Last night was one of the most amazing I've ever had!
Prior to that though, it was a jam-packed day as is normal now. Had a 4 hour work OKR retro with all the team members. I think we were able to end with several impactful action items, best practices, and modifications to our current process to continue improving as a company. I do concurrently think there is still a long way to go. I do like the idea of implementing some of the practices from The Leadership Dojo, to help us ground ourselves more physically, which can help in all facets of our life.
It was perfect weather in the evening, so had to take advantage and exercise so ran the usual 2 laps around the neighborhood. As the burner, I've kinda plateaued at about 2:10-2:14 for the neighborhood suicides. Been consistently getting times in that range the last 5-6 times.
Then did viz med for the first time in a few days and then chilled with Jaspreet for a bit, followed by Manju. Afterwards, I read The Leadership Dojo. I only got through maybe 4-5 pages in 1 hour. B/c I was relating so many concepts packed within those 4-5 pages to my life, what I'd been learning, etc. I filled up more than half the page of this date's entry with just the ideas that were sparked in that one hour. I don't think I've ever had so many insightful, revelatory, philosophical, practical ideas in a one hour span like that before. That was what made last night truly remarkable!
What really gets my intellect stimulated is ideas! I kinda knew that already but not to this level. What really hit me is the different in the context of the conversations that I had with my two friends, separately. One was focused more around the discussion of people, which can be useful at times but doesn't get me too excited. I'll cheerfully discuss the ideas of people, but just talking about what this one person said and how that person reacted doesn't bring out the best conversationalist in me. I'll happy listen to how those external events made them feel, as I know it's not healthy at all to repress any emotions. But just hearing in what my mind are just events, w/no discussion of feelings, learnings, ideas, etc. is not the best use of my time and energy. On the other hand, the other discussion I had I was much more engaged. In both conversations, I wasn't necessarily asked many questions, but I sensed the difference in my approach was that the context was based around the exchange of ideas and not events and people. Again, there's nothing wrong with either of these. I'm just observing the reflecting on how I felt and responded to the differences in the situations.
So that's one thing I realized as I lay in bed reflecting on my day. Another thing that I realized as I was reading in an involved manner was how to potentially replicate how I was learning in that hour. I was reading, taking notes, stopping to think and reflect on what that means, how that impacts my life, how I could possibly implement a takeaway from it, what ideas it sparked, how this relates to other things that have occurred in my life or other content that I've consumed. How do I replicate this in a sense in my school idea? How do I explicitly and implicitly place the most value in the quality of the education, not the quantity of the education. Education and learning is only as good as how it impacts your actions. In the book, he says "Because we're taught, and then assume, that insight is the end goal, it's not uncommon that we fall into shame and guilt when we can't act on our insights." An immediate example of this happened at work today. We were deciding how to change up our meeting structure, when we discussed the idea of reading the updates as part of the meeting itself (which is something Amazon does, btw). One person responded by saying something to the effect of "I know I'm not going to read the updates beforehand. I just know me. I won't." Which is smart that he's aware how he'll act in that situation even though he knows he probably should read it beforehand. There are just other things he'd prioritize. And I don't disagree with that prioritization. I'm just saying that knowledge of what we can do or should do doesn't always translate into action. Same thing with being on a fast or a diet but there's donuts laying out in the middle of the office. We know what we 'should' do if we want to be committed to whatever we're practicing. But it doesn't mean we follow that 100%. So going back to the original idea here, it'll by my job to discover how to emphasize the quality of what you're learning. I'd rather have a student read 3 pages of content and reflect about it for an hour instead of them reading 60 pages of content in an hour and have no application or action from that. It's not how fast you're going through the content, it's how deeply are you connecting with it?
Speaking of those connections, I was watching / listening to Jay Shetty's On Purpose podcast with Brian Grazer over the course of the past 2 days. He talks about and has written a book about face to face conversation. How can we connect with ourselves more and with others more and more deeply? making eye contact in a calm, relaxed manner can relieve any primitive fear that's built into our minds from millennia of evolution. This gives them permission, or at least increases the likelihood, of them reaching and sharing their souls, which in turn allows you to do the same. It was obviously perfect timing b/c the 4-5 page section in The Leadership Dojo was about facing. Facing situations with integrity, confidence, compassion. We choose to "face our problems head on", "we stand up for what we believe in", etc. These are all intentionally facing - giving some aspect of our life the time and energy. So I related that to our OKR meeting again yesterday morning. When one person was giving their updates, I noticed that everyone's body was facing the screen, including the speaker. I, instead, was faced towards the speaker, trying to really listen to what they were saying. I can read the updates whenever I want to since they're distributed to everyone. Plus, I'm not listening to a screen speak. I want to face the current situation with respect, confidence, compassion, solutions. Now I only did this b/c I had been reading the prior sections of the book and was focusing my awareness on body postures and language of myself and others. I do regularly what everyone else was doing. It's so easy to not be aware of small actions and habits like that but bringing my awareness to it, even for a short time period was insightful and revealing. Idk I was necessarily going to read the facing section, but it's "funny" how they all work out like that.
