Teaching for Purpose: Preparing Students for Lives of Meaning by Heather Malin
Examples and research that demonstrates how integrating ‘purpose’ in the curriculum can benefit students and teachers.
Launch: An Internet Millionaire’s Secret Formula to Sell Almost Anything Online, Build a Business You Love, and Live the Life of Your Dreams by Jeff Walker
What I found here was a way to communicate how I can help my audience. I can’t wait to try this out to build stronger relationships with new and existing clients.
The Four Agreements — A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Miguel Ruiz
If you step back and look at the way you live your life, you’ll see that many of your thought patterns and behaviors are driven by unconscious agreements you’ve made to be part of society (the author calls this domestication). If you want to ascend to a higher level of spirituality, you can create new agreements with yourself that can better serve you.
“Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves.”
The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday
A story-based guide to Ryan Holiday’s take on stoicism. It’s thanks to Holiday that I first decided to read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and it’s probably because of him that I will keep reading original works of stoicism.
Through the lenses of perception, action and will, Holiday shares some of his favorite stoic ideas. Some highlights for me:
-Perception is a superpower, and we should see each situation for what it could be.
-Exercise: Take your situation and pretend it is not happening to you. Pretend it is not important, that it doesn’t matter. How much easier would it be for you to know what to do? How much more quickly and dispassionately could you size up to the scenario and its options?
-When you receive a poorly wrapped present, you should still say thank you. If someone is doing one of the following, it can help you grow:
Disrespectful: They underestimate us, which is a huge advantage.
Conniving: we won’t have to apologize when we make an example out of them.
Critical: Lower expectations are easier to exceed.
Lazy: Makes whatever we accomplish seem all the more admirable.
-We should greet our obstacles with: energy, persistence, coherent and deliberate process, iteration and resilience, pragmatism, strategic vision, craftiness and savvy, and an eye for opportunity and pivotal moments. This reminds me of Marcus Aurelius: “”No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be emerald, my color undiminished.”
-There is no need to greet obstacles with: discouragement, frustration, resentment, avoidance, blame, anxiety, doubts and encouragement. (If you do, channel these into something useful).
-You love obstacles because they are fuel. You need fuel. You can’t go anywhere without it.
-Is this a unique misfortune picked out just for me? If it is, thank you for helping me grow at this stage and leave something behind.
-Is this a generic misfortune that has nothing to do with me? If it is, thank you for helping me grow at this stage and leave something behind.
-Do I have good problems today? Yes? Thank you. I derive value from obstacles. They help me know where I am and what this is. What it’s for.
-Vires Acquirit eundo: We gather strength as we go.
- First, see clearly. Next, act correctly. Finally, endure and accept the world as it is.
And finally, an inspiring quote to take action on: “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school… it is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. ” - Henry David Thoreau
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Summary: Unpredictable outlier events will have an outsized impact on the future. Preparing accordingly will help you take advantage of chance, and understand when to protect yourself or to take risks.
On predicting the future:
- Plans fail because of what we have called tunnelling, the neglect of sources of uncertainty outside the plan itself. We tend to dismiss outliers and adverse outcomes when projecting the future.
- Past information can give us a general idea about the future, even if it doesn’t give us a great one.
- Predicting the past is harder than predicting the future. We’re not sure of what happened and why.
On better thinking:
- The perception of causation has a biological foundation. We have a very deep inclination to narrate.
- We take what we know a little too seriously. The Scientific Revolution made us feel that we were in possession of tools that would allow us to master the future. We believed that uncertainty was gone.
- Measures of uncertainty that are based on the bell curve simply disregard the possibility in the impact of sharp jumps or discontinued discontinuity and are therefore inapplicable in a complex world.
- We teach people methods that deal with a simple world, in a linear form, and turning them loose in a complex world.
- What if Society was governor of from the basis of the awareness of ignorance, instead of knowledge?
What I want to do:
- Use an empiricist mindset. For example, by keeping a tally of my predictions. Explore quantitative self movement.
- Encourage students to prepare for and embrace the unpredictable.
