Daily Dose of Positivity: Good Study Habits

 The worst study habits we have and what to do instead

 1. Staying up late and waking up early to study

2. Counting hours and massing

3. Not knowing what to study

4. Counting the volume of studies

5. Procrastinating till you have all the notes or planning too much

6. Not chilling, partying, gaming, dating, etc.

7. Neglecting food, water, and exercise

 The best study techniques and strategies science has to offer

 1. Spaced repetition: revise information with increasing gaps in between

2. Interleaving : Study multiple related topics simultaneously

3. Chunking: Study small coherent groups of information together in small sizes

4. Meta-cognition: Sit back and think about your learning

5. Retrieval practice: Prove you can remember what you’ve learned

6. Mood, Arousal, & Fun: Keep having fun and make learning relatable & meaningful

 What if your concentration is poor and you are easily distracted?

 1. Make information challenging

2. Study with background music

3. Use a combination of interleaving & spaced repetition in short study sessions

16 Worst and Best Study Tips, Techniques & Habits [How-To] - Cognition Today

Daily Dose of Positivity: Managing emotional responses

Being able to manage our emotional responses, even in the face of adversity, is a foundation of emotional capacity building. Being able to manage our emotional responses, even in the face of adversity, is a foundation of emotional capacity.

People who constantly overreact emotionally are also less likely to receive the feedback they need to improve.         

If a person breaks into tears every time we give them feedback, most of us would come to dread those feedback conversations, and eventually might avoid them altogether. 

Learning to handle feedback—and proving to others that you can handle adversity and difficult situations—is a huge part of building your capacity, personally and professionally. 

Like many things in life & business, emotion has a time and place. It’s crucial to have your emotions be seen as an asset and not a liability. 

“Take control of your emotions before your emotions take control of you.” – Scott Dye

"If criticism from outside proves devastating, it is because it so readily joins forces with an infinitely more strident and more aggressive form of criticism that has long existed inside of us."

Daily Dose of Positivity: Assume positive intent always

We have a choice. We can assume negative intent from others, and be proven right when things go wrong. Or, we can assume positive intent and occasionally be let down, but build more positive and productive connections along the way.   

Is there an area in your life where you are increasingly assuming negative intent? Do you have a sense of what it is costing you and how you might assume positive intent instead? 

“When you assume negative intent, you're angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed. Your emotional quotient goes up because you are no longer almost random in your response.” – Indra Nooyi 

"If we take man as he really is, we make him worse, but if we overestimate him …. If we seem to be idealists and are overestimating, overrating man, and looking at him that high, here above, you know what happens ? We promote him to what he really can be."

Daily Dose of Positivity: Morality- A collective phenomena

 Over decades of focused research, the field has demonstrated that evaluating the moral compass of individual participants does little to advance our understanding of the morality or the actions of a large movement. Only by assessing the goals, tactics, and outcomes of movements as collective phenomena can we begin to discern the distinction between “good” and “bad” movements.

John Stuart Mill’s Philosophy of Equality

It allows everyone to decide how they can best contribute to society. “The loss to the world, by refusing to make use of one-half of the whole quantity of talent it possesses, is extremely serious.”

The story of Özlem Cekic, one of the first women with a Muslim immigrant background to be elected to Denmark’s parliament. Almost immediately after taking office, Cekic’s inbox filled with hate mail, including xenophobic comments and threats. Cekic courageously reached out and invited senders of this hate mail to have coffee with her, meetings she called “Dialogue Coffee.”

She learned through these meetings to separate a hateful viewpoint from the person expressing it in order to gain perspective. 

She also learned that people fear people they don’t know, and generalizations can lead people to dangerously demonize entire communities.

“The bad news is nothing lasts forever. The good news is nothing lasts forever.” 
– J. Cole

Daily Dose of Positivity: Effort and Talent

 If someone’s much better than you at something, they probably try much harder. You probably underestimate how much harder they try. I’m not saying that talent isn’t a meaningful differentiator, because it certainly is, but I think people generally underestimate how effort needs to be poured into talent in order to develop it. So much of getting good at anything is just pure labor: figuring out how to try and then offering up the hours."

The biggest change in my professional maturity came when I became Actually Responsible for things. ... I gained a lot of appreciation for people who make things, and lost a lot of tolerance for people who only pontificate. I found myself especially frustrated with my past self, whose default was to complain and/or comment, then wonder why things didn’t magically get better."

 “Most people never pick up the phone. Most people never call and ask. And that's what separates sometimes the people who do things from those who just dream about them. You have to act. You have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to crash and burn. With people on the phone or starting a company, if you're afraid you'll fail, you won't get very far."

— Steve Jobs

If you worked as hard at doing difficult things as you did avoiding them, you’d become unstoppable.

“A year from now you will wish you had started today.”

— Karen Lamb

Daily Dose of Positivity : Interaction vs Reciprocation

Every interaction you have with another human being is merely a mirrored reciprocation

"All you have to do if you want everything in life from everybody else is first pay attention; listen to them; show them respect; give them meaning, satisfaction, and fulfillment. Convey to them that they matter to you. And show you love them. But you have to go first. And what are you going to get back? Mirrored reciprocation."

The world is so damn simple. It’s not complicated at all! Every single person on this planet is looking for the same thing. Now, why is it that we don’t act on these very simple things?

Daily Dose of Positivity : Multidisciplinary in thinking

How many mistakes do you make when you understand something? You don’t make any mistakes. Where do mistakes come from? They come from blind spots, a lack of understanding. Why do you need to be multidisciplinary in your thinking? Because as the Japanese proverb says, “The frog in the well knows nothing of the mighty ocean.” You may know everything there is to know about your specialty, your silo, your “well,” but how are you going to make any good decisions in life—the complex systems of life, the dynamic system of life—if all you know is one well?

Munger calls “the big ideas” from all the different disciplines. You needn't be the master of all disciplines. You can have an idea of all disciplines to the extent your job or life demands.