About the book

“No regrets.” You’ve heard people proclaim it as a philosophy of life. That’s nonsense, even dangerous, says Daniel H. Pink in his latest bold and inspiring work. Everybody has regrets. They’re a fundamental part of our lives. And if we reckon with them in fresh and imaginative ways, we can enlist our regrets to make smarter decisions, perform better at work and school, and deepen our sense of meaning and purpose.

In The Power of Regret, Pink draws on research in psychology, neuroscience, economics, and biology to challenge widely-held assumptions about emotions and behavior. Using the largest sampling of American attitudes about regret ever conducted as well as his own World Regret Survey — which has collected regrets from more than 16,000 people in 105 countries — he identifies the four core regrets that most people have. These four regrets, Pink argues, operate as a “photographic negative” of the good life. By understanding what people regret the most, we can understand what they value the most. And by following the simple, science-based, three-step process that he sets out, we can transform our regrets in a positive force for working smarter and living better.

With Pink’s signature blend of big ideas and practical takeaways, captivating stories and crisp humor, The Power of Regret offers an urgent and indispensable guide for a life well lived.

Source: https://www.danpink.com/the-power-of-regret/

 

About the author

Daniel H. Pink is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including his latest, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, published in February. His other books include the New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind — as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human. Dan’s books have won multiple awards, have been translated into 42 languages, and have sold millions of copies around the world. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.

Source: https://www.danpink.com/about/

 

Big idea #1 — Regret is not a dirty word

Regret can actually be healthy. Over 70 years of research has concluded two things; that regret makes us human, and regret makes us better.

It makes us human because it engages this uniquely human ability that we have to time travel in our minds; forward into a hypothetical future to look at our lives if we took one decision versus another decision, backwards to think about what decision we should make now, and then forwards again into a different path or an alternate reality, to compare that to our current future or an alternative future.

Regret is especially painful as well as an emotion, because we can mostly blame it on our own decisions and actions or inactions. It is also a very common feeling, and one that is highly valued.

It makes us better by;

• sharpening our decision-making skills (we need to feel a little bit bad in order to not to repeat those particular decisions or actions that we took or didn’t take)
• elevating our performance (it can deepen persistence by imagining ourselves winning that gold medal / aceing the test / getting the job that we’re about to go into an interview for)
• strengthening meaning and connection (by reminding us what is important, what we don’t want to do, what we do want to do, how we want to live, how we don’t want to live).

Obviously we don’t want our regrets to overwhelm us. There’s a quote in the book that says, we want regrets to “poke us, not smother us”.

Big idea #2 — The four types of regret

In the regret surveys that Dan created, adults shared their regrets and were asked to categorise them into eight domains. Those eight domains were family, partners, education, career, finance, other, health, and friends.

And they were in that order. So the most regrets were in the family domain, and the least regrets were categorised in friends domain. But when they looked at the data, they realised that they were looking at the categorisation or those domains all wrong, there was actually a different theming of the regrets that could be established.

Those four types of regrets are;

1. Foundational — a failure to be a responsible conscientious person or prudent. And most of the regrets here come into those financial educational and health domains. Often it’s a lack of the right decisions around what’s best for you in the future, or taking care of yourself now in order to be in a better place in the future period of time.
2. Boldness — most of these come from inaction forgone opportunities. We’re more likely to, and the fact that we’re more likely to regret what we didn’t do, so a boldness regret is a lack of boldness in the past.
3. Moral — taking the low road, which normally involves cheating, lying, deceiving, something bad in that. 
4. Connection — fractured or unrealised relationships with each other. The other term for this, this was rifts and drifts. So did you have a rift with someone; an argument or a falling out that was never really resolved, or did you just drift apart and you regret that and you feel guilty about not keeping in touch. Those come up later in life where maybe someone gets sick or passes away and you regret not staying in touch with them.

These underpin all of the domains, meaning it’s not the domain that regrets fall into that distinguish them, but the type of regret, or the reason that someone regretted the thing.

Other researchers that Dan spoke to said on boldness regrets that “regrettable failures to act have a longer half-life than regrettable actions”. Inaction is so much more painful for people, and throughout the book you can see this sentiment littered within the verbatim responses that people sent as part of the surveys.

Regrettable failures to act have a longer half-life than regrettable actions

It’s incredibly painful reading, you could almost read all the regrets and go away with a renewed sense of purpose and resolve to not let these things happen in your life.

Big idea #3 — Avoiding and fixing regrets

To avoid regrets we can learn from the ones we’ve already got, take different decisions and pathways in order to avoid doing those things again in the future. For regret we already have, we can do a few things to stop them smothering us.

Firstly we can undo it; maybe that’s apologising, or maybe it’s taking action and behaving in a way that will undo, improve, or fix what you did or didn’t do in the past.

Secondly we can ‘at least’ it; taking something from a regret to a relief or from an ‘if only’ to an ‘at least’.

Eg. Dan shares this example about his regret of going to law school, which wasn’t something he wanted to do. Rather than…

• If only I hadn’t gone to law school, try
• At least I met my wife there

This is good for the pesky stuff that niggles away at us. It’s a bit of gratitude and is more about changing the mindset around a particular regret.

