Mental Pivot #53: A Learning Journal
Chronicling progress through the lessons we learn, internal vs. external benchmarks, and how to fix social media.
Ever get to the end of a week and wonder what the heck happened? This happens all too often in my life. I don’t like that feeling at all.
In the past, I’ve countered this by keeping a journal. Unfortunately, when the pandemic hit, routines fell apart and my daily journaling habit suffered.
I thought I’d try something different to revive my journal and push back against the problem of wondering “what the heck happened this week?”; I set the bar really low and simply recorded one interesting thing I learned each day over the course of seven days.
After all, if you learn something new each day of the week, that’s a pretty good week, isn’t it?
In the interest of encouraging others to chronicle their weekly learnings, here’s my log from the past week:
🗓️ Friday: Reading Lisa Cron’s Story Genius (book on storycraft) and she makes a great point about not confusing linear and non-linear processes for complementary activities. For example, reading a novel is linear, one proceeds sequentially from start to end. On the other hand, writing does not proceed in such an orderly fashion; a writer might start at the end or develop their work out of sequence or in a haphazard fashion (i.e., don’t expect to write linearly!).
🗓️ Saturday: Learned about “Agrivoltaics” (Wikipedia) while proofreading my daughter’s newsletter, Veggie Digest. Agrivoltaics is the dual-use of land for solar energy growing crops. The solar panels provide shade and minimize evaporation. Neat synergy.
🗓️ Sunday: Learned Yukie Smith’s piano arrangement for Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” (YouTube video of her rendition) that demonstrates simplicity, restraint, and beauty—quite the trifecta. Note: a copy of the sheet music is available from Joni Mitchell’s official site (PDF download).
🗓️ Monday: Learned how to make aji verde after realizing that every time I eat at a Peruvian restaurant, I can’t get enough of that tasty green sauce. I used this recipe from Adrianna Adarme which turned out great. No idea about the authenticity, but the author has a Peruvian mom and Colombian father which was good enough for me.
🗓️ Tuesday: Learned the correct pronunciation of “sluice.” It should have been obvious that it rhymes with juice, but all my life I’d thought that it was more like the vowel sound you hear with “Lewis.” Oh well, English is weird. I could fill a daily journal exclusively with things I learn about language.
🗓️ Wednesday: Learned about the “weird” light at the bottom of a mug in a cool YouTube explainer. Impressive visual demonstration on curves, envelopes, and light. While the math went over my head, there’s still benefit in grasping the fundamentals of physical phenomena and developing my general intuition.
🗓️ Thursday: My 9-year-old reminds me that a job isn’t just what you do to earn a paycheck. During our morning commute, he remarked that his mother had been working at the same hospital for 15 years. I replied that I never lasted 10 years at one gig. Without a pause, he responded: “Dad, you’ve been a dad for 20 years.” Touché.
So there’s my week in seven vignettes. It was a fun exercise and a great reminder of the myriad experiences and learnings I encounter over a short span of time. There is something satisfying about looking back at the week and having something concrete and specific to reflect on and say: “Oh yeah, so that’s what I learned. Good week!”
I hope everyone reading this has a good week too.
For further inspiration, check out Rohan Rajiv’s blog, A Learning a Day. Rohan has been blogging about his daily learnings since 2008! Quite a feat. If a learning journal for one week is awesome, how much more so is one that spans 13+ years?
Now onto this week’s recommendations…
Thinking Tools:
The Forgetting Curve: The Science of How Fast We Forget: Anne-Laure Le Cunff describes Hermann Ebbinghaus’ groundbreaking experiments from the 1880s on memory and how it decays over time. Recent studies have shown Ebbinghaus’ findings are replicable and experimentally sound.
How Learning Works: Roman Kudryashov explains key concepts related to learn in an especially clear and logical fashion. Among the components he defines as part of a greater system of learning: knowledge, experience, skill, performance, coaching, mentoring, and feedback. It’s an exercise in foundational principles.
Internal vs. External Benchmarks: “There are two ways to measure how you’re doing: against yourself and others.” As you might expect, aim for the intrinsic motivations where possible (the Stoics concur).
The Reading Obsession: A look at the habits of Warren Buffet. The article starts with something of a straw-man, but once you get past that, there are helpful insights on the habits of the world’s most successful investor (many culled from Alice Schroeder’s highly regarded biography, The Snowball).
Reading Enrichment:
Culture Shock: A graduate student from Pune, India studying in the United States offers his observations about life in America. It’s always fun and illuminating to see how differently people see the world and to understand their point of reference—a different spin on things I take for granted!
How to Fix Social Media: Nicholas Carr (author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains) examines the two-pronged regulatory approach regarding telecommunications and broadcast media in the United States during the 20th century and the goal of balancing free speech, privacy and the public interest. Readers learn about the common carriage standard, public interest standard (and its legal ambiguities), and fairness doctrine—the latter was abolished altogether in 1987. Does the past offer clues for how we might “judiciously regulate” the internet? Even if you are averse to government regulation and censorship of any kind, Carr’s piece spotlights issues worth considering.
How Long Can We Play?: Chris Ballards’ long-form piece for Sports Illustrated is a sweeping look at athletic mortality, physical decline, and the technologies employed to maintain peak performance for as long as possible (I’m looking at you Tom Brady). Consider this: in 1982 there was only one player over the age of 35 playing in the NBA (National Basketball Association); today there are 16 players over that age. While the pros have access to cutting-edge therapies, there are longevity tips near the end of the piece to help us plebes play longer too.
The Intelligence of Bodies: Jan Swafford, composer and music scholar, offers his thoughts on the recent AI-generated realization of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony (based on unfinished sketches left by Beethoven when he died). His ideas on what makes human vs. machine accomplishments “interesting” are worth pondering. Specifically: does the struggle and effort behind a difficult feat mean something?
Meet Skimpflation: One Reason Inflation Is Worse than Reported: “The economywide decline in service quality that we're now seeing is something different…we're paying the same or more for services, but they kinda suck compared with what they used to be. We propose a new word to describe this stealth-ninja kind of inflation: skimpflation.”
Odds & Ends:
YouGlish is a tool for improving your pronunciation for over a dozen different languages including Arabic, English, French, Japanese, and Russian. For English learners and people who can’t pronounce the word “sluice” properly (that would be me, if you read the intro to this week’s newsletter), YouGlish lets you search for a specific word and serves a YouTube clip featuring native speakers using that word. Even better: you can specify what type of accent you’d like to hear (e.g., United States, United Kingdom, Australian, Canadian, Irish, Scottish, or New Zealand).
The Summer of Math Exposition Winners were recently announced by Grant Sanderson (the creator behind 3Blue1Brown). 3Blue1Brown is one of the very best YouTube video explainer channels for tricky math and science concepts (I found the neural networks series and cryptocurrency episode especially helpful at my last gig). The contest was geared towards encouraging the development and visibility of more quality content from other creators in the same vein.
The Most Brilliant Bookshops in the World: a roundup of awe-inspiring destinations for bibliophiles. This would make for a wonderful travel touring itinerary (though the spotlight destinations are quite distant from one another and the languages of inventory varies).
Cross-Promotions:
The Sample: A newsletter discovery tool. Based on your interests and feedback, The Sample sends a new newsletter recommendation to your inbox on a daily or weekly basis.
The Veggie Digest: A weekly newsletter about the latest trends in sustainable food innovation. My daughter, an environmental policy student, writes it and I periodically contribute to it.
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