- Use a barbell strategy. Be as hyper-conservative in hyper-aggressive as you can instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative
Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
“This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies.” -Yuval Noah Harari
Summary: Upcoming changes in technological capability will disrupt our opinions of what matters most. As things shift, our decisions could create a world that is radically different from our own.
I enjoyed Harari's breakdown of liberalism in Sapiens, and I equally enjoyed his breakdown of humanism in Homo Deus. By “humanism” Harari means the doctrine that only our feelings and experiences are what is most important.
Through his analysis, he highlights the narratives that are shaping our lives today, and how they could change in the future. From another book review:
Human sciences will challenge the human superiority and human exceptionalism that is implicit in humanism, including erroneous beliefs in the uniqueness of human sentience (feelings), human sapience (reason) and free-will. We are just animals with a God-complex.
For Harari, the implications for human democracy, human freedom and human rights will be significant. Think of the challenges to humanist politics (the voter knows best), humanist economics (the customer is always right), humanist aesthetics (beauty is in the eye of the beholder), humanist ethics (if it feels good — do it! and humanist education (think for yourself).
As Liberalism and humanism’s ideas are questioned by science, new types of dogma for growth will start. Religion said ‘listen to God’, but humanism says ‘listen to yourself.’ And science says ‘listen to the data’.
I, Robot — Isaac Asimov
A fascinating way to explore potential futures. I imagine it helped propel people’s imagination of the future when it was written. The scenarios and questions are still relevant today, as we consider the upcoming transformational impact of AI and the metaverse.
I found the dialogue between characters to be too artificial to enjoy, but this book has turned me on to finding more science fiction and literature that explores what the future could look like,
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez
Most of our research and design practices center on men. What is male is seen as universal and what is female is seen as atypical. Caroline Criado Pérez makes a great case for why this is a problem, and the repercussions and consequences of this state of affairs. The reader is forced to ask themselves: how did we miss this?
I loved learning this insight and I’ve shared this book recommendation with several people since then.
Criado Pérez also makes a great case for a data driven society. Through the collection of gendered data, the author argues, we can create a better world. This is because gaps in data and design have caused issues in servicing women. And it feels like many of these issues can be easily fixed.
I loved it when the author discussed ‘hidden costs’. For example the cost of not having bathrooms in the slums in India, has large, indirect costs that are felt elsewhere in society. And these can be addressed through purposeful interventions.
Criado Pérez presents incredible statistics that reveal gender discrimination. One cannot help but be impressed by the mountain of findings and examples that the author provides. Surely there’s a problem somewhere.
What the problem is, and how to fix it, is much less clear. One problem seems to be our unconscious biases. According to some of the findings presented, men and women may not believe that women are as capable and competent as men. And clearly this isn’t the case: women are as capable and competent as men.
One issue that complicates the value of the book is its dichotomous definition of gender. For a book published in 2019, it is surprising that there was no place in the book for those that don’t fit neatly into the description of male and female.
One issue that concerns me: including folks who don’t define themselves as male or female would have watered down some of the core arguments of the book. Is this why the author decided to choose this route?
Another central theme of the book also positions women as carers (e.g. of their children or of the eldery). While it’s important to recognize this unpaid labor, it created another gap: the acknowledgement of the large group of women who don’t have children or don’t consider themselves carers. A woman doesn’t need to be defined by the role of a ‘carer’.
Criado Pérez offered many strong, practical policy suggestions that we need to implement immediately. Others were less practical. For example, she laments the lack of data on women’s vaginas. She even complains about this lack of data as if some unnameable oppressive force was preventing this data collection. Another less practical idea she suggests is to build treadmills that ask you for your gender before you use them. Perhaps she hasn’t considered why many people wouldn’t want to share their gender data with a treadmill?
