The following has been curated by Consultants Collective member executive coach, Kevin Jordan.
This week’s edition has multiple articles and Ted Talks on the power and benefit of continuous learning and development, regardless of the stage of your career. There are also a few perspectives on happiness and gratitude and their applicability to our modern (and often chaotic) professional and personal environments. I am a big fan of all of the TED Talks and podcasts as well, especially the stories and wonder and sunsets podcasts).
Articles
If You Want to Get Better at Something, Ask Yourself These Two Questions by Peter Bregman
Learning anything new is, by its nature, uncomfortable. You will need to act in ways that are unfamiliar. Take risks that are new. Try things that, in many cases, will be initially frustrating because they won’t work the first time. You are guaranteed to feel awkward. You will make mistakes. You may be embarrassed or even feel shame, especially if you are used to succeeding a lot.
Harvard Business Review
Competitive advantage with a human dimension: From lifelong learning to lifelong employability by Beth Davies, Connor Diemand-Yauman, and Nick van Dam
As AI-enabled automation advances, organizations should embrace “lifelong employability,” which stretches traditional notions of learning and development and can inspire workers to adapt, more routinely, to the evolving economy.
McKinsey & Company
Why Even New Grads Need to Reskill for the Future by Marc Zao-Sanders and Kelly Palmer
The work-readiness of new grads is a substantial but solvable problem. Graduates need to adopt the mindset, methods, and wealth of technologies now available to determine their career direction and success. And employers can provide a reassuring tailwind, which will create a stronger workforce, and help the bottom line.”
Harvard Business Review
How to Improve Your Memory (Even if You Can’t Find Your Car Keys) by By Adam Grant
Incredible memory capacities are latent inside all of us — we just have to use the right techniques to awaken them.
The New York Times
With Goals, FAST Beats SMART by Donald Sull and Charles Sull
Goals are a powerful tool to drive strategy execution. To harness their potential, leaders must move beyond the conventional wisdom of SMART goals and their entrenched practices. Instead, they need to think in terms of being FAST by having frequent discussions about goals, setting ambitious targets, translating them into specific metrics and milestones, and making them public for everyone to see.
MIT Sloan
How to Be Thankful For Your Life by Changing Just One Word by James Clear
I think it’s important to remind yourself that the things you do each day are not burdens, they are opportunities. So often, the things we view as work are actually the reward…You don’t have to. You get to.
When to Stick with Something — and When to Quit by André Spicer
So when you ask yourself whether to stick with a task or goal, or to let it go, weigh the potential to continue learning and developing incrementally against the costs, dangers, and myopia which can come with stubborn perseverance.
Harvard Business Review
Unintended consequences: life, and economics, are full of them. The cobra effect is a specific kind of unintended consequence that happens when the proposed solution ends up worsening the problem it was intended to solve. It’s not simply a surprise negative result, it’s the opposite of what was intended.
Quartz
Why Rich Kids Are So Good at the Marshmallow Test by Jessica McCrory Calarco
Why Rich Kids Are So Good at the Marshmallow Test: Affluence—not willpower—seems to be what’s behind some kids’ capacity to delay gratification.
The Atlantic
These six millennials make millions. So why do they share a house? by Brittany Meiling
TED Talks/Podcasts
Accelerate Learning to Boost Your Career by Scott Young
Scott Young, who gained fame for teaching himself the four-year MIT computer science curriculum in just 12 months, says that the type of fast, focused learning he employed is possible for all of us…And, in a dynamic, fast-paced business environment that leaves so many of us strapped for time and struggling to keep up, he believes that the ability to quickly develop new knowledge and skills will be a tremendous asset. After researching best practices and experimenting on his own, he has developed a set of principles that any of us can follow to become ‘ultralearners.’
Harvard Business Review
Why Success Alone Won’t Truly Make You Happy by Justin Kan
Justin Kan, the Twitch/Atrium founder, bluntly lifts a veil on social media self-promotion by sharing how success has an ephemeral return on personal happiness. Countering a common tendency among ambitious individuals to defer their personal happiness until they’ve achieved lofty goals, Justin explains that wellness is something to work towards in the present. He attributes his mental health to both abiding by the tenants of his ‘feeling good’ program and working in his zone of genius.
YouTube
How Changing Your Story Can Change Your Life by Lori Gottlieb
Stories help you make sense of your life — but when these narratives are incomplete or misleading, they can keep you stuck instead of providing clarity. In an actionable talk, psychotherapist and advice columnist Lori Gottlieb shows how to break free from the stories you’ve been telling yourself by becoming your own editor and rewriting your narrative from a different point of view.
TED Talk
Capacity for Wonder and Sunsets by John Green
John Green reviews humanity’s capacity for wonder and sunsets. [This podcast, The Anthropocene Reviewed, is outstanding!]
WNYC Studios
Blog Posts
You Have To Find The Good In People
We have to focus on what we can learn from other people. We have to focus on what is special and unique about them instead of zeroing in on the ways they are not as good as us. We have to be forgiving and patient, kind and appreciative. We have to engage with what they bring to the table, not lament the things they take from it.”
Daily Stoic
To be an ally means that you won’t get in the way, and, if you are able to, you’ll try to help. To become an accomplice, though, means that you’ve risked something, sacrificed something and put yourself on the hook as well.”
Seth’s Blog
Arts & Culture Corner
The Surfer’s Secret to Happiness by Ellis Avery
The dark mystery of bodily suffering had offered itself to me as a new way to love New York City, and life, all over again. I had accepted it, with joy. Watching the surfers at Bondi Beach, I vowed to do so again when I returned home in the fall, no matter what.
New York Times
What I Learned About Life From Buying a Goat on Craigslist by Ryan Holiday
That was the Way. Nature. The cultivated soil. The growing crops. The satisfaction of good hard work. The poetry of the earth. As it was in the beginning, as it will be forever. I’m lucky enough to say, at least for the present moment, that that is my life. A life laid out before me, not by a Zen master, but by a simple goat.
Forge
What’s happening at Deadspin is a travesty by Jeremy Gordon
Whenever a publication shuts down, as has happened more and more over the last few years, it undergoes a public eulogizing by its employees, the friends of its employees, the people who wanted to work there, and most importantly the readers, whose tributes are probably the purest, because they come with no baked-in professional obligations… So I’m going to attempt avoiding gauzy mythologizing and sentimental hyperbole [about] the sports blog Deadspiin, which is not yet dead but hearing its own death rattle under its newest owners’ moronic leadership.
The Outline
