1. Focus only for four hours a day You almost certainly can't consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day. The real lesson – or one of them – is that it pays to use whatever freedom you do have over your schedule not to "maximise your time" or "optimise your day", in some vague way, but specifically to ring-fence three or four hours of undisturbed focus (ideally when your energy levels are highest). Stop assuming that the way to make progress on your most important projects is to work for longer. And drop the perfectionistic notion that emails, meetings, digital distractions and other interruptions ought ideally to be whittled away to practically nothing. Just focus on protecting four hours – and don't worry if the rest of the day is characterised by the usual scattered chaos. https://www.oliverburkeman.com/fourhours
2. The extraordinary story of Michael Dell Nine years ago, Silicon Valley and Wall Street alike had written off Dell, the person and the company, both tethered to the then-cratering personal computer market, as en route to the same technological irrelevance as Palm or BlackBerry. He enlisted private equity firm Silver Lake and its billionaire co-head Egon Durban to sidestep the public cynicism, taking his company private for $24.9 billion in 2013. The results have been remarkable. Automobiles, telecommunications, energy grids, hospitals and logistics networks have all become digital businesses, producing ever-increasing reams of data that need to be managed and stored. Dell now sits at the helm of the world’s largest infrastructure provider for this activity. In turn, Dell Technologies, at $75 billion, is worth more than four times what it was before it went private. Soon Dell will sit at the helm of two separate public companies: Dell Technologies, his personal computer and IT infrastructure giant, and its spinoff, VMware, a mainstay in cloud-computing infrastructure. Both will hold manageable debt levels and a valuable currency for growth and acquisitions. “Everybody’s eyes are on Amazon, Microsoft and Google,” says billionaire Marc Benioff, the cofounder of Salesforce and a friend of Dell’s. “They don’t realize that Dell has quietly amassed the market share in enterprise technology.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/08/03/deal-of-the-century-how-michael-dell-turned-his-declining-pc-business-into-40-billion-windfall/
3. Climate change is here, and unless drastic action is taken, it will only get worse The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’ climate science research group, concluded in a major report that it is “unequivocal” that humans have warmed the skies, waters, and lands, and that “widespread and rapid changes” have already occurred in every inhabited region across the globe. Many of these changes are irreversible within our lifetimes. This is the first report of its kind in eight years, and a lot has changed. Scientists have backed away from many of the best-case scenarios. They’re more confident than ever that human-caused climate change is already worsening deadly weather events, from flooding to heat waves. And they’re investigating culprits of climate change that warm the planet even more than carbon dioxide.
The report warns that the world is likely to overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming compared to pre-industrial temperatures — one of the goalposts of the Paris climate agreement — within the next 20 or 30 years, even under scenarios where greenhouse gas emissions fall significantly.
Those effects of climate change continue to ripple across the planet, amplifying disasters like the massive wildfires in California, deadly flooding in China and Europe, and record heat in Siberia. Climate change is here, and unless drastic action is taken, it will only get worse.
https://www.vox.com/22613027/un-ipcc-climate-change-report-ar6-disaster
4. You have to earn your trust
Your truth and the truth are not always the same thing. The truth is a fact. Your truth is just an opinion. Nobody values somebody who is honest about their opinions if their opinions always suck. Knowing when to offer your truth and keep your mouth shut is a rare quality. The line between thoughtful dialogue and disrespectful disagreement is razor-thin. If you cross the line, you lose somebody’s confidence. There are countless ways to do this, and once you do, it’s hard to go back. My parents taught me that all you have is your word. Lose this, and you’ve lost everything.
Trust is the most valuable currency on the planet. And it’s something you can’t buy. You have to earn it.
It takes time to earn somebody’s trust. You can’t force it. You can’t even be deliberate about it. It just has to show with every action you take. Eventually, your bank will fill, and you’ll have something that most people don’t.
https://theirrelevantinvestor.com/2021/07/29/something-you-cant-buy/
5. Getting better with deliberate practice While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance. The greatest challenge of deliberate practice is to remain focused. In the beginning, showing up and putting in your reps is the most important thing. But after a while we begin to carelessly overlook small errors and miss daily opportunities for improvement. This is because the natural tendency of the human brain is to transform repeated behaviors into automatic habits.
Mindless activity is the enemy of deliberate practice. The danger of practicing the same thing again and again is that progress becomes assumed. Too often, we assume we are getting better simply because we are gaining experience. In reality, we are merely reinforcing our current habits—not improving them.
https://jamesclear.com/beginners-guide-deliberate-practice
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