Today at a Glance:

• The Learning Pyramid indicates that teaching is a much more effective driver of retention than reading or lecture. The goal should be to move rapidly to teaching in order to cement new learning.
• Richard Feynman developed a learning framework grounded in teaching and iteration that was highly effective for him during his illustrious academic career.
• The Three-Step Learning Model: (1) Read & Research to build a base, (2) Teach to cement learnings and highlight knowledge gaps, and (3) Assess & Iterate to fill the gaps.

Today at a Glance:

• Humans have a tendency to manufacture complexity. We make progress in our lives—personally or professionally—and decide that the best way to celebrate that progress is to sprinkle on a new bit of chaos.
• We can all laugh at this tendency to complicate life, but we should also find ways to simplify it.
• Here are 50+ short, timeless insights for simplifying your world—"hacks" for your life, careers, relationships, health, money, and more.

Today at a Glance:

• When compared to our ancestors, our lives appear to be filled with significantly more attention-grabbing pulls in a variety of directions. Our attention is more divided than ever.

• Attention residue is the idea that there is a cognitive cost to shifting your attention from one task to another. When our attention is shifted, there is a "residue" that remains in the brain and impairs our cognitive performance on the new task.

• To fight back: (1) Work in deep focus blocks, (2) take regular walks or breathers between higher value tasks, and (3) batch processing times for messages. Implement these three strategies and you will immediately see a difference in your work quality and efficiency.

Today at a Glance:

• The highest performers embrace software updates. They treat their minds like a code base that requires consistent updates and resets to improve upon the old.
• There are a variety of baseline rules for life that are deeply ingrained into our minds and in dire need of an update. Many of these rules are culturally ingrained, meaning they have been repeated and passed down with no regard for their continued accuracy, or the quality of their underlying assumptions.
• Today's piece shares 8 rules that have been commonly repeated, but that we should probably start breaking.

Today at a Glance:

• Becoming a father has changed a lot of things about my life. My relationship with time—specifically my awareness of the passing of time—has fundamentally morphed.

• The Paradox of Time: We are aware of the incredible value of our time but constantly take actions that are disrespectful of that value. We know how important our time is, yet we ignore its passage and engage in low value activities that pull us away from the things that really matter.

• Our time is finite, but we often fail to recognize it until it's too late. Asking the hard questions and doing the simple math that they require is how you can bring awareness to the surface and rethink your priorities and tradeoffs.

Episode at a Glance

• Ancient culture was marked by an embrace of friction. Modern culture is marked by an avoidance of friction.
• In our obsessive quest to reduce friction, we may be eliminating some of the moments, experiences, and texture that made us uniquely human.
• My Prediction: In a world of steadily decreasing friction, it will be those who are willing to embrace friction that will thrive. To become one, start by finding small ways to choose the hard way even as the easy way stares you in the face.

Today at a Glance

• A high performer is a person who consistently executes their craft at a top-1% level over an extended period of time.
• I'm very fortunate to be able to spend time with many such people during the normal course of my "work"—from CEOs to athletes to investors to artists. This means I have a front row seat for direct observation of what makes these people tick.
• This piece lays out 12 non-obvious traits of high performers, including the ability to modulate intensity, focus on questions, embrace healthy paranoia, and more.

Today at a Glance:

• I spent most of my life as the “busy” guy. If anyone asked how I was doing, I would always respond with some variation of “so busy!” or “good, but really busy!” I was actually busy, but it also became part of my identity—a weird brag I developed to try to signal my value and improve my own self-worth.
• In the modern era, everyone seems really busy. We say we are busy as a status signal and for self-protection—we feel we are busy due to over-connectedness, obsessive optimization, and failures of prioritization.
• Busyness has a whole host of negative effects on our lives. We work more but actually get less done on the things that really matter. What's more, busyness negatively impacts our physical and mental health, as well as our enjoyment of daily life.
• Escaping the Busy Trap involves three key steps: (1) reframe the goal to focus on output per unit input, (2) prioritize what truly matters, and (3) embrace boredom and free time.