3 | Sunday Brunch ☕️
Use Your Brain, Ask Good Questions, Embrace Long Feedback Loops
Happy Sunday! Welcome back to our third Sunday Brunch newsletter - a concise curation of my favorite tidbits from the week.
Without further delay, grab your coffee, mimosa, water, juice, bloody mary, chocolate milk, protein shake, or whatever else the Brunchers are drinking these days and enjoy this week's issue.
Cheers Everyone.
How to Think - In my previous newsletter, we discussed Are You Busy or Productive↗ There is a massive difference between the two. In simple terms, productivity advocates doing what is important as opposed to what is immediate. How to tell if you're busy... If you check all the boxes on your daily "To-Do" list, but crawl into bed at night with the nagging feeling that you didn't accomplish much of anything... That's busyness, not productivity.
One heuristic to tell how good someone is at making decisions is by how much time they have. The busiest people are often the ones who make the worst decisions.
In order to be productive, we need to be thoughtful. We need to think. Shane Parrish of Farnam Street serves up a subtle reminder.
Asking The Right Questions - Throughout school (elementary - college), I avoided asking questions like the plague because I didn't want to sound stupid. Turns out the joke was on me. Asking questions - good questions - is a superpower.
There will always be a time and a place for "Yes / No" questions. "Why" questions also have their value. The real value and the true insights, however, come from "How" and "What" questions.
Long Feedback Loops - If you're unfamiliar with feedback loops - think about tests in school - you learn, study, and practice the materials, to ultimately pass an exam. Your grade on that exam is a feedback loop. Feedback loops are useful and important. They help us improve and give us an indication of our performance. BUT... not all feedback loops are created equal.
Our exam example is a short feedback loop. A longer feedback loop would be achieving a degree from a university. You needed to consistently perform well on hundreds of exams to achieve your degree. An even longer feedback loop would be leveraging your degree for use in your life.
School is an easy example because it's a "have to," so to speak. If you're reading these newsletters, it's likely you went to school and earned your degree. Feedback loops, however, will continue for the remainder of your life - long after school is over. We would do well to remember the value of long-term loops. At the end of the day, how well you do on one life test is less important than where it leads you.
We all know people who are addicted to getting really good at things, but move on as soon as they've achieved some level of competence. They love the high of constant stimulation, so once they see their progress plateau they quickly move onto something else. I think this is fine if you want to become a good generalist, but if there's absolutely nothing in your life you've really committed to it's probably a sign that you're addicted to instant validation.
Ava
That's it for this week, everyone.
Thank you, as always, for your time. If you made it this far in the article, I appreciate you tremendously and am thrilled to have you in our community.
Feel free to share any thoughts, feedback, recommendations, or other ⤵️
Enjoy your Sunday & have a great start to the week!
See you Wednesday!
Whit Rasmussen's Newsletter
Join the newsletter to receive the latest updates in your inbox. No spam, unsub at any time. We would love to have you in the community!