This works for certain types of regrets, but you might have bigger ones or ones that are created by inaction, which can be harder to undo. The three steps to try here are;

1. Relive and relieve: disclosing the regret (to yourself or someone else)
2. Normalise and neutralise: practicing self-compassion, thinking how you would speak to a friend in the same situation who came to you for advice.
3. Analyse and strategise: creating distance between yourself and the regret by looking at it in the third person (eg Steph didn’t do X, rather than I didn’t do X)

 

 

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PS. I'll be doing an Ask Me Anything bonus episode in the next few weeks; if you've got something you'd like me to answer / tackle, email me [email protected]

 

About the book

All over the world, our ability to pay attention is collapsing. In the US, college students now focus on one task for only 65 seconds, and office workers on average manage only three minutes. New York Times best-selling author Johann Hari went on an epic journey across the world to meet the leading scientists and experts investigating why this is happening to us — and discovered that everything we think we know on this subject is wrong.

We think our inability to focus is a personal failing — a flaw in each one of us. It is not. This has been done to us — by powerful external forces. Our focus has been stolen. Johann discovered there are twelve deep cases of this crisis, all of which have robbed some of our attention. He shows how he learned this in a thrilling journey that takes him from Silicon Valley dissidents who figured out how to hack human attention, to veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD; from a favela in Rio where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, to an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore their workers’ attention.

Crucially, he learned how — as individuals, and as a society — we can get our focus back, if we are determined to fight for it. The answers will surprise and thrill you. This is a book about our attention crisis unlike any you’ve read before.

Source: https://stolenfocusbook.com/

About the author

Johann Hari is a British-Swiss writer who has authored three New York Times best-selling books. They have been translated into 38 languages, and been praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah to Noam Chomsky, from Elton John to Naomi Klein.

His latest book, ‘Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention’, was published in January 2022.

His first book, ‘Chasing the Scream: the First and Last Days of the War on Drugs’, was adapted into the Oscar-nominated film ‘The United States Vs Billie Holiday’. 

His second book, ‘Lost Connections: Uncovering The Real Causes of Depression — and the Unexpected Solutions’ was described by the British Journal of General Practice as “one of the most important texts of recent years”, and shortlisted for an award by the British Medical Association.

Johann’s TED talks have been viewed more than 80 million times. The first is named ‘Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is Wrong’. The second is entitled ‘This Could Be Why You Are Depressed or Anxious’.

Source: https://stolenfocusbook.com/the-author/

 

Big idea #1 — The 12 reasons you can’t pay attention

The book is structured around the 12 reasons we’ve lost our ability to focus. They are;

1. The increase in speed, switching, and filtering
2. The crippling of our flow states
3. The rise of physical and mental exhaustion
4. The collapse of sustained reading
5. The disruption of mind wandering
6. The rise of technology that can track and manipulate us
7. The rise of cruel optimism
8. The surge in stress and how it triggers vigilance
9. Our deteriorating diets
10. Rising pollution
11. The rise of ADHD and how we are responding to it
12. The confinement of our children, physically and psychologically

James Williams, a former Google strategist (and now dissenter) talks about this idea that we are living through, “a denial of service attack on our minds”. There’s so much information attacking our brains, they are overloaded and don’t function as well. We’re drinking from a firehose. 

 

Big idea #2 — The system is rigged

All of the 12 reasons have some link to a broader systemic issue. Talking to the different people and scientists and researchers etc, that Johann spoke to as part of this book, who have been doing the work around this, this is the common theme.

And this isn’t just about Facebook or big tech, but frankly most of the big tech companies reward structures are based around usage. More use = more data,, which is what they sell, which = more money. People from the inside of these tech companies are now speaking out about the decisions being made internally in those organisations, why they’re being made, and the impact of them.

It is completely in these company’s control to make those different decisions, make the ones that would actually be an improvement to society. That would maybe get back to where social media could have been, and maybe was 10-15 years ago when it first started. The things that made it appealing in the first place.

However, now they know that something that inflames or angers gets a bigger response; it gets more shares, and it gets more attention, which brings them more money. Therefore that’s what is pushed to us.

The timeline and the infinite scroll that’s a feature of a lot of social media platforms could also easily be changed at the flick of a switch, but they don’t, because the more you’re on there, the longer that infinite scroll keeps you there with the distorted timeline, the more information they’re gathering.

We can’t just tech detox ourselves out of this by silencing our notifications or going on a silent retreat. A lot of the people designing these platforms, won’t let their kids use them, and they won’t use it themselves. So it just goes to show that if they’re not eating their own dog food, why should we be the guinea pigs doing it?

Ex-Googler James Williams was speaking at a conference with leading tech designers. And he asked them the simple question; “how many of you want to live in the world that you are designing?”. There was an uncomfortable silence in the room, nobody put up their hand.

These platforms really are the dumbing down of humanity and society, and diminishing our attention at a time we need it more than ever. The way that social media platforms are changing the conversation and shaping the conversation, is really quite terrifying. And never mind when you get into the stories and the evidence around radicalization and some of the really dark things that social media platforms are feeding people and continue to feed people, because that’s how they’re designed.

We can’t just not use tech. It’s too simplistic and too unrealistic. But it is worth considering what we’re using and how we’re using it.

Johann speaks to Nir Eyal, who literally wrote the book (Hooked), which became the book these big tech companies used to build their platforms and build their systems and services in a way that people cannot escape from them. The interview is quite heated as Nir suggests that people just turn off their notifications, and if they don’t, that’s on them. There’s a role for personal responsibility, but when the system is designed for the opposite, it’s a real challenge at a societal level.

