Stories Help You Make Sense Of Your Life

Each week, subscribers to my email newsletter receive a summary of the some of the articles, podcasts, blogs and other materials I view as most compelling. Here’s a snapshot from a newsletter in November.

If you’d like to be added to my list, please email me at: kevin@kevinjordan.coach.

Articles

"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."

"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." "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." "Incredible memory capacities are latent inside all of us — we just have to use the right techniques to awaken them." "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." "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." "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." "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." "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." "These six millennials make millions. So why do they share a house?" TED Talks/Podcasts"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.'" "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." "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." "John Green reviews humanity’s capacity for wonder and sunsets." [This podcast, The Anthropocene Reviewed, is outstanding!]

Photo by Simon Maage on Unsplash