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- Be Jon Snow
Today at a glance:
Essay: How being Jon Snow can help you to learn better.
Article: On filtering the noise in the information age.
Quote of the week: Jeff Bezos's take on stress
Books I’m reading: Non-fiction books on the Compounding effect, self-growth, and a sci-fi bestseller.
BE JON SNOW
"You know nothing, Jon Snow." Game of Thrones fans, rejoice. I'm inviting you to embody Jon Snow. What do I mean by that?
In our universe (the one without dragons), if you want to succeed, you must let go of past habits and embrace new ones. Mastering the art of unlearning is essential for continuous learning and progress.
Our brain habitually holds on to existing beliefs and rejects anything new. Let's forgive our powerful brain, it’s just trying to make things easier for itself. However, in order to progress and grow, it is necessary to constantly level up.
Like doing a 100 kg deadlift forever will keep your strength even-steven, doing the same things over and over will keep you at the same place. What got you here isn't likely to get you there. It’s the constant process of learning, unlearning, and relearning.
Like doing a 100 kg deadlift forever will keep your strength even-steven, doing the same things over and over will keep you at the same place. What got you here isn't likely to get you there. It’s the constant process of learning, unlearning, and relearning.
Ego is the enemy: I’m not referring to the book by Ryan Holiday. Ego really is the enemy. It stops you from learning because it easily becomes inflated with mastery in just one thing. A mere solitary taste of success can make you delusional. You lose touch with reality and overestimate your worth and potential. And you might even be supersmart and excellent at your skills. Feeling proud about it will trap you where you are. You will stop growing if you don’t update yourself.
Separate yourself from your thoughts and beliefs.
This is one of the reasons why our parents and grandparents are so rigid and aren’t very accepting of new things. They believe they know what’s best for you because they have experience. But experience doesn’t always translate to wisdom.
Knowing nothing is a great start. You can’t learn what you think you already know. Always be ready to drop your beliefs and what you earlier thought was true. Your old thought patterns, prejudices, biases. Your ego.
Know nothing. Be Jon Snow.
THIS WEEK’S ARTICLE
In this article, I have talked about why one should have control over what you put into your mind. Same as what you put into your body. How you're constantly distracted and overwhelmed by information. And how can you limit the junk.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
This is from an interview in the early 2000s during the initial days of Amazon. One of my favorites.
Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over, so if I find some particular thing is causing me to have stress that’s a warning flag for me, what it means is there’s something that I haven’t completely identified perhaps in my conscious mind, that is bothering me and I haven't yet taken any action. I find, as soon as I identify it, and make the first phone call or send the first email message. Whatever is it that we are gonna do to address this situation, even if it is not solved. The mere fact that we’re addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from so stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn't ignore.
~ JEFF BEZOS
BOOKS I’M READING
I completed The Compound Effect | by Darren Hardy two weeks ago. A short book on how compounding principles can be leveraged to get extraordinary results. A good book if you’re not familiar with the concept of compounding and how this model applies in various areas of life. I'm currently reading Ready Player One | by Ernest Cline and The One Thing | by Gary Keller. I am usually reading more than 10 books at any given time. These two are the ones I'm looking forward to completing by this weekend.