Friday Five: Slow Learning

Friday Five is where I curate five articles (with excerpts)/quotes/tweets/visuals shared on my personal learning network that I found particularly useful, and hopefully you will find some of them valuable too!

This edition features insights on slow media, the downsides of speed reading, challenging our leadership beliefs and power of conflicts in elevating the art of storytelling.

Slow media – Seth Godin

When there’s unlimited shelf space allowing unlimited podcasts, which can be of unlimited length, the goal isn’t to get the show on the air faster or to make it noisier. Instead, the goal, like the goal of a good book, is to say something worth saying, and to do it in a way that’s worth waiting for.

I enjoy slow media – really good podcasts that I listen to while commuting, where two individuals have an insightful and layered conversation on a topic. No pithy quotes, no formulas, no shortcuts to wisdom. Insights just flow and you pick what resonates with you most. In a noisy world of information, slow media is nuanced way of learning.

Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound

When the reading brain skims like this, it reduces time allocated to deep reading processes. In other words, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings, to perceive beauty, and to create thoughts of the reader’s own.

It is hard to learn when we anxiously scroll our newsfeeds hoping to extract whatever insight we can. The truth is, it does not last longer. Reading is an immersive process where our brain creates (and visualizes) thoughts of its own. When we skim or speed read, we often miss the whole point.

Are You Sacrificing for Your Work, or Just Suffering for It? 

So if you find work worth sacrificing your self for, then do it right: Respect your limits, pace yourself, and get the help you need to give it your best, not just your all.

While we try to catch up with the pace at work, the pace catches up with us leaving us burned out and exhausted. If this is what you experience, do read this post. My key takeaway: We need to create an ecosystem where we can give our best, not our all.

5 Questions to Surface Your Leadership Beliefs 

What you don’t see CAN hurt you. . . and your team. Unexamined beliefs can undermine your good intentions.

In this post, Jesse Lyn Stoner offers five questions to surface some important leadership beliefs and consider how well your actions reflect them.

Stories Are About Change – Steve Pressfield

Stories give us the courage to act when we face confusing circumstances that require decisiveness. These circumstances are called CONFLICTS. What we do or don’t do when we face conflict is the engine of storytelling.

Stories are at the heart of enabling change. Stories we tell and stories we live are vital in building a culture and enabling change.