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 —

How to Be Better at Stress by Tara Parker-Pope via The New York Times

In a 2012 study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 28,000 people were asked about their stress level and compared them to premature death. The study found that having more stress didn’t necessarily lead to premature death but having a lot of stress and believing it was taking a toll resulted in a 43% higher risk of premature death.

This is an important and actionable finding. If we know we’re stressed but decide to do something about it, we increase the likelihood for disease prevention and long-term health. The article has some great tips on how you can go about reducing stress in your life.

Books, documentaries, or podcast episodes I’m enjoying —

The Magic of Thinking Big by Davd J. Schwartz

I first learned about this book through Tim Ferriss who said that this book helped him overcome the fear in launching his business and writing his first bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek. I picked it up and I was not disappointed. Although the book was written over 50 years ago, many of the lessons and actionable advice are highly applicable. I’ll be writing up a summary of this book on www.actionablebooks.com but I recommend picking up a copy and diving right into how you can transform your life by thinking big.

A quote that’s inspiring me —

Empathy suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and custons, border-crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?

— Leslie Jamison

“ah-ha!” thought of the week —

A little reshuffling goes a long way.

Earlier this week, I spent about an hour playing around with my home office configuration. I’d had the same layout for the past 2 years and felt that a bit of change would do wonders. And to my surprise… it did.

Instead of having my sit-down desk in the centre of the room, I now have it next to the window (natural light is key) and my standing next right next to it. This configuration also makes the layout a lot cleaner and open.

If you’ve had the same home or office layout for the past little while, experiment with a little reshuffling. You’d be surprised at how even a small shift can make a big difference!

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Featured image by Scott Web.

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.