10 thousand hours; Burnout; Fresh minds
Milk, No Sugar #273
💡Think
A useful question to ask yourself when you’re feeling overwhelmed is, “how many of me are there?”
The answer is obviously one, which can force a reset and a chance to consider how much we’re taking on and whether it’s useful to our targets.
When we hit this point of realising that there’s an imbalance, we can start to delegate or de-prioritise what it is we’re trying to cram in.
Delegation is a scary word, but I get paid to talk about the benefits of collaboration, so we’re all aligned yessss?
And de-prioritising can become our best friends if what we’re working on doesn’t align to our long term goals. This feeling can be shared across your team (if at work) and assessing whether what you’re doing is actually important can be the best thing for a growing to-do list.
📷 Look
📖 Read
❶ Here’s 10 thousand hours, don’t spend it all at once
I love the sentiment here – we all believe that hyper focus on our one “thing” will ensure expertise, yet there’s evidence to suggest that deep work on a few things can actually allow us to become a multi-expert (I just made that word up). It’s when we are consistently distracted by myriad things that our focus and progress starts to stall.
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❷ Burnout runs deeper than too much work
In my circles at least, burnout is the word of the moment. Who isn’t? This article doesn’t take the word on face value, and attributes this feeling a lot more to our “obsessively passionate” nature, i.e. the need for approval. In this lens, it makes so much sense why people in the creative industries are feeling it.
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❸ Keeping your (design) mind new and fresh
This is a nice short one about how to keep your ideas fresh when you’ve hit a block by using the WOQE method – watch, observe, question, and explore. It’s great to have these kind of techniques to fall back on, as it’s so easy for a creative block to spiral and before you know it, you’ve been staring at the same thing for 4 hours without progress.
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Bonus round
You need to fix your startup’s leadership debt
The mystery font that took over New York
And the best thread of the week:
🎧 Listen
Daniel Kahneman doesn't trust your intuition
Everyone’s favourite Nobel Prize winning psychologist, philosopher… economist (?) is interviewed here about his life’s work and take on what it means to be “wrong”. The main takeaway here really is that you need to know when to accept that you don’t know something, and work out how you can get to the point at which you do.
Listen to this podcast (37 minutes)
🙌 Share
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🙏 Thanks
Have a great week,
Luis Ouriach
@disco_lu