When the book transitioned to talking about women at work, it lost its transformational appeal for me. The author claims to have unlocked several entrepreneurial opportunities that could result in billion-dollar markets: cars built for women, smaller smartphones for women’s smaller hands, special seat belts for pregnant women, pianos for women and more. I believe some of these ideas are terrific, while others are impractical. Either way, one has to be skeptical and ask — if these are such obviously great business opportunities, why hasn’t anyone done them yet? Similarly, following some of the tangential arguments of the book, it seems that the author identified another hidden opportunity: companies founded by women, with all-female staff (to take advantage of unfair hiring practices and discriminatory promotion practices).
The book successfully makes the case that many work systems were made by men and for men, and that this minimizes and marginalizes the other 50% of the population. By presenting strong arguments, great evidence and vivid examples, she presents a great case which I bought into. But I don’t believe that the working world was built for men with the purposes of oppressing women. The first purpose of working was survival. Then, the purpose shifted to producing labor to maximize profits. Our collective suffering and attempts to survive and thrive were the primary concern, not the advancement of one gender over the other. This is why I disagree with the author when she claims that the bow and arrow, the plow and the brick are sexist instruments.
I do believe that the workplace needs to continue to evolve, and hopefully at a much more rapid pace. I also believe in a more conscious world, where we can add a thoughtful pause and create a more just society. I believe Caroline Criado Pérez pushes us in the right direction, and that her ideas will help us create a purposeful world, by design.
A guide to making smarter decisions in business and in life. Cunningham argues that most people make mistakes not because they lack intelligence, but because they fail to think critically and strategically about their choices.
Three sections:
- importance of asking better questions
- taking calculated risks, rather than making hasty or impulsive decisions
- strategies for implementation and execution, including tips for staying focused and motivated.
My favourite questions to reflect on:
- What are the possible reasons I’m noticing this symptom?
- What is happening or isn’t happening, that if it did happen, would cause the perceived gap or symptoms to narrow or disappear
- What am I not seeing?
- The question should never be “should I pursue this opportunity?
- The question should be how many resources will it take to pursue this opportunity? Is this in my wheelhouse? What could go wrong? What are the potential return on investments? What is the cost if I’m wrong? Could I live with being wrong?
- Ask your customers, what would it take for us to be the best? What are you looking for in a partner? What would it take to get there? Find out what they want. FOWTW.
- Opportunity meet structure. What is the structure we need to make the progress I want? Opportunity meet structure. Structure equals leverage.
- What are the obvious bottlenecks in my business to continue to slow us down?
- What are the existing tools and mindsets that are no longer serving me?
- What are the things that consistently creep on my calendar, and what can I do about it?
- The customer persona the customer buyer journey. Who do I want to buy from me? What needs to happen for them to buy?What must happen to keep them coming back? What might cause them not to buy? Your customers get to define success, not you. What must happen for a customer to buy from us? What must happen for a customer to come back?
- What has to happen for the customer to say I would have to be crazy to do business with someone else.
- What expectations do my customers have that I’m not meeting?
- What do we need to eliminate? Or deprioritize questions and prioritize? Success proposition instead of value proposition?
- If my business could talk, what would it say?
- Why isn’t my target market using us now?
- If someone gave me the opportunity to buy my business today, how much would I pay for it? What can I do to increase his number by 50% in the next six months?
- What does my largest competitor do to address this issue? (How do they get new clients? How do they convert them?)
- Do I have the right causes set up to cause the effects that I want? In my relationships, health, career?
- How is the person I want to be going to do what I want to do? How would the person I want to be, do what I am about to do? How do I give my team ownership of their critical drivers?
- What are 3 to 5 critical drivers that I need to be measuring? What is the standard I need to set with the team?
General wisdom:
- On problems: Misdiagnosing the problem or systems will cause us to build the wrong machine.
- Mixing up the problem in the symptom. Separating the two is difficult and it seems to be at the heart of a lot of the discussion so farThe difference between a choice and an option. An option is an idea. A choice is executable.
- When a staff underperforms, you apologize. The apology: I apologize for choosing peace and tranquility instead of the results we were after. I apologize for not holding you to a higher standard. But things are about to change
- A mistake avoided counts in the speed of growing your business
- Only do good deals. The result of bad deals is that 90% of management’s attention is directed towards fixing the bad deal. And the result is that it’s still a bad deal deal
- Ordinary things done consistently produce extraordinary results. Stop looking for a magic pill.
