Making Sense:
Shared meals and stories are the raw material of our lives. Through them, we engage in the daily active construction of meaning and relationships. Consuming media rather than savoring it is akin to semi-processing food -- its nutrient taken out.
If we want to conquer information overload, we need to treat what we read as food for the mind. When it comes to creating, the mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, and more says focus on the importance of solving the right problem.
- How to conquer information overload. Evan Doll: Flipboard now has over 100 million registered users around the world. The launch of the iPad proved to be a turning point for Flipboard as it became one of the first seminal apps for it. In his talk Evan talks about his welsh roots, how his Nan would find interesting clippings and send them to him. Like a modern day curator. And how information overload can be like empty calories and why we need to slow that information down, switch that phone off and start taking notice of the little important moments that are happening in our daily lives.
- What’s More Important to You: the Initial Rush of Prose or the Self-Editing and Revision That Come After It? WSJ: I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right. There would be nothing to revise if the initial prose didn’t exist. Without revision my work would be too ridiculous to bear, a pile of almost-good pages I’d rather burn than publish. The truest thing I can say about either one of them is, like the mother who loves her offspring beyond measure, I dislike them both equally.
Making Do:
Being intentional about our choices is critical -- whether we are selecting technology for our marketing programs, or learning to make time to recharge. Inferring answers from the opposite of the question, and doing it faster, comes with a steep cost. This week we looked at how Culture Drives 2015 Digital Trends: Making the Adobe Report Actionable.
- 9 big takeaways from last week’s #MarTech conference. Scott Brinker: The “marketing technologist” label is simultaneously a big tent and an emerging field. It’s a big tent because it includes people from digital marketing, marketing operations, IT, software product development, ad operations, and agency creative technologists. Their official titles, backgrounds, and job descriptions vary tremendously. Yet there’s a unifying bond between them — applying technical talent and capabilities in the pursuit of brilliant marketing. [...] It’s an emerging field because, as a percentage of people working in marketing and IT, these hybrids are still relatively rare. But they’re multiplying, rapidly.
- It's the Weekend, Why Are You Working? HBR: our cognitive resources are a scarce resource that gets depleted and has to be refilled over time. Cognitive resources are important, allowing us to control our behaviors, desires, and emotions. [...] Just as the repeated exercise of muscles leads to physical fatigue, repeated use of cognitive resources produces a decline in an individual’s self-regulatory capacity. [...] In fact, depleting our cognitive resources can make it more difficult for us to follow our moral compass.
Making it:
Taking care of our minds is critical to leading productive work lives. In the professional sphere, people skills are as important as hard skills to succeed, and finding your voice is part of it.
- It's Healthy to Put a Good Spin on Your Life. WSJ: We all create narratives to process information and make sense of events, whether as explicitly as Mr. Baker or in subtler ways. The way we construct these stories has a large impact on our mental health, new research shows. The issue is much more complex than just “look on the bright side of life.” There are concrete, methodical approaches to changing how we think—and also wrong ways to do it.
- Here is Why Founders Should Care About Happiness. First Round: The most productive people in the world don’t just like what they do on an everyday basis — they enter a flow or high-performance state that brings them consistent satisfaction. [...] The other major component of flowing toward goals is coping well with stress and anxiety. [...] People are constantly shifting degrees between feeling safe and being in fight-or-flight mode at work.
- The Full-Stack Employee. Chris Messina: Being full stack is an exercise in shifting between opposite poles. While there’s often less support for individual work and a greater expectation of self-sufficiency (i.e. setting their own hours, using their own devices for work, etc), they’re also expected to collaborate and work in groups effectively.
[image Pixabay]