Hey there! Thanks for checking out the Weekly Learning Roundup.

This week there are some interesting articles on the negative impacts of empathy (is too much bad?), five rituals to optimize your brain, and a link to a great new book coming on about coaching. I also share with you a new wrinkle I’ve added to my meditation practice and a free-to-try app that may save you some time with your automations. Enjoy!

Interesting links from the week:

Being a good parent will physiologically destroy you, new research confirms (Quartz)

How Millennials Can Help You Work Faster (Shift)

Stefanie Williams pens ‘open letter to Millennials after Yelp employee complained (Mail Online)

How to Achieve Self-Ownership (Tim Ferriss)

It’s good to be German: The world’s most powerful passports (Quartz)

Neuroscience says these five rituals will help your brain stay in peak condition (Quartz)

The Coaching Habit Book (Box of Crayons)

Productivity tip of the week:

I’ve written about the benefits of meditation in the past. I’ve also recently added a wrinkle to my meditation practice which has really helped – a meditation journal. After every morning meditation, I take two minutes to scribble a few thoughts about my meditation. I write a score between 1 to 10 and very briefly explain what came across my mind during the meditation. It’s helpful because I get a better sense of how my meditation went and the progress I made. If you meditate, give it a shot – it might further enhance the experience.

A quote that’s inspiring me:

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” — Nelson Mandela

Product/service I’m loving:

Zapier

This free to try automation service works very much like IFTTT where you can connect two apps to speak to each other and automate tasks. What makes Zapier different? It offers way more customization and selection of apps you can connect. Not to mention, it now gives you the ability to do multi-step automations for complex automations you want to process.

I use Zapier at work to automate new lead emails, customer feedback scores, and importing new webinar attendees to our CRM. For personal tasks, I use Zapier to help me automatically setup templates in my blog and connect certain email messages to my SMS so it catches my attention.

It’s free to try for up to 5 “zaps” (i.e. automations) so give it a shot with any task that you find yourself doing more than once. The key is to experiment then tweak as you discover more tasks you can automate at home or at work!

Documentaries/books I’m enjoying:

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Ghana with a student group. We visited the Cape Coast Castle where hundreds of thousands of slaves were transported from Africa to the Americas. It was an eye-opening experience to see cramped underground cells where the slaves were kept and hearing about the stories of the torture, disease, and death that the slaves faced.

I just started reading The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill and it has further opened my eyes to the history behind the slave trade. The story is told from the perspective of an African woman who is captured and taken to America. It’s a powerful story of one woman’s survival and one that I highly recommend picking up.

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As always, thank you to those that liked, re-tweeted, or commented on my Tweets. See you on next week’s round up!