E1: Do You Have A Commonplace? Every Knowledge Worker Should Have One

Apply For The Future Skills Program

Episode Summary:

Listen to the full episode on iTunes (and please leave a rating to help the podcast reach more people): E1: Do You Have A Commonplace? Every Knowledge Worker Should Have One

• Things are happening faster and faster.
• You have to learn on your own.
• School won’t help you keep up.
• Important future skills: Managing people and projects, staying focused for long periods of time, reflecting and analyzing, being creative, manage time and priorities better, understanding how to manage decisions and risk, motivate yourself.
• We have 3 types of episodes: 1) Focus on one big idea or tip, 2) Long interview with scientists, business men, experts, 3) Medium length: Experts share their best ideas and how they use them to build critical skills, build companies, create teams, make money, understand themselves better and form meaningful relationships.
• Listen to 2-4 episodes on the way to work or while walking. Improve your life, stay healthy, build a future proof career, navigate the world more effectively and hopefully make more money.
• We both keep a commonplace: Offline brain but with better structured memory.
• This is the most important tip for boosting meta cognition and repetition (spaced repetition). These are 2 of the most important and underrated future skills around.
• Mikael Syding: While working as a portfolio fund manager at futuris, I used the commonplace to record mistakes, lessons, losses, wins, what was luck, what was skill and wrote down lessons on how to make better decisions in the future.
• The commonplace is the best mental habit for becoming a better and more clear thinker because you have to learn how to organize your thoughts and notes in a structured way. This is an extremely important skill.
• Common sense doesn’t always work out. It’s better to write down your own rules of thumb and then regularly review them to see if they actually work out.
• Example: It’s hard to keep everything in your head.
• Prune your list with rules of thumb to only have the best ones and then memorize them.
• How to start a commonplace: 1) Get Evernote or onenote, 2) Create a notebook for your most important thing (I.e. job or career), 3) Make subsections.

We are right now creating the Future Skills Program which will be an online video course covering decision making, building the 4 Capitals, and other actionable tips for improving your life and career. It will include weekly homework and evaluations.

The course will be presented by Mikael Syding, the European Hedge Fund Manager of the Decade 2000-2009.

Apply For The Future Skills Program