Work and Money

Great news: experts invented a new metric to stress about

In a world of AI, it’s not about IQ or EQ. It’s about AQ.

You know what an IQ is because the people with high ones won’t let you forget. You may be less familiar with EQ, the Emotional Quotient. The people with high EQs are too considerate to tell you about that one. You probably haven’t heard about AQ because, well, it’s brand new.

As Erik Barnes reports, AQ stands for Agility Quotient, and it’s quickly becoming the trait employers care about most. AQ measures how well you adapt when the rules change, the tools shift, or your job suddenly looks different than you expected.

That matters because AI is reshaping work fast, and employers no longer want people who freeze when the playbook changes. “That’s not how we used to do it” doesn’t work anymore.

The good news is that, unlike IQ, AQ is not fixed. It can be built through curiosity, flexibility, and small personal anchors that keep you grounded when everything else is in motion. In a workplace defined by constant change, adaptability may be the most human advantage left.

AQ, EQ, IQ… that begs the question, what is OQ?

Do you have a GOOD picture to share?

Send us your best images, and we may feature them as the image of the day. Be sure to tell us a bit about your pic.

History

George Washington started his career by losing, surrendering, and accidentally starting a war

Lessons learned hardest are learned best, and Washington learned hard.

Before he was George Washington, American legend of near-deity historical status, he was a 22-year-old who seemed determined to make every imaginable mistake, plus a few that are genuinely hard to imagine. (Whoops, just signed a confession for an assassination I didn’t commit, in a language I don’t read.)

As Christopher Magra explains in this deep dive, Washington’s first command ended in defeat, surrender, and an international incident that helped ignite the French and Indian War. He chose the wrong ground, misread the politics of Native alliances, pushed forward when retreat might have saved him, and learned the hard way that bravery without restraint can be catastrophic.

What makes this story worth your time isn’t the list of errors. It’s what those failures forced him to learn. Long before the Revolution, Washington was being trained by humiliation, mud, rain, and consequences. The leader who would later hold together a fragile army first had to survive being very, very bad at leading one.

What did we learn?

Meat may be the secret ingredient in a diet that will get you to 100 years old.

How much meat are GOOD readers eating? Like a good diet, our results were a healthy mix of things, and 40% of you are veggie-heavy.

• All veggies, all the time. Fresh and light. (12.3%)

• A veggie-heavy mix. (40.6%)

• A meat-heavy mix. (33.0%)

• Very meat-forward. Veggies are more of a suggestion. (14.2%)

Culture

Consumption stigma is all in our heads, but it has very real effects

From guilt to warped spending habits, it’s a powerful social feeling most of us never question.

Remember that time Jane from accounting ate cheap Valentine’s chocolate at her desk? Exactly. No one remembers. No one cared. But when it is you with the bargain box and a coworker walks by, your brain suddenly goes into emergency mode. Hide it. Joke about it. Upgrade next time.

As Siti Nuraisyah Suwanda, Emily Tanner, and M. Paula Fitzgerald report, that flash of embarrassment is not about chocolate at all. It is “consumption stigma,” the idea that everyday purchases signal something moral or social about who we are.

Their research shows how these tiny moments stack up. People switch to pricier brands they don’t prefer, avoid free or helpful programs, or change their behavior entirely just to avoid being judged in ways that rarely actually happen.

The good news is that, like the demon in the horror movie, consumption stigma loses its power when we stop believing in it. When people openly own their choices, whether that is cheap chocolate, store brands, or secondhand clothes, the shame starts to evaporate. Confidence turns “embarrassing” into normal. Sometimes even into smart.

On February 10, 1996, world chess champion Garry Kasparov sat down across from IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer in Philadelphia for Game 1 of their six-game match. Kasparov walked in, sure he could out-think a calculator, but two hours later, he would stand up having witnessed firsthand the dawn of the thinking machine future at point-blank range. Under standard tournament time controls, the computer, playing White, won in 37 moves, the first time a reigning world champion had lost a classical game to a machine.

Kasparov recovered to win the match 4–2, but that opening shock set the tone for the man-vs-machine narrative that would climax the following year when an improved Deep Blue would defeat the grand master.

Chess experts describe the computer’s style as deeply tactical, calculating, and fierce. At the time, Deep Blue was a computational beast. Today, a consumer-grade graphics card like the NVIDIA RTX 4090 delivers more than 7,000 times the power.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Code-Golf crowd squeezed a working, rule-complete chess engine, Toledo Atomchess Reloaded, into ~779 bytes, small enough to fit about 47 copies inside the 36 KB header image of this article.

Do you have something GOOD to share?

We’re always on the lookout for uplifting, enlightening, and engaging content to share with readers like you. If you have something you think should be featured in the Daily GOOD, let me know!

💬 From the group text…

How do you get your kid to be an Olympian? Start them young, I guess, like they did in the 40s.

Join the Group Text! Send us your social media gold.