💎 Friday Gems (Super Learning, Clarity Cards, Career Management Document, The Stories We Tell Ourselves, and much more!)

Become an experienced beginner.

Photo by Kendra Findlay on Unsplash

In this week’s edition:

• Learning: Fail productively… how to turn yourself into a super-learner

• Focus: Clarity Cards - A Simple 5-step System to Make Your Writing a Priority

• Career: An Essential Tool for Capturing Your Career Accomplishments

• Wisdom: The stories we tell ourselves

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Learning

💎 Fail productively… how to turn yourself into a super-learner

Our ability to learn is a key skill to help us do well at work and life in the present and is a foundational skill to help us thrive in our future. The quicker we learn and understand ideas, the faster we can master new disciplines and grow our skills.

How can we make sure the information we learn actually sticks?

What if Unfortunately, many of our preferred learning techniques – such as reading and highlighting textbooks, or the drawing of colourful “mind maps” to summarise material – don’t offer enough mental challenge to make the information stick, leading to disappointing results.

Reading, highlighting textbooks, and rote memorization may be “easy and effortless options” and have gotten us through school but to give us the best chance of retaining information and recalling it when needed — we need a different approach.

Just like when we exercise and use weights as resistance which helps our muscles become stronger, the idea of adding “desirable resistance” in our learning helps our memory get stronger.

Strategies to help us learn better are:

• Take a Pre-Test quiz - Quiz yourself on the concepts you are about to learn even before you have started learning. This primes the brain to absorb information once you have started learning.

• Teach it to someone else - This forces you to gain a deeper understanding of a concept so you can easily explain it to others.

• Mix it up - Interleaving is a strategy to rotate or switch between different parts of a topic you are learning. This helps the brain compare, contrast, and discriminate between concepts and, enhances recall, and improves critical thinking.

• Get moving - Exercise triggers neurotransmitters which are essential to memory function so going for a run before or after a learning session will help give you a natural memory boost.

• Change your environment - Our memory is context dependent so learning in different places helps our memory and recall be more flexible in different situations.

• Do nothing - Once we have added some desirable difficulties to our learning we can practice “wakeful rest” or minimal sensory simulation, yes, that’s no Netflix, to help our brain cement the learning.

I am fascinated by the “desirable difficulties” concept which again is adding just enough friction in the learning process to give our memory the best chance to take in and retain information.

Source: David Robson in The Guardian

Focus

💎 Clarity Cards - A Simple 5-step System to Make Your Writing a Priority

Sometimes we get stuck in our day to day, responsibilities, priorities, work, that we lose touch with what is truly important for our creative growth.

I recently learned about Clarity Cards by Dan Blank.

You need to begin with Radical Clarity — to know what matters most to you so that you can double-down on it. This process is not just about achievement, but about having a sense of fulfillment.

So if you’re feeling stuck or just need a gentle nudge to refocus on your creative goals then try it out. I’m going through this exercise right now too and I’m excited to see what my pyramid of prioritized cards looks like.

Source: Dan Blank - We Grow Media

Career

💎 An Essential Tool for Capturing Your Career Accomplishments

Here is my usual stressful approach to a job search:

1. Wait until I’m ready to find a job

2. Panic at my lack of an updated résumé and portfolio

3. Pull together a quick version of each for a job application

Maybe it sounds familiar to your approach too. Yes, this is not a great way to go about such a critical part of the job search.

Instead, what if there is a better way to go about it?

Introducing “The Career Management Document” or CMD for short.

A Career Management Document (CMD) is a comprehensive collection of your résumé and portfolio content. It’s a document you update regularly, over time, with all the work you’ve done.

As you go about your days, write down your accomplishments in the format of a resume bullet.

Jessica shares a few helpful examples on how to document your accomplishments:

• Coached a student on writing a stronger portfolio story to showcase their advanced UX skills, resulting in the student getting a job interview.

• Facilitated an end-of-study analysis in under 90 minutes to help the team synthesize user research data from 12 participants.

• Led a remote retrospective with teams in two offices, developed actionable takeaways, and ended on time despite a delayed start.

This is a great way to keep track of your major accomplishments so you can use them at any time during your job search process. Plus it feels great and is reward to see a long list of work you have achieved that would have been lost to memory otherwise.

It’s never too late to start your career management document and keep adding to it periodically.

Source: Jessica Ivins in A List Apart

Wisdom

💎 The stories we tell ourselves

"The narrative we've constructed about life-what the world is like, how we must behave, where we fit in the scheme of things-forms a bubble that cuts us off from life as it really is.”

Stephen Bodian

That’s it for this week’s gems!

If you are enjoying this newsletter, please feel free to let me know. It’s always nice to know that people are out there. 💜

Curiosity will save us,