To Build New Habits, Get Comfortable Failing
Every year, we say we’re going to change — to build new habits or reach grand new goals. But such resolutions don’t often produce long-term change because we don’t give any thought to what it would require. Running a marathon may sound great, until your first run and you’re out of breath by your second mile. We tell ourselves this setback is something to learn from, yet we let it stall our progress.
^ADJ: It's important to not only set goals and create new habits, but also to consider how we can maintain these habits and keep our goals at the forefront of our minds. To achieve this, I recommend reading "Atomic Habits" by James Clear and creating a mind map using a tool like MindMeister. This can help you visualize and plan out how you want to operate in 2023. If you'd like a template to start from, feel free to email me for a copy.
Hat Tip and thanks to William Oliver for the article.
I Built an AI Chatbot Based On My Favorite Podcast - Superorganizers
In the future, any time you look up information you’re going to use a chatbot. This applies to every piece of information you interact with day to day: personal, organizational, and cultural.
^ADJ: Initially, I was unimpressed with GPT-3. However, after asking it to define "personal bandwidth," I was surprised by its accuracy and can see how it has the potential to revolutionize how we work and interact with SaaS products. It's no wonder that Microsoft and Google are rushing to integrate this technology.
What I have been reading
Had a great break, so plenty of opportunity to read, here are some of the best:
Beating Inflation - a great guide from one of the leaders in the pricing field (also wrote Confessions of the Pricing Man), I am going to write a fuller review of the takeouts I took from this book, but one that sticks with me is that so many of us have never had to deal with inflation.
License to Parent: How My Career As a Spy Helped Me Raise Resourceful, Self-Sufficient Kids - a great fun read from two former intelligence operatives, took some great learnings from it.
Beyond Collaboration Overload: How to Work Smarter, Get Ahead, and Restore Your Well-Being - If I had to have a top 3, this would be one - lots of practical advice - an example: “So that I use your time well, can you quickly let me know what you hoped we would accomplish together?” This helps people stay focused on their goals in meeting with you.
Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell - this is an amazing story of someone who you have never probably heard of, but was incredibly influential within Silicon Valley - coaching some of the top execs, and he did it with a modesty that is simply amazing.
Leading Through Inflation: And Recession and Stagflation - In this book Ram Charan offers a simple but incisive framework, focusing you on: 1. Continuity of the business 2. Digitalization of the business 3. Fixing bottlenecks and removing frictions in the supply chain 4. Focused innovation 5. Capex for building essential capacity.
Great at Work: The Hidden Habits of Top Performers - helped shape my thinking about how to work smarter, more effectively.
A 2×2 Matrix to Help You Prioritize the Skills to Learn Right Now
Summary: The modern worker has very little time for learning, and yet continuous learning is vital for anyone who wants to maintain their edge. There’s a significant pressure on us all to learn the right stuff, but how do we identify what that is? A time-utility analysis can help you decide what to prioritize. By examining how useful a skill should be, and how much time it would take you to learn, you can plot various skills on a 2×2 matrix: stuff that’s easy to learn and really useful is a clear quick win, while you’ll have to carve out more time for useful skills that take some time to learn. And for those truly useless things? Think about how much time you can afford to invest in them, and then learn as you can — or just move on with your life.
Managing Your Career Without a Manager
When I unexpectedly found myself without a manager, I knew I needed to really take charge of my own career growth. Here’s what I learned along the way.
^ADJ: I really liked this framework and can be applied with or without a manager.
Shopify: Say no to meetings
Why You Should Care:
- Meeting fatigue is real - it impacts how engaged and productive employees are.
- One solution has been meeting-free days.
- Find out how and why Shopify has gone one step further.
^ADJ: I think 2023 is going to be a year where we start to rethink how we work, what is really important and start to bring about change within our organisations, especially around meetings.
TIp: Change your default standard meeting time to 30 minutes, or 50 minutes (and give you some breathing space between meetings)
ASML: advancing semiconductor chips
Key Points:
- ASML makes the machines used to create computer chips
- The equipment makes it possible to precisely pattern billions of transistors in a space as small as a fingernail
- Only ASML’s devices can produce the most advanced chips, so the firm faces no imminent challenge
^ADJ: Key takeouts - the complexity of the supply chain and what is involved to make todays chips is impressive