There’s lots of tech examples there, but it’s the same with some of the food systems about what gets rewarded; keeping costs low and therefore the decisions that are made in order to maintain the status quo, maximise shareholder profitability, rather than maintain (or improve) nutritional value.

Similar with climate change and pollution. There’s examples of different health, stress, and attention outcomes for people living in areas with more pollution, versus those who get to live in slightly cleaner areas.

It all goes to show the level of systemic decisions and issues at play in terms of the holistic health and wellbeing of society and populations.

And it’s really hard to read some of this and not feel like you’re being taken down a conspiracy theory route. But at the same time, given how public much of this information is, you realise it’s not really a conspiracy, this is actually how things are happening and we are the guinea pigs (and the product) in this experiment.

Big idea #3 — What to do?

One of the things that the book is not, is a book of hacks. This book is not about how to hack your way around the, the systems that are designed to set us all up to fail.

At the same time, it’s easy to throw hands up in the air and assume that we can’t do anything because there’s such huge power at play. There is a balance of using things in a smarter way, and looking for bigger change.

Some of the things that Johann talks about in terms of the individual things that he does include;

• keeping his phone in a kSafe (a lockable box with a timer, he’ll put his phone in there between certain hours, it locks and you literally cannot get your phone out before the time us up unless you smash it open)
• using the Freedom app, which you can use to block certain websites or block emails when you want to really focus on doing some focused, deep work.
• not beating himself up, but asking himself what he could do to get himself in a flow state if he feels distracted
• taking six months off of social media per year (including asking a friend to change his passwords), he doesn’t take six months off in one go, but he takes a couple of weeks off every month or, or breaks it up throughout the year
• going out for walks without his phone
• prioritising free play time with his godchildren 

He says that the pandemic has supercharged the direction in which we’re heading. If we were heading down a pretty miserable path, when it comes to technology use and our stolen focus beforehand, this has been exacerbated by the last couple of years as we’re much more connected, spending much more time on devices trying to block out the outside world, numbing ourselves, and more stressed. 

He also importantly, calls for a bigger change. He calls it Attention Rebellion, which would call for;

1. the banning of surveillance capitalism (or selling people’s information and attention for money),
2. advocating for the four day work week in order to reduce certain stresses and give people more space and time for the brain break that they need in order to work really well and connect and spend time doing other things, and
3. rebuilding childhood and the freedom around childhood that many people in earlier generations experienced and enjoyed, that is just not the case today.

He says it’s small creative groups of individuals and societies that will create this change, that’s why we have things like weekends. We need people who get together and say, ‘this is not good enough, something needs to change’. We need to be these people, and find these people; join them, vote for them, support them, whatever it needs to be, because without that, nothing will actually change.

 

 

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About the book

When it comes to recruiting, motivating, and creating great teams, Patty McCord says most companies have it all wrong. McCord helped create the unique and high-performing culture at Netflix, where she was chief talent officer. In her new book, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, she shares what she learned there and elsewhere in Silicon Valley.

McCord advocates practicing radical honesty in the workplace, saying good-bye to employees who don’t fit the company’s emerging needs, and motivating with challenging work, not promises, perks, and bonus plans. McCord argues that the old standbys of corporate HR―annual performance reviews, retention plans, employee empowerment and engagement programs―often end up being a colossal waste of time and resources. Her road-tested advice, offered with humor and irreverence, provides readers a different path for creating a culture of high performance and profitability.

Powerful will change how you think about work and the way a business should be run.

Source: https://pattymccord.com/book/

About the author

Patty McCord brings the Silicon Valley concepts of fresh ideas and innovation and applies them to rethinking the way we work. She challenges norms and invites us to reconsider the idea of “best practices.”

From her many years working with companies that range from very large global tech companies to small very small innovative start-ups, Patty saw first-hand how companies can become slow and complacent and employees become cynics and whiners. She spent 14 years at Netflix experimenting with new ways to work. Making the Netflix culture deck become reality for the people who work there. From abolishing performance reviews to challenging the need for policies, Patty believes people come to work as fully formed adults with a desire to make an impact and be proud of what they do and she’s on a mission to spread the word that we can do this differently. She is frequently in the media with interviews and articles from Harvard Business Review, NPR, Fast Company and The Wall Street Journal. She speaks at CEO Forums, Business schools and for large groups around the world.

Source: https://pattymccord.com/about-patty/

 

Big idea #1 — Your employees are adults

Your employees have power, but only if you don’t take it away. There’s been a big theme for a number of years around employee empowerment. We only need to empower employees if we disempowered them in the first place.

Netflix wasn’t built on elaborate systems. They kept stripping away policies, but they did it experimentally. This doesn’t therefore create a ‘free for all’, which is usually what people freak out and assume is going to happen when you start removing policies and procedures. Instead it removes the ‘senseless bureaucracy and stupid processes’, and instead focuses on discipline and behaviour.

This is what the Netflix culture deck is. It’s a summary of the behaviours that they expected people to be disciplined about in their time working for Netflix. 

Patty’s belief is that a business leader’s job is to ‘create great teams that do amazing work on time’. That’s it. We don’t need loads of policies and processes and practices in order to do that, we just need to create the environment where people can do their best work. And even more so to create a company where people want to come in and ‘solve these problems with these people’, which is one of the phrases that Reid Hoffman used when he was describing to Patty the company culture that he wanted to create.

