Yasim's Blog

First, welcome to the club. Checkbox 1: Was This Really My True North? Sometimes things fail. Why? Because you may not have cared enough. The fact is, highly capable people are often driven to success standards that are extrinsically measured — e.g. they provide external credentialization — but have little in common with what they truly wanted to accomplish. If you are working without meaning in a role, task, or job, your missing drive will make it harder for you to succeed. If you are conducting a post-mortem of a failure, ask yourself, Was I truly self-motivated to succeed, or was someone (or something) else driving me to succeed? If you were following your authentic "true north" — a goal, purpose, or calling you know you were born to follow — it makes sense to evaluate how and why things went awry. Checkbox 2: Was My Own Standard Reasonable? Failure has much to do with internal expectations. If things don't go your way when you're launching a new strategy, or pitch...

Here are ten big ideas from Abby Marks-Beale’s 10 Days to Faster Reading … #1. Linear Reading is Inefficient – You Don’t Have to Read Every Word to Extract Value from Non-Fiction Material The purpose of non-fiction reading is not to read every word on every page – it’s to extract useful information from the material. Growing up, most of us learned to read by starting with the first word on the first page, then continuing to read until we get to the last word on the last page. Unless you’ve learned structured non-fiction reading techniques, you probably still read this way, even though it’s extremely inefficient. Efficient reading is non-linear – a series of quick skims, skipping around, referencing, and note-taking. The purpose is not 100% eye-coverage of the text: it’s to extract all of the useful information that’s relevant to what you want to do. It’s easy to get hung up on “reading the book” as turning pages until there are no more pages to turn. Once you get comfortable with th...