Hey there!
Thanks for checking out the Weekly Learning Roundup. These bite-sized, weekly posts are designed to give you a “hit” of interesting learnings I had over the previous week.
This week’s learnings roundup is packed with awesome links. In particular, I loved James Clear’s new blog post around The Evolution of Anxiety – how we, humans, have brains wired for an “immediate return environment” when we actually live in a “delayed return environment”. It’s a great awareness-raising piece around how your brain works and how to hack it to excel in a delayed return environment.
What I’m reading this week:
What Happens When Millennials Run the Workplace? (New York Times)
The Employee Engagement Problem No One Is Talking About (Business 2 Community)
[Audio] How to Avoid the Busy Trap (and Other Misuses of Your Time) (Tim Ferriss)
[Video] A comedian has the perfect response to people who call millennials entitled and narcissistic (Vox)
How Will Young People Choose Their Religion? (The Atlantic)
In Search of Forty Winks (The New Yorker)
[Video] How to stay calm when you know you’ll be stressed (TED)
How we used to die; how we die now (Exopermaculture)
The Evolution of Anxiety: Why We Worry and What to Do About It (James Clear)
How to Get Busy Influencers to Share Your Stuff (Tim Ferriss)
Productivity tip of the week:
The Seinfeld Strategy
You may have heard of this one. When Jerry Seinfeld was asked by a young comedian for the #1 tip to become a successful comedian, Seinfeld told him to write one joke every single day. Then, draw a big “X” on that day on a calendar and make sure the comedian did that every single day.
It’s a powerful strategy because it makes “become a successful comedian” much more tangible – write one joke every single day. It also reduces the potential of procrastination because one joke is much more attainable than “success” or the “best standup set ever”, for example. If you have a goal that’s going to take some time to realize, consider adopting the Seinfeld Strategy, it might help you take the small steps necessary to achieve a big goal.
Check out The Hustle Calendar for the calendar I use to track my progress.
Product/service I’m loving:
The Hustle Calendar (CDN $28.99) is probably one of my favourite tools that I use to help me stay accountable and keep on track with my goals. It gives you an all-in-one view of all the days in the year which allows you to keep track of daily progress you make towards a certain goal. For me, this year, it’s spending 15 minutes everyday on this blog (that’s my real calendar above). It’s a great tool to be able to notice trends on certain days when I don’t get around to completing my goal (see the days without the “X”s) and be proud of the streaks I’ve been able to put together so far.
If you’ve got a goal this year to achieve and you’re willing to put together a small amount of attention to it everyday, pickup this calendar. It’ll be pretty inspiring how much you’ll be able to achieve over a month, quarter, and a year. It’s also really difficult to break a streak when you’ve got a good one going!
A quote that’s inspiring me:
A good man will not waste himself upon mean and discreditable work or be busy merely for the sake of being busy. Neither will he, as you imagine, become so involved in ambitious schemes that he will have continually to endure their ebb and flow.
– Seneca
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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!
Peter Nakamura 