Which had me going down another train of thought last night. There are probably / undoubtedly these connections happening around us all the time every day. Do we have enough awareness, focus, and clarity to be able to distinguish the signal from the noise of our lives. Doing meditation and Tai Chi, among other things, have helped with that practice of being intentional about how we direct our mind and body. I hope to only continue seeing these connections among all the ways I'm intentionally investing my energy. Then as I'm continuing to practice this commitment, it becomes just a natural part of me. I'll just be unconsciously looking for the connections every day. And then, every day is a lesson if we're paying attention! We just aren't a lot of the time, so the days go by without any focused reflection and we live the same cycles of days.
Then this thought sparked another rabbithole of how I can intentionally be aware of connections and learnings from the day. Caused me to continue to iterate on my current list journal practice. I changed up the design a bit to incorporate the potential changes. I added for today a 'Learning' section, which has 3 lines, or areas of learning. Self, people, world. So I have to learn something about myself. Something like the pure love of ideation and the synthesis of them. Something about other people. Can be through interaction directly (verbally or non-verbally) or by watching content, etc. Then the world - something that is the more literal interpretation of learning. Some explicit fact, idea, concept, word, etc. about a specific subject like finance, education, marketing, etc. And then I thought about why yesterday happened. To see the distinction b/w which types of convos I'm engaged in the most, for example. So why not apply that to every day? So created a small section at the bottom titled 'Why did today happen?' where I can synthesize and analyze my entire day and learn from it. If I can fill this out every day, I'll have a greater sense of purpose and connection to everything that I'm TLDRing.
Speaking of which, I then postulated, why not embrace the constant evolution of my journaling process. I could create a TLDR of Life journal that has the sections I have in my journal. But there would be many options to choose from that would reflect the many steps along the iteration process I've been on. Different levels so if someone is just starting out, the ones with more sections wouldn't be recommended since they could be overwhelming. Ultimately, I wrote some quick notes out in a project page in the Project database in Notion and categorized as Someday / Maybe. So let's see if this idea ever comes to life.
I was also thinking a lot about questions. They can tell a lot about a person. Perhaps, and I'd argue so, more so than the answers they give. I value the people who ask me questions. And not just any questions. Good. Great. Profound. Mundane. Underrated. Under-asked. Universal. Granular. Questions. So then I asked myself this question: Can I ask a questions that no one has ever asked before? I think that is true progress.
So combining the questions and my affinity to connecting, I took it back to my podcast and how I could potentially make it better. Make listeners think. Make myself think. Make the guest think. Couple of ideas popped up. Perhaps starting the episode(s) / series (at least the ones with guests in the future) with 3 deep breaths. Gives myself time to be at ease as well as the guest and be relaxed. And perhaps the even the listener. The other ideas was that in the course of a conversation, the guest would probably have questions for me, so that's normal. But I want there to be an intentional time when the guest asks me a question. Perhaps even immediately following the 'Ice Bath' idea. This hopefully doesn't come across as an egoistic move. But one more related to the idea that you can get to know someone even better by the questions they ask rather than the answers they provide. So, in essence, the listener should really be paying attention to the question, and not necessarily the answer. So let's how I can incorporate that into my episodes. This was also partly sparked by Jay Shetty's Final 5 questions (rapid fire style) to Brian. He asked Brian if you could speak to anyone, dead or alive who would that be? He said the pope. After being asked why, Brian posed a question that made me stop and think myself. Was definitely impressed he had come up with such a deep question on the spot like that. Hopefully, I can create those casually profound moments in my podcast too.
All this and more came to me within the span of an hour. Which is wild. All sparked from just reading 5 pages in a book. Looked it up and realized that I'm not constantly engaging in synthetic thinking: the combination of ideas into a complex whole.
What I could potentially try going forward is to just ideate by synthesizing at night and getting all of them on paper. Then the next day, after I've had time to sleep on them, I can formulate more coherent and articulate thoughts and ideas that are original, at least to me at that current point in time.
LOL. I'm addicted to thinking.
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