Now it’s worth noting that Patty was at huge tech companies before Netflix. She was at SunMicrosystems for a number of years, which is a huge, traditional tech company. She wasn’t always in this super cool startup Netflix kind of place. She says in the book that she often in her previous life she had implemented some of the policies and procedures that she eventually began to question, as she began to realise they just weren’t effective, and therefore were a huge waste of time and resources.

 

 

Big idea #2 — The principles

These are lessons that Patty learn about how to instill principles and behaviors of high performance in teams and set a culture in an organisation.

All teams and companies are different, so you can’t just lift the Netflix culture deck and adopt it as your own, but these five principles seem to be common and true and underlying whatever the ‘culture deck’ would look like for a company:

1. We want to clear, open, constant communication about the work to be done and the challenges being faced. Not only for manager’s own team, but for the company as a whole.
2. We want people to practice radical honesty, telling one another, and us, the truth in a timely fashion. And ideally face-to-face.
3. We want people to have strong fact-based opinions and debate them avidly and test them rigorously. 
4. We want people to base their actions on what was best for the customer and the company, not on attempts to prove themselves right.
5. We want hiring managers to take the lead in preparing their teams for the future by making sure they had high performers with the right skills in every position.

(Can you imagine if this was the case in all companies, it would be utopia),

All of this shows the underlying principles of discipline, and creating the environment, the systems and the conversations that allow that to sustain. None of those require endless policies and practices.

One thing that Patty is really strong about in the book is about your people. really knowing and understanding the business. Your people aren’t going to make the best decisions, and possibly behave in the correct/desired way if they don’t know the business. Knowing what you’re striving for, what you’re aiming for, what’s important, and what’s not is even more important than any learning curriculum. Help people understand, which will help give them the discipline to decide, act, and behave in the way that’s best for the customer and the business.

Big idea #3 — Create debate

One of the principles was around creating strong fact-based opinions to debate them avidly and test them rigorously, and also that the point of a debate was not about you being ‘right’.

They took this very seriously in Netflix. In her HR role Patty regularly tested “best practices” or “conventional wisdom”, and experimented by removing things, seeing what happened, tweaking, testing, and then putting things back in or taking more things out.

The Netflix exec team would orchestrate debates in front of each other, including having to argue the other side or different position to the one they maybe wanted to take or they believed in. They would also do this publicly in monthly debates in the Netflix theatre, where they would invite all of the staff to come and watch the debate a particular real business challenge they were facing at the moment. This was no role play just for the sake of doing it.

Part of this was to show that there’s no easy or obvious answer to hard questions, particularly at that strategic level, so it helped people see that there were multiple different, equally good directions, that decisions could go in and that it’s hard to decide which one to do.

This is a great way of role-modelling debate, and really powerful to show debate for the best betterment of the company, the customer experience, the clients, whatever it happens to be, and not for personal gain / being ‘right’.

Patty says this was much more powerful than any conflict related course or debate course that companies send their employees too. Because they’re seeing in real life, they’re seeing it in the context of the work that they are doing, and importantly that they can see that this is all in service of getting the right outcome for the company and the customer.

 

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About the book

Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

If we want to find the way back to ourselves and one another, we need language and the grounded confidence to both tell our stories and to be stewards of the stories that we hear. In Atlas of the Heart, we explore eighty-seven of the emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human and walk through a new framework for cultivating meaningful connection. This is for the mapmakers and travelers in all of us.

Source: https://brenebrown.com/book/atlas-of-the-heart/

About the author

Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston, where she holds the Huffington Foundation Endowed Chair at the Graduate College of Social Work. Brené is also a visiting professor in management at the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business.

She has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy; is the author of six #1 New York Times best sellers; and is the host of the weekly Spotify original podcasts Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead.

Brené’s books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and her titles include Atlas of the Heart, Dare to Lead, Braving the Wilderness, Rising Strong, Daring Greatly, and The Gifts of Imperfection. With Tarana Burke, she co-edited the best-selling anthology You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience.

Her TED talk on the Power of Vulnerability is one of the top five most-viewed TED talks in the world, with over 50 million views. She is also the first researcher to have a filmed lecture on Netflix. The Call to Courage special debuted on the streaming service in April 2019.

Brené lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband, Steve. They have two children, Ellen and Charlie.

Source: https://brenebrown.com/media-kit/

Big idea #1 — We need to start feeling

Most of us don’t fully feel. We numb, we avoid, we deflect, and we do anything to not feel painful or uncomfortable feelings, in an attempt to remain in control.

When we start feeling our feelings, we discover we need to do a lot of work to reevaluate ourselves, to reset boundaries, choose ourselves over the comfort of others.

We can’t outrun our feelings, and we need to be, to hold people accountable for their hurtful behaviors. If we don’t understand the link between thoughts and behavior, we become more and more disconnected from each other. There is a lot of disconnection in the world at the moment because we’ve lost the ability to see things from a different point of view, to extend empathy, to connect, and to have the courage to have some uncomfortable conversations.

But to do any of this successfully, we need language. Most people unfortunately can only recognize three big emotions; something looking like mad, sad, and glad. As a result, we’re only really accessing a tiny slice of what it means to be human. The more emotions that we can define, access, and recognise in ourselves and others, the wider and better the conversations we can have.