- Find out what they want. FOWTW
- The single most powerful force I have in my life are the words I used to describe my situation. Why? Because they label the experience. Put another way, once you name your dog it’s yours.
- Simplifying growth. When thinking about growth, stay away from tactics at first. For example, hiring a new salesperson, search engine optimization, sales and discounts. Instead engage in thinking time. What is our number one obstacle preventing us from doubling our sales?
- A strategy is an idea about what needs to happen to overcome the obstacle preventing forward progress
- You think about what might go wrong, you are more likely to design something that might go right.
- What costs me money is what I don’t see. But I don’t see the assumptions behind my ideas.
- Give teams or team members their majors and minors. What are their priorities?
- Main points. Mistakes are due to overly optimistic and emotional decisions.
- There are no secrets. Just stuff you haven’t learned yet.
- JP be careful about my optimism. Went to use it and when to be suspicious of it. This will help me this more successful in business and in planning how I spend my time and what I make my better what I like to bet on
The big eight planning process:
- Number one: outcomes
- Number two: obstacles
- Number three: the plan or system. Resources, milestones, interim targets.
- Number four: the process tactics machines tasks. Skills training resources required
- Number five: The team of A players who have a high emotional need to succeed. The experience: been there, done that to execute. And a scorecard.
- Number six: the critical standards and drivers deliverables that must be delivered to measure progress. To ensure the timely delivery of standards.
- Number seven. The dashboards that measure results and track progress and allow for adjustments along the way. Without a dashboard, you get a story.
- Number eight. The accountability and coaching conversations.
3 pillars of success
- Write down your key outcomes everyday
- Make time in your calendar for what is most important
- Get an accountability partner
On customers:
- Why are potential buyers turning us down? Number one reason: risk of failure. Thinking that it might not work for them. Friction. Cost of switching. Number three the difference that makes the difference. Clear explanation of: here is what we do and how old way is different. Others vendors do that and it’s different because of that. Other vendors.
- What does success look like for the customer? Figure this out and give it to them.
- Give the customer certainty of success. This is the best the best growth strategy
- What potential risks or fears do customers see or imagine that could be preventing them from doing business with me?
- What is the frictionless promise that we can make to clients?
- How does the unaware buyer define success?
The Practice: Shipping Creative Work
by Seth Godin
- Establish a “Practice” to ship whatever you create to a schedule. The discipline of doing that will cause you to be even more creative in the future.
- Write every day. Blog, and record your thoughts. It will establish your identity, and help you arrange your thoughts. That’s the foundation for your creative output of the future.
Highlights
- If you want to change your story, change your actions first.
- Why project identity backwards when you can project it forwards? Do, then be. Not be, then do. Then do.
- Process or practice saves us from the poverty of our intentions.
- Focus on my process and practice. Not on the outcomes.
- Focus on showing up and can’t control. Not when you can worrying.
- Worrying is the quest for a guarantee
- Do what you love is for amateurs. Love what you do is for professionals
- What would you do if you knew you would fail?
- Merely do it instead of just do it. Focus on the process without emotion narration
What would I be motivated to write about every day? What little stories can I tell about what I notice?
Write about what I have “faith” in? (Belief based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.)
- I have faith that so much more is possible than what is happening right now.
- I have faith that there are always new ways of looking at the world that can improve our lives.
- I have faith in perpetual change.
- I have faith that everyone is doing something wrong, therefore if you try to improve you could do something a little bit more right tomorrow.
- I have faith that humans have the potential to be powerful and motivated.
- I have faith that we all have the power to design and create great lives.
- I have faith in myself and my ability to transform, surprise myself, reinvent myself, disappoint myself, achieve incredible things. I believe in my ability to sabotage myself.
- I have faith that self transcendence is accessible to anyone.
- I have faith that radical human evolution is needed if the planet and its people will reach their full potential.
- I have faith that humans have so much room left to grow to understand how to live, how to work, how to love.
Reread: A man’s search for meaning
