I was first introduced to the idea of mapping your week listening to Cortex. In episode #24, Grey shares a hand-drawn version of an ideal two-week calendar for himself. I had never thought before about this way to sketch out and set expectations for how you would like your week to progress.
I took a few stabs at it in the past, but hand-drawing out a calendar got a bit too tedious for my liking, as did finding the best way to represent different blocks of time. I tried using a highlighter tool with different colors, but ran into the problem of remembering with ease what each color meant. It also didn’t help that it was only really easy to review that calendar on my iPad Pro and that OneNote is a bit too infuriatingly slow for my sanity.
I fell out of that practice after around two or three weeks, but recently came back around to the idea and took a different approach. Instead of drawing everything by hand, I created a simple spreadsheet in Numbers that uses conditional formatting and COUNTIF functions to assist in visualizing and thinking through a weekly plan. I will caution that I just created this spreadsheet as a method of approaching weekly planning on Sunday, so I have no idea if it will stick. That being said, you may download a Numbers or Excel template here and see an example fleshed out plan in the screenshot below (the example is included in the templates).
I touched on the topic of a theory of learning in a previous blog post. Currently, I’m reading two books by Tim Ferriss, as well as posts by Tim Urban about the way the brain works. While mulling over their topics, I spelled out a simple theory of learning as laid out below:
- Stop selling yourself short. Your number one action item is to overcome learned helplessness. I’ve met so many people who are capable of doing great work, but who for reasons unknown decide to draw a line for themselves in pursuing some challenge (“I’m not good at math”, “I don’t have your brain”, “That’s not how my brain works”, etc). Those excuses are absolute nonsense. Your brain is what you make it. I first heard the metaphor of learned skills as software from Daniel Dennett. In most cases, you’re the only person standing in your way. You’ve learned to be helpless and you may not even realize it. To understand more about learned helplessness, I encourage you to watch Veritasium’s excellent video on the subject.
- Pursue intellectual curiosities. I’m optimistic. I believe most people have one or two complex subjects they’d like to understand better. As for why people don’t pursue them, I don’t want to speculate too much. I suspect part of the reason is that many people don’t know where to start and/or expect to master the subject in one sitting, so they wait for some ideal time when some bolt of inspiration shoots down from the clouds and hits them in the chest. Don’t wait. If you’re interested in space, try browsing some space-related articles occasionally. Maybe look up a YouTube video or two. Be constantly dipping your toes in the water. One day, you may just go down a rabbit hole to learn something fascinating. Over time, you cumulatively build your understanding of a subject.
- Question everything. Turn everything you read and think you know over in your head. Poke it. Change some variables and see if your ideas hold up. Most importantly, don’t overestimate your own genius. You will be wrong often. That’s ok.
- Give yourself tough learning projects. Point #2 above is about feeding your brains bits of intellectual food over time to keep it churning. Learning isn’t just about snacking, though. To truly push yourself forward, you need to immerse yourself in a tough learning project such as picking up casual familiarity with a new language, learning to code in Python to automate the boring stuff, or understanding what the “stock market” is. When pursuing such a project, it’s especially helpful to think about Elon Musk’s analogy of knowledge as a tree. When things get hard, map everything out and try to figure out where your branch or trunk isn’t as strong as it needs to be to hold up the more complex knowledge that builds from it. Ask questions about that stop gap and try to immerse yourself in any answers you can find. Give multiple explanations and media a shot. You never know what will make the concept stick (one person’s special metaphor, a certain pace of explanation, a set of diagrams, a snide remark, etc). That’s how Tim Urban approaches researching topics for his excellent posts (the whole interview is great, but start at 28:40 for his learning process in particular).