 

Big idea #2 — The categories of emotions

The book is structured into 13 groups of emotions;

1. The places we go when things are uncertain
2. The places we go when we compare
3. The places we go when things don’t go as planned
4. The places we go when it’s beyond us
5. The places we go when things aren’t what they seem
6. The places we go when we’re hurting
7. The places we go with others
8. The places we go when we fall short
9. The places we go when we search for connection
10. The places we go when the heart is open
11. The places we go in when life is good
12. The places we go when we feel wronged
13. The places we go to self assess

All of those clusters have several different emotions that sit within them, some of them are a mix of what we would commonly call positive and negative emotions (although many in the field would avoid this language).

Each emotion is then broken down to cover how it shows up in our bodies (the biology of the emotion), how families and communities shape our beliefs around the connection between feelings, thoughts, and behaviors (the biography), how to examine our go-to behaviors and recognizing the context of what we’re feeling or thinking (behaviours), and the backstory of each emotion (backstory).

Note: I think this is one of the most powerful parts of the book, the categorization of the emotions in this way, based on how and when they show up.

Big idea #3 — The confused emotions

There’s lots of examples in the book around emotions that often get confused with each other. For example, the difference between stressed and overwhelmed, jealousy and envy, and the link between resentment and envy. 

Brené shares an interesting conversation Professor Marc Brackett (author of Permission to Feel). She asked if resentment was linked to anger, and he said that it was linked to envy. This was a huge penny-drop moment for Brené who realised that the ‘anger’ she felt when she was resentful, was actually envy, usually because the other person was able to put a boundary in place that she wished she could, but felt like she couldn’t.

This ability to recognise the subtle nuance between certain emotions is so important for having better conversations with each other about how we feel. Another example was the subtle differences between disappointed, regretful discouraged, resigned, and frustrated. If you’ve only got access to ‘mad, sad, and glad’, you might bunch all of those into ‘mad’. But actually there are really distinct differences in why those five emotions could be showing up.

The conversation you might have someone who’s feeling disappointed when they felt like an outcome was outside of their control, versus the conversation you can have with someone who was able to identify as feeling frustrated are quite different conversations and therefore quite different questions, and empathy are required.

For this reason, this book is an absolute go-to resource for labeling, understanding, demystifying, and defining the emotions we all feel. Seeing where those lines are commonly blurred, and therefore our actions and behaviors might be too, is a pathway to meaningful connection.

Meaningful connection requires grounded confidence and a mindset of learning and improving.

Ultimately, all of this is a journey based in reflection, curiosity, empathy, mistakes, a lot of discomfort, and really a lifetime of work. This is not something that you’re going to read the book, and become a fully fledged, emotionally competent human. This is absolutely a lifetime of work, as Brené openly shares in her own stories throughout the book.

 

I talked about Brené's previous book, Dare to Lead, in episode 2(!) of this podcast. You can go back and listen to it here.

 

 

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About the book

You spend most of your waking life working — a jaw-dropping 90,000 hours for the average person. You deserve to feel joy during that time. But how? 
 
This Working Life empowers you to experiment in the lab of life. You’ll reflect on your highs and lows, harness your superpowers and pinpoint your guiding values. You’ll learn the importance of empathy as you craft a job or curate a portfolio career that can grow with you. You’ll unlock the power of rituals, community and self-care, and build resilience that will help you face life’s inevitable curveballs. 
 
Lisa and Monique get personal, sharing hard-won learnings from their own lives. This Working Life also features insights from world-leading thinkers like Dorie Clark, Jeremy Utley and Dan Klein, and practical activities to help you take action.

Source: https://www.hardiegrant.com/

About the authors

Lisa Leong is the host of ABC Radio National’s This Working Life. She is a former corporate lawyer and ABC Eyre Peninsula breakfast presenter whose purpose as a broadcaster, media commentator and master facilitator is to help people find the sunshine in work, in relationships and in themselves. Her work and unique approach has been the subject of a Harvard Case Study and TEDx Talk: ‘Can robots make us more human?’ She is a graduate of the Customer-Focused Innovation program of Stanford University’s GSB and the Stanford .school, the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and the University of Melbourne Law School. Her superpowers are curiosity, creativity and delivering key messages by way of song.

Monique Ross is a freelance journalist, writer and editor who has previously worked for ABC News Digital and ABC Radio National. She is also a certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide, and the founder of Heartwood Nature Bathing, based in Brisbane/Meanjin. Her superpowers are connection, organisation, grit and making pasta disappear.

Source: This Working Life book cover

Big idea #1 — There’s not one answer

There’s not one answer to work, and there’s certainly not one career path. This is not a book of hacks, or a plan, or a process, or a methodology, or a single model per se. It’s more of a set of mindsets and thought-starters on how to (re)think work in the modern age.

It challenges the idea of a ‘job for life’, and encourages us to think about building skills that are transferable, and a career that’s more fluid and ever-changing. At the heart of this is a mindset of learning and experimentation, not an answer or a particular path for everyone that everyone should take. 

There’s a lot of experimentation woven into the book in little sections called ‘lab experiments’, with ideas that you can put into practice including building a portfolio career, finding a mentor, and everything in between. The important point is that you do have options and you can change things. You can make tweaks by practicing job craft, you can pivot by adding strings to your bow or building a portfolio career, or you can completely reinvent by having a career change. Lisa and Monica give plenty of their own examples of tweaks, pivots, and reinventions they’ve had through their careers.

