#85 - Hello! I'm launching an e-book series and an email course on decision-making for you!

It's free for all subscribers!

Dear reader,

My four-part e-book series and email course are launching soon on my new website!

This is something I’ve been working on for the last couple of months.

This is something that I’ve been working on since I first read Thinking, Fast and Slow and was at once fascinated and daunted by all there was to know. Since I read something Charlie Munger had said, on Farnam Street. Since I started reading everyday and applying what I learned at work.

You get the drift. This has been a long time in the making.

Not surprisingly then I’m excited to bring the fruits of my process to you, dear readers. Now, if you’re a subscriber, you get privileged access to both the e-book series and the email course. Unless, of course, you don’t want me to. And I don’t intend to spam you. We can continue conversing here, on this newsletter.

Alright then, this week, I want to share my observations 🔭 from my experience of putting together the e-book series and email course. It was not only fun but it was a lot of it, in ways I did not expect. So, here goes…

The best way to learn something is to change the rules every once in a while

I’ve produced close to 500 pieces of content on decision-making across formats. But I’ve never done promotions, not as part of a campaign at least. I’ve plugged this newsletter every once in a while but nothing beyond that. And now that I’m promoting, in marketing lingo, the lead magnets, it’s forcing me to think of new ways (analogies, stories, formats) to introduce the same concept. You know what that’s doing?

It’s getting me to make what I’m trying to say more novel, useful, and memorable. Here, see for yourself, how I come out with the topic of decision categorization in two different ways.

An even better way to learn something is to teach it

I’ve for a while intuitively believed this, and then the other day, I read this quote attributed to systems thinker Russell Ackoff in my friend Pritesh’s superbly curated newsletter Stay Curious. It goes like this:

Although we learn little of use by having it taught to us, we can learn a great deal by teaching others. It is always the teacher who learns most in a classroom.

My first phase of learning involved kindling a love for non-fiction. I read books and I listened to podcasts. The latter was my way of bundling temptation with the chore of doing dishes through several months of a hard lockdown.

In phase two, I put down my lessons in writing and posted them publicly. That drew a curious crowd to mill around. Some of them stuck around, asked questions. I answered a few, I asked them back a lot more. In a two-month window (Feb-Mar) in 2022, I interviewed close to 20 mid-to-senior-level professionals across industries and geographies to understand what’s eating them. That experience set off a process of discovery that lasted for the next several months.

If writing and sharing your ideas publicly invites embarrassment, teaching throws caution to the wind. Welcome to phase three! The second half of last year (triggered by my selection into LinkedIn India’s first creator accelerator program), I spent time mentoring folks, responding to DM’s from people with sticky problems (emigrate to Canada or not?), and even kicking off as a decision coach—each progressively more unnerving but each acting as a bar-raiser for what level of competence was acceptable. The experience lent me the confidence and clarity to put together an e-book series to give you the lay of the decision-making land AND a practice-focused 30-day course to help you build better decision-making habits.

Take a look at what that has led to.

And finally, there are three ways in which we learn and the fourth way is the best

My friend Gaurav Singh told me about this Confucius quote:

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Let me add a fourth way: all three.

Reflection alone (without experience) will land you a philosophy major at 21. You’ll probably also be French. Imitation today is unavoidable, supercharged as it is by social media echo chambers. Experience is, well, experience. It leads to a kind of wisdom for which you pay in calendars, not clocks. Here’s something I had written on the topic experience last year, when I was exploring the meta topic of learning:

Just notching up experiences counts for a lot less if we’re approaching every problem as if for the first time. Our backlist of experiences has to count for something. It has to help us make fewer mistakes. The best way to not repeat mistakes is to learn from each repetition. From each turn of the wheel.

Pick each experience apart by questioning assumptions (reflection), build/update a model of reality with deliberate effort (abstraction), and then put that lesson into practice (action) that leads to the next experience to learn from. 

When we reflect and store the remnant of an experience in our brains, we’re filing away a pattern (new model of reality). Later, we’re subconsciously matching that pattern with what we see. With the best, the pattern-matching is associative (similar). Not direct (same).

With algorithms ruling what we see, imitation is inevitable. But if you can pair that with the double loops of gaining diverse experiences and reflecting upon them, then you would make Confucius happy.

***

Thank you for your attention! I would love to understand what about your decision-making you would like to change the most. Drop me a comment! I will see you next week.