise plans for teams of 50 or more, explains the security risk to prospective clients. I have calls with people at investment firms and Fortune 500 companies. I see the concern on their faces. And then theyre like, Nah, but I want it! says Lee. Theres a lot of pressure in these companies for security, but theres even more pressure to figure out a [corporate] AI strategy. Agentic for email While some of these email services can be used for free, all of them reserve their best features for people willing to pay for a subscriptionup to $40 per month for a Superhuman business account. But those initial dollars arent the endgame. Modern email apps are positioning themselves at the top of the funnel to pull you inand offer agentic services that go well beyond managing your correspondence. Yahoos first salvo will be connecting your inbox more directly to your calendar. The company is working on a product that could take information out of your email and offer it back to you as a listand then pin the items to suggested dates on your calendar. Yahoo plans to further build this out, so its AI agent will eventually handle many of these to-dos for you. Google is thinking along similar lines. In the future, you can imagine a world where [your] calendar understands you deeply, says Google VP Barnes. It knows when youre eating dinner with your family. It knows when its best to meet a new prospective client, when youre most fresh. Vohra from Superhuman envisions a future where an AI agent is ccd on emails, allowing it to take over tasks, like scheduling a meeting. Our two AI agents can find time and book meetings for us despite neither of us actually having access to each others calendar, he says. Indeed, AI is rapidly breaking email out of its inbox. Shortwave recently launched a spin-off platform, called Tasklet, that lets users program background agents that connect their email and calendar to more than 3,000 services via APIs. For heavy email users, these agents hold a lot of promise. Real estate agents could use plain language to program a daily search of new homes for a prospective client. Meanwhile, product developers could use agents to track updates from disparate apps and correlate them into a dashboard that tracks bug reports and patches. As for Gmail, Barnes says that not only will it get the power of the AI Overviews weve seen in Google Search, but Google Search will get the knowledge of your email to personalize its results: What if Gemini could help you plan a vacation with all of the context Gmail has? Imagine that experience. We know what kind of places you like to go to. We know the budget you usually spend. We know how many people youre traveling with. Eventually, this could evolve into more than a shopping assistant. Its like having your own personal chief of staff, he says. In a world ruled by AI, most tech strategists believe well no longer be managing our lives by juggling individual apps or even platforms like Slack or Teams. All of this information and communication could sit largely out of sight, most of the time, while an AI with the most intimate and complete portrait of your life helps to make decisions on your behalf. Thats as exciting for a big data player like Google as it is for a newer startup like Superhumanbecause the first challenge is being adept at wrestling that treasured email junk drawer into shape. We actually feel really great about this, says Vohra. Primarily, because we have a massive head start.
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E-Commerce
Michael Jordan is widely recognized as one of the best basketball players to ever live. In a recent interview, Jordan revealed one of the secrets to his success: His love of the game. Jordan says he loved the game so much that he made sure to have a special clause included in his contract when playing with the Chicago Bulls, one which hes positive players today dont have: the love of the game clause. If I was driving with you down the street, and I see a basketball game on the side of the road, I can go play in that basketball game, Jordan told NBCs Mike Tirico. And if I get hurt, my contract is still guaranteed. Jordan went on to explain that constant practice, not just doing drills but playing real games, helped him and other NBA players like Larry Bird master their craft. It was playing in games that helped players develop their love of basketball, and helped them remain passionate about the game, rather than just viewing it as a job. I love the game so much. I would never let someone take the opportunity for me to play the game away from me, Jordan said. Jordans love of the game clause teaches us an important secret to finding career success, namely: To truly become the best at what you do, you have to love it. This secret is related to emotional intelligence, the ability to understand and manage emotions to reach a goal. How can you leverage emotional intelligence to master what you do? Lets explore. (If you enjoy this article, consider signing up for my free emotional intelligence course.) Leveraging your “love of the game” To clarify, Jordan wasnt speaking about becoming the best basketball player ever. Although countless fans and analysts alike have pegged Jordan as the GOAT (greatest of all time), Jordan typically steers away from that conversation, saying that title disrespects the basketball legends whove come before him, and the players who play today. Rather, Jordan was primarily interested in reaching his full potentialand his love of the game fueled that drive. Basketball was that type of love for me, Jordan said. I had to find a way to make sure I was the best basketball player I could be. Jordans success led to his becoming the wealthiest professional athlete in history. Most of his earnings didnt come from his playing contracts, though. Rather, they resulted in multiple business ventures and branding deals, most notably the Jordan brand with Nike. But Jordan says that for him, the brand never affected what he was going to do on the basketball court. I put the work first, and then the brand evolved based on the work, Jordan said. We would play this game for free. We did. And now we just happen to get paid for it. So, how can you apply this to your own work? There are several reasons business owners run the businesses they do. You may have taken over a family business. Maybe you dabbled in the world of self-employment and discovered you enjoyed the freedom it offered. Other entrepreneurs become so out of necessity: Mark Cuban started his first business after getting fired. But regardless of how you got into the business you now run, the secret to mastering your craft is to develop a love for what you do. Ask yourself: What aspects of my work do I really love? The things Id do for free? How can I practice those things as much as possible? How can I further leverage that love to master my craft? As you answer those questions, and as you put in the work, youll find yourself constantly improving, continually growing, and consistently becoming a better (work) version of yourself. Because if theres one thing that Michael Jordan taught us, its that natural ability, talent, and skill will get you far, but love is what makes you the best. Justin Bariso This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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E-Commerce
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