Reading Time: 2 min Back in February of 2012, I attended WordCamp Atlanta for the first time (and that old site is still up!). During that weekend I met some incredible folks, but the most immediately impactful was Kathy Drewien. We kinda, sorta, vaguely knew each other, and were able to talk more there. She knew I lived in […]
Learning
You begin to fail when you deny your mistakes
Reading Time: < 1 min Mistakes can often be amazing. I’ve shared ideas from people like Thomas J. Watson and Niels Bohr that literally prefer people that have made mistakes. There’s an important caveat in there though — you must be willing to learn from them. This was summarized perfectly in Carol Dweck’s book “Mindset“, where she shared: “John Wooden, […]
I change my mind. What do you do?
Reading Time: < 1 min The increasing propensity for people to refuse to change their minds, even when faced with irrefutable evidence, is baffling to me. I don’t like being wrong – no one really does – but being wrong means that I’m now less wrong than I was before. More importantly, as I’ve shared before, most of the smartest […]
Is memorization important?
Reading Time: < 1 min Over the years I’ve read many articles about memorization. Many are against it (“We have the world’s information a Google search away”) while others are for it. I’m heavily in favor of taking time to memorize things, but I’m always open to new perspectives on how valuable (or not) that practice might be. I recently […]
Post-processing
Reading Time: 2 min At the end of a productive span of time, such as a team meeting or reading an article, spending a few minutes processing what happened can make the time investment 10x more valuable. For example, after I read a book or an impactful article, I spend some time to pull out the highlights so I […]
Intentional mistakes can help
Reading Time: < 1 min I talk a lot on here about making mistakes, generally from the angle of “try hard to learn from your mistakes”. That certainly holds true, but there is some evidence that intentionally making mistakes can be helpful too. The Derring Effect A paper from the American Psychological Association showed that when students were instructed to […]
The best people ask the toughest questions
Reading Time: 2 min I’ve talked a good bit over the last few weeks about learning to ask better questions, and I’ve seen two people in particular that consistently do a fantastic job of it. Todd I was on a “book club” call with Todd Stanton a few weeks ago, and we were very fortunate to have the author […]
Curiosity can vanquish boredom
Reading Time: < 1 min It’s amazing that in our world where we literally have millions of pieces of entertainment at our fingertips (movies, songs, videos, etc) that we can become bored, but happens to all of us. According to Nir Eyal in his book “Indistractable“, the solution is simple: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure […]
Distractions can help you learn
Reading Time: 2 min When you need to dive deep into your work, banishing distractions is an essential thing to do. In many cases, though, distractions can help you learn a subject even more deeply. In Benedict Carey’s book “How We Learn“, they talk about using distractions to help better remember certain types of data. If you’re in a […]
I write and therefore I know
Reading Time: < 1 min In a recent episode of the “Focus on This” podcast, host Blake Stratton shared something that I found very interesting. The topic was about journaling, and how it can lead to clarity. Blake took the idea of externalization and put it like this: Usually you think, “Oh, I know and therefore therefore I write,” it’s […]