One of the most important things about this book is it really just show the art of the possible. It’s so easy to feel like you ‘can’t’ do these things, or ‘can’t’ change something about how you work. But how much of that is actually you holding yourself back; writing off things without really testing them, experimenting, and pushing a little bit more.

Big idea #2 — Category of one

This was one of my favourite ideas in the book. It’s the idea of being a category of one by leveraging your unique experiences, strengths, and values so that you (and only you) can add your own magic and impact to your work.

First you need to know what your strengths, values, and experiences are. This is important so that you can then develop them and use them with a bit more purpose and intent.

The life flow exercise in the book is a great exercise in the book where you look at the the highs and the lows of your life and career to see what those trends and themes are. You get to find the common denominator of when you’ve been really satisfied with your work or life, which means you can design your next move around having more of those elements.

This mindset of a category of one also allows you to stand out and can stop comparisonitis because if you’re a category of one, there’s no point comparing yourself or your path or your skills to other people, because they are a different category of one.

Being able to play your own game is also very freeing, and much healthier than constant comparison. It allows you to embrace a more infinite mindset rather than playing the finite games (despite the fact that organisations are often set up to pit us against each other when it comes to annual reviews etc).

Finally, thinking in a ‘category of one’ mindset can be the thing that allows you to successfully create and/or design a role, knowing what your strengths are, where you’re going, and what your unique individual path is.

Big idea #3 — Work/life coherence

Work/life balance makes my eyes roll back in my head, so I was very pleased to see for once a different approach in here.

Lisa and Monique challenge the idea that work and life should be separate. It often feels like more stress to try (and fail) do that. A coherence, on the other hand, is about finding more of a unified whole, or a connectedness between work and life.

They say that if balance draws a line between work and life, coherence starts to unify those two sides, and they become more interconnected, in flow and flexible to change. For work/life coherence to work, we need to remove guilt and presenteeism and instead focus on what actually matters.

There’s a two way exchange of course, and requires transparency in your team or organisation. At an individual level we need to be able to self-regulate, we need to better help ourselves focus and be present so that when we’re doing work, we are doing work, and when we were at home, we are doing that thing. Coherence doesn’t work if one are is always spilling into the other. 

It takes boundaries, it takes self-awareness, it takes self-regulation. And of course, transparency in order for this to work.

 

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About the book

Are you constantly juggling multiple tasks and operating at 100 per cent or more? Do you feel you are permanently on the treadmill and can’t get off? If you needed extra capacity for something urgent, could you find it?

In The 1-Day Refund, best-selling author and time management expert Donna McGeorge shows you how to recover an extra 15 per cent of your time-10 minutes per hour, 1 hour per day or a full day each week-to think, breathe, live and work. By creating more space, you’ll discover a new ability to focus on what’s truly important to you.

 With The 1-Day Refund, you’ll be on your way to getting back a full day, so you can take advantage of any opportunity that comes your way.

Source: https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-1-day-refund-donna-mcgeorge

About the author

Donna is passionate about enhancing the large amount of time we spend in our workplace (too much, for many) to ensure it is effective and productive, as well as enjoyable.

Donna has worked with managers and leaders throughout Australia and Asia–Pacific for over 20 years. She delivers practical skills, training, workshops and facilitation to corporates — such as Nissan Motor Company, Jetstar, Medibank Private and Ford Motor Company — so they learn to manage their people well and produce great performance and results.

She lives on the Gold Coast, Queensland, a region known for its world-class beaches, but her most creative moments come while sipping tea on her balcony, gazing at the meandering waterways, alongside her husband, Steve, and dog, Prudence.

Source: https://www.donnamcgeorge.com/about

 

Big idea #1 — Aim for 85

We need to rethink the idea of capacity. Most of us live at 100% (and some of us at 120%) in how we work and live. But Donna challenges us to aim for 85% , and design our lives and work around that.

Professional sports people do this, knowing that it’s better for endurance as they can be more relaxed. Actor Hugh Jackman also uses this 85% rule when he is performing as it allows him to be more relaxed and leaves his brain with a bit of extra capacity for mulling things over and being more creative.

This 15% buffer in our lives allows us not to rush, building in time for those delayed trains or meetings that run over, or any of these unexpected time when life happens to us. And 15% of seven days is one, so by operating at 85% you get this extra day back.

Donna uses a nice analogy in the book of a cup of tea; carrying a cup of tea at 100% full is very hard to maneuverer, whereas a cup at 85% is a breeze, with much less risk of spillage and mess.

Donna talks about four different types of capacity;

1. Surge capacity; takes more energy but we don’t have much time, it’s necessary in some cases, but it’s not sustainable.
2. Wasted capacity; when we have too much time and not much energy we’re pottering around wasting time doing ‘busy work’.
3. Impaired capacity; where we have low energy and not much time, we’ve use all our energy at work and we have none left for our family and our friends and our hobbies.
4. Adaptive capacity; our ability to modify for changes in environments as, and when they happen. This is where we want to be, and operating at 85% allows us to operate at this adaptive capacity.

Big idea #2 — Create space

We need to offset our off-kilter use of capacity. We need to make space in our lives and our days. And Donna has put a four-part model together that considers our physical and mental capacity, plus our personal and our professional lives.

