The results of a year-long experiment in 2016 where I’ve recorded all of my learnings (456 in total).

Image By John Flores https://dribbble.com/shots/2285476-Circles

The Beginning Of The End

A brief thought on reflecting effectively

One of the reasons why I love year-ends is because the “end” of anything always gives rise to opportunities for reflection. We may build an understanding of the world through our experiences, but it’s only through the process of reflection that we develop our understanding more deeply, and make our intuitive knowledge more applicable.

There’s only one problem: The first step to effective reflection is accurate recall and the human memory is inherently faulty and unreliable, partly because we’re biologically susceptible to a whole host of cognitive biases.

For example, the recency bias is the phenomenon which makes it easier for you to remember last weekend’s events than what happened during the second weekend of February earlier this year. Another one is the misinformation effect, a memory bias in which we subconsciously incorporate new information to distort memory of the original event.

The list goes on.

Together, the cumulative implications of these biases impede our ability to form the accurate and complete picture needed for effective reflection.

Since one of the key purposes of reflection is to learn from previous experiences, to do it effectively means that we need to do two things,

Remember as accurately as possible what has happened, at the point of reflection. Assimilate the information from the reflection in a way that we can remember it in the future.

Which brings us to…

Drawing Circles

How might we remember better?

I want you to imagine each year as a circle. One that we draw continuously with each passing minute, day and month. One which we’ll complete at the end of the year; a full circle so to speak.

If the goal is to have a fuller, richer, and more durable memory that we can draw from, then, doesn’t it make sense to supplement our memory, in addition to the few big and easy to recall events, with a collection of little moments that would otherwise be lost in our stream of consciousness.

Here’s the central question I was trying to answer:

If it’s a circle we’re drawing, how can we draw a more circular circle?What if our circle, instead of being drawn from connecting 15 points, was drawn from connecting 50, 200, or more points?

Image via http://giphy.com/gifs/circle-P28VMyC1iyP7i

Since association is a proven strategy in improving memory, I was also interested to find out if I could use these “points” as cues to trigger the specific moments of my life which I had recorded them — my state of mind and emotions I was experiencing at the time.

Time to experiment.

The hypothesis: By investing a miniscule amount of time (30–60 seconds) to record every interesting learning I come across, I would be able to encapsulate them into a fuller and more contextual story which I can thenretrieve more easily, and therefore be able to use.

In essence, a mental timelapse of my year in learning.

As of the time I’m writing this, 28/12/16, the total tally: 456 learnings.

Mostly they come in the form of quotes and pieces of thinking from books and podcasts, and occasionally through conversations and articles. Sometimes it’s a piece of learning from myself, no doubt somehow inspired from another piece of thinking elsewhere.

Without further ado, here’re my favorites for 2016.

52 Key Learnings In 52 Weeks

I’ve added notes to my favorites among the lot.

1. “Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.” — Naval Ravikant, Entrepreneur and angel investor.

Note: Don’t outsource your happiness to the future; choose to be happy now. Check out this podcast Naval did with Tim Ferriss.