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- Newsletter Week 07 | 2022
Newsletter Week 07 | 2022
The 1% Rule, Thinking in Bets, and focusing on the negative
Hey there.I hope you've had a great week.
What I've made for you
Book Notes: The 1% Rule by Tommy BakerThis book essentially synthesizes and collects wisdom from other books, and presents the author's take. If you haven't read any of the most popular Personal Development books, this one would be a great start, as it connects many of the dots between them. However, if you have read some of them, there's a lot of repetition.
Book Notes: Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts by Annie DukeDuke presents some great ideas on making better decisions. I found the book slightly dull, but it had some very interesting points and ideas.
Twitter Thread: How I write my newsletter with ObsidianAt the risk of getting slightly meta, I wrote a thread about how I combine various Obsidian plugins to facilitate my writing process.I'm planning to write a blog post that goes into more details, so stay tuned for that!
Using premortems to improve your decisions
Last semester, I was the Scrum Master (basically: optimizer-enhancer-facilitator-guy and Scum-enforcer that makes sure everyone is working smoothly) for a University project.About halfway into the project, I asked the team members to pretend we failed our exam. Then I asked them to list out the reasons why we failed.
This is the basic process for doing premortems: you pretend things have gone south, and you figure out why.
It was almost invigorating.We got to get to spell out all the reasons why we would fail. It wasn't a negative experience. On the contrary: everyone lit up and had fun doing it.There were, of course, very serious undertones—after all, we were finding the causes for our (potential) failure.
Performing premortems helps you find the areas in which you are on the wrong trajectory. This, in turn, helps you find areas you need to focus on.
The stoics had a similar concept: Premeditatio Malorum. It is a "meditation on the evails we may encounter," as coined by Seneca.
It may be slightly depressing to always think of what may go wrong, but better that than being unprepared.
Quote
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
— Aldous Huxley
To your success. Regards,
Christian Bager Bach Houmann