1. Mental capacity/personal lives: breathing space. We need to let go and disengage with people or things that bring us stress or anxiety and maximise for joy.
2. Physical capacity/personal lives: living space. We need to free up by decluttering and thinking more functionally about the space we’re using to live in.
3. Physical capacity/professional lives: working space. Here we need to level up by defragging our days and find chunks of time to work, not cracks of time. This might involve improving our systems or delegating work.
4. Mental capacity/professional lives: thinking space. We need to take time out and decelerate and take time out in order to let our brains work at their best way with that space where we can make those connections and our brains can work as they have best evolved to work.

Big idea #3 — Reclaim a day

This is really the whole purpose of the book; the 15% of extra space and capacity is roughly one day per week.

If you were one of the many people who found yourself not having to commute as a result of working from home over the last couple of years, that’s an easy 8-10 hours a week that you would get back. If someone had told you in 2019, that you would have an extra 8-10 hours per week, the following year, or for the next couple of years, what would you have said, what would you have wanted to spend that time on?

Donna shares that Australians work 3.2 billion hours per year in unpaid overtime. And for what? Do we really want this time many of us gained to be absorbed back into emails and busy work? 

This is the time to be intentional and rethink capacity and space for our life, our brains, our relationships, and our work.

 

 

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About the book

Any given day brings a never-ending list of things to do. There’s the work thing, the catch-up thing, the laundry thing, the creative thing, the exercise thing, the family thing, the thing we don’t want to do, the thing we’ve been putting off (despite it being the most important thing). Even on days where we get a lot done, the thing left undone can leave us feeling guilty, anxious, or disappointed.

After five years of searching for the secret to productivity, Madeleine Dore discovered there isn’t one. Instead, we’re being set up to fail. I Didn’t Do The Thing Today is the inspiring call to take productivity off its pedestal — by dismantling our comparison to others, aspirational routines, and the unrealistic notions of what can be done in a day, we can finally embrace the joyful messiness and unpredictability of life.

For anyone who has ever felt the pressure to do more, be more, achieve more, this antidote to our doing-obsession is the permission slip we all need to find our own way.

Source: https://extraordinaryroutines.com/book

About the author

Madeleine Dore is a writer and interviewer exploring how we can broaden the definition of a day well spent. For the past five years, Madeleine has been asking creative thinkers how they navigate their days on her popular blog Extraordinary Routines and podcast Routines & Ruts.

She has contributed columns and features to Sunday Life, BBC WorkLife, ArtsHub, 99u, Womankind, Kill Your Darlings, The Design Files, ABC Life and more. Madeleine regularly conducts life experiments and hosts events to explore how creativity isn’t just something we do, but how we approach our lives.

Source: https://extraordinaryroutines.com/about

Big idea #1 — Be a day artist

One of the underlying ideas is this concept of being a ‘day artist’, or seeing each day as a work of art. Being creative, rather than doing creativity in how we live. This means being creative with the elements of a day, even when that day doesn’t go to plan.

There’s a nice quote in the book from Helena Bonham Carter that says;

“Everything in life is art. What you do, how you dress, the way you love someone and how you talk, your smile and your personality, what you believe in and all your dreams, the way you drink your tea, how you decorate your home, or party ,your grocery list, the food you make, how your writing looks, the way you feel. Life is art.”

It’s a great reminder that we get to choose how to live. It’s quite a freeing idea. Taking this approach involves a little bit more play, and wonder and curiosity. 

Maybe you don’t start the day by ‘eating the frog’ or doing the most unpleasant thing first, but maybe you start the day with something that’s pure pleasure instead. There’s a fantastic example in the book, about a chef who starts the day with a bowl of porridge with a dollop of clotted cream on top, along with some brown sugar, and he just thinks that’s the best way to start the day because by breakfast, he’s already won the day! A perfect example of prioritizing delight over dread.

Being a day artist might mean making changes to your environment, having a corner of a room dedicated to reading, for example. It doesn’t need to be that you need lots of extra space, but maybe you just use your space differently. There’s example in the book from Austin Kleon, who talks about having a really clear, crisp, clean work area with his computer where he writes, but then a really messy desk, which is where he does all his messy collage work.

It means letting go of expectations, or at least holding them much more lightly and letting things surprise us, which can then allow us to explore what we really want, not just what we think we “should” be doing.

Now, we can’t seek constant novelty in life, but we can be much more attuned to it and leave space for surprise, even if it’s just for an hour or 10 minutes in our day.

Big idea #2 — Embrace the wobble

There’s lots of wobbling in our days. Maybe something takes longer than planned, or there’s a distraction, an interruption, or a drama. Whatever it might be, embracing the wobble means that we might need to find ‘puddles’ of time, rather than needing perfect blocks of uninterrupted time in order to get things done. It’s more about self-awareness, than self-regulation, which a lot of productivity guidance can be a bit heavy on.

Wobbling is a constant adjustment, we’re constantly twisting and turning and balancing and bumping into things. But berating ourselves for our inconsistency takes up the precious time that we’re telling ourselves off for wasting in the first place. There is no dress rehearsal in life, this is it.

Maybe we need to stop letting ambition get in our way. Sometimes ambition can be a good thing, but sometimes it can be a pursuit of recognition from others, rather than a focus on doing things that we want to do. It’s obviously not all bad, but maybe being more micro-ambitious, a term that she took from the wonderful Tim Minchin, is a healthier and more flexible approach that allows us to focus in what’s in front of us, in the present instead of what’s next.

