Thanks for checking out the Weekly Learning Roundup. These bite-sized, weekly posts are designed to give you a quick hit of interesting learnings and articles I came across this week.

It’s a motley assortment of tips, resources, and links that will hopefully give you a bit of inspiration for the upcoming week. Enjoy!

What I’m reading —

Real Productivity Isn’t What You Think It Is by Heleo

This article brings together two really smart people – Cal Newport and David Burkus – as they discuss the importance of “deep work”. Checking email, updating social media, going to meetings, etc. are all things that any new, smart university graduate can do. In the knowledge economy that we’re in, success is contingent on how well we can think deeply about the problems that we face. Cal Newport provides some of his thoughts on how you can practice the skill of deep thinking. Excellent article on a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about recently.

A quote that’s inspiring me —

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

— David Foster Wallace

American novelist and short-story writer

“ah-ha!” thought of the week —

Don’t auto-download podcast episodes.

Let me clarify myself first! I love podcasts and I regularly listen to some of my favourites like The Tim Ferriss Show, Waking Up with Sam Harris, and The Bill Simmons Podcast. But I realized recently that I was becoming a robot by passively letting new content automatically download onto my phone.

What I realized was that I was 1) not all episodes were interesting to me and 2) I need to be more proactive in choosing what content I wanted to listen to. So what I’ve done is to stop the auto-download of podcasts and instead downloaded the interesting episodes that I want to listen to throughout the week.

We have way too much information sent our way these days and this helps minimize information overload and also be much more pickier with what information I invite into my life.

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Featured image by Ana Zivick.

As always, thanks for checking out this Weekly Learnings Roundup. Follow me on Twitter @peternakamura to see the full list of articles that I share on a daily basis.