Hi Friends,
And happy Monday!
How do you set up your own mindset to foster learning and action? Some advice from Amy Edmondson:
Building a psychologically safe workplace (starts from 7:30) 4min
Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem
Acknowledge your own fallibility
Model curiosity
How do you leverage the now-famous “learning in public” principle to fuel growth, both yours and others?
Side note, I am still at level 2, probably because I can’t accept to narrow what I read and write about. I know I should, but I can’t.
What is your next step?
What do you think mine should be if you have been following me for some time?
Learning Gears 5min
I can think of three gears of Learning In Public.
Explorer
The main problem to solve is that you don't know what you don't know.
The creative exhaust you make are mainly notes to self.
There is no unifying theme.
This is still useful, because you can't connect the dots until much later in life.
Connector
The main problem to solve is that you know things many don't know.
Hence you should share that and they need to hear you. That takes a little extra effort.
The creative exhaust you make is explicitly meant for others. This means some effort is required that isn't just about your learning, but more about making things easy to digest.
You still don’t have a grand theme to your work, but usually you are juggling multiple themes, and also learning and teaching about their intersections.
Miner
Reserve the Miner gear for when you've struck gold. Something that resonates with people, that you are also abnormally fascinated by. When you strike gold, you'll know. Stop and plant your flag.
The main problem to solve is that something important is too hard, or the world knows too little about something this important. Therefore you dive deep into something nobody else does.
The creative exhaust you make is very specialized - you do research and build community and infrastructure. What you do is meant to last. Before you, the thing was very hard, or impossible. After you, the thing becomes much easier. The world will thank you.
You now have one theme that not just unifies your work, but that you become synonymous with.
Every person in the world who has the problem you solve, will eventually find you, because that is how the Internet works.
How do you transform a limitation - physical reality - into a tool to boost your productivity and avoid procrastination / wasteful project management?
Getting Physical 2min
Cal Newport makes the excellent suggestion (also explored in his book Deep Work) to set targets for focused work in terms of tangible products. If you aim to spend the morning planning a given project, aim to produce, say, a two-page strategic plan which you can print out and hold in your hands. Then print it out, and hold it in your hands.
A big part of the problem is that in the purely mental realm of ideas, and the immaterial realm of the internet, it feels as though no limits apply. You get to pretend you’re a god. There’s always another initiative you could launch, another piece of preparatory research you could do, another message you could send or reply to. Plus you never quite have to confront the question of whether there’s enough time for all you plan to accomplish – because in a purely immaterial world, you can always squeeze more in.
But it’s a fantasy: since you won’t ever accomplish anything except in collaboration with the realm of the physical and limited, you feel a growing sense of dissonance, of having less purchase on life, and you lose the sense of having some effect on reality that’s central to wellbeing.
Defining your work in terms of physical actions and outcomes slices through all that, because it forces a confrontation with limitation. When you replace “do some preparatory research” with “create a physical research summary document of up to five pages”, you make things more specific, which never hurts. But you also make them more concrete – a subtly different point, and which leads naturally to performing the work in a more discerning, outcome-focused way. (Even “making decisions”, which can feel like the ultimate non-physical task, can be usefully re-expressed in physical terms, although you might have to risk feeling a bit silly: for example, you might aim to produce a one-page memo to yourself, expressing the decision you’ve made.)
Less Descartes, please, with his insistence on the mind and body as utterly distinct realms; and more Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French existentialist who saw that we could never flee the physical for the mental, because “the body is our general means of having a world”
Please don’t forget to share if you think this type of insights can help others:
Thanks for reading, and have an actionable week,
V