 

Big idea #3 — Kindness over busy-ness

None of us need telling twice about the modern scourge of busy-ness. It’s such a barrier to connection and it’s a fast track to burnout.

Kindness, Madeleine says, is the antidote to burnout. Kindness with ourselves and with others. Whether that’s a chat with the person serving you at the post office, or making a donation to charity, or texting a friend to say hi, incorporating a bit more kindness into our days, rather than busy-ness, can be a nice way of slowing down and remembering what’s important.

Kindness extends to ourselves by knowing that rest is not a bad thing. Hobbies don’t need to be a side-hustles, and we can challenge all the things we tell ourselves that we should do. Otherwise it’s easy to find ourselves too busy to actually enjoy life. There’s a really nice analogy in the book of being like a sponge. Sometimes we’re in absorption mode soaking up, resting, learning, taking in knowledge etc, but too long in absorb mode will leave us kind of sodden and a bit soggy and wet. So we need to be squeezed. We need a bit of pressure to balance us out.

Ultimately, Madeline says;

“Maybe we can’t expect to enjoy every day, but we can find it endearing. When we reach the end of the day, instead of berating ourselves, what we did or didn’t do, we can be charmed by the ordinary moments of living and what our days can bring.”

Which I think is a rather nice way of thinking about life.

 

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About the book

We unlock our greatness by working on the hard things. Instead of doubting yourself, fearing you’ll make a mistake, and feeling like you need to play “small” so you don’t disrupt the status quo, start showing up for yourself so you can show up for the world. Don’t regret a life half-lived. Stepping up and pursuing your dreams is hard … and it’s exhilarating, and it’s important. Let me show you how to get clear, get confident, and start anything that matters.

Source: https://www.mbs.works/best-books-training-for-coaches-leaders-and-mentors/how-to-begin-book/

About the author

Michael Bungay Stanier is the author of six books which between them have sold more than a million copies. He’s best known for The Coaching Habit, the best-selling coaching book of the century and already recognised as a classic. Michael was a Rhodes Scholar and plays the ukulele badly. He’s Australian, and lives in Toronto, Canada.

Source: https://www.mbs.works/about/

 

Big idea #1 — Set a worthy goal

This is the bulk of the book. You go through this process a few different times to refine and improve your worthy goal.

The first phase is purposely messy and probably quite dull. And you test this first draft of your goal on whether it’s thrilling, important, and daunting. 

Round two of the iteration, has you adding some active words and verbs, before testing it again. A final refinement has you scoring the goal on how thrilling, important, and daunting it is, each out of seven. If the score is low (<18/21), your goal needs a bit more work. You might need to add a word, or make the goal bigger, or maybe more constrained, or specific. And then voila, you have a worthy goal.

Big idea #2 - The pain of reality

As any good coach would, Michael has you taking a good, hard look in the mirror. The book takes you through examining your habits, your false starts, your patterns and behaviours, and your ‘mosquitoes’, as he calls them, that buzz around you and follow you around, whatever it is you try to do.

This is an exercise in self-awareness and compassion, not self-loathing. You might go through this and realise some uncomfortable truths about your tendencies and things that may have set you back in the past, but it’s very much about being aware of them, and then being able to work with, or around, them this time.

The next part is about painting a picture of your future, whether you do, or whether you don’t, see through this worthy goal. This is really useful to see the true opportunities and opportunity costs, of doing or not achieving this goal.

One of my favourite exercises in the book is the idea of defining You2.0, which really hones in on what you want yourself to look like when you’re operating at your very best, versus operating at 85%. It’s such a great way of thinking back to situations where you really thrive, and what that looks like, to give yourself the boost that you can rekindle that again.

Big idea #3 — Set yourself up to succeed

As with any good goal setting book, there’s a big emphasis on setting yourself up for success. This includes having the right people around you; the people who are going to nurture you and you need a bit of nurturing, give you a bit of a kick or a nudge when you need it, or who you can aspire to and who can teach you. Ultimately the people who can both support and challenge you along the way.

The other piece is around awareness. There’s a lot of activities in here around really knowing thyself, understanding where you’re likely to trip yourself up, and where you’re likely to not be as effective as you could be in reaching your worthy goal.

Finally, thinking about experiments and practices. Michael talks a lot about how to take small first steps. Which isn’t necessarily a new idea, but a nice one to think about in terms of getting this worthy goal moving in the right direction, especially if it’s a bit daunting (as it should be).

 

 

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This week we're taking a gentle start to the year talking about the books on my reading list for this year, and how I'm rethinking my reading habits and goals.

Here's some of the books I mention in the episode;

• How to Begin by Michal Bungay Stanier
• Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown
• I Didn't Do The Thing by Madeline Dore
• This Working Life by Lisa Leong and Monique Ross
• How to Tell a Story by The Moth
• The Power of Regret by Daniel Pink
• Stolen Focus by Johann Hari
• Making Numbers Count by Chip Heath
• The Biography of Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

 

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It's a December special with this bonus mini-series called How We Read, featuring conversations about the books that have stuck with us.

 

In this episode of How We Read I'm talking to Claire Hatton about her top books of 2021, how she reads, and why 2021 has spurred some different genres of reading for her.
Here's the books he talked about:
1. Leading Edge by Holly Ransom
2. Victoria, The Queen by Julia Baird
3. Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku

Plus, honourable mentions of Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister by Jung Chang, and Phosphorescence by Julia Baird.

 

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