📕 Issue #73 - Learning in Public – Creator Flywheel, Growth Mindset, Personal Monopoly

Oct 31, 2020

👋🏻 Greetings from Taipei! I’m Charlene Wang. I make your life a little better with coaching and community. I’m writing a book to break the model minority stereotype. LivingOS Newsletter is my musings on transitions in life. Grateful to have you.

I was an online course junkie.

Over the past five years, I have consumed 100+ courses and invested thousands of dollars in online education. I clipped tons of content in Evernote, followed Buffett’s advice to read 500 pages a day, and was overwhelmed by the abundance of content.

Why waste your energy on things that will be forgotten?

When I learned that our brain would only retain about 5% of what we consumed, I decided to take Barbara Oakley’s course on Learning How To Learn. Despite the course’s stellar reputation, it missed the most important point—the flywheel for the digital age: learn to create, create to get feedback, and iterate to learn even more.

After all, you are remembered for what you create, not what you know. To realize the full learning potential, you need to turn the knowledge into actions:

If you are an investor, use your knowledge to inform your investing strategy.
If you are a founder, use your knowledge to solve the key user/business needs.

Your goal is to learn enough to share. Ask yourself: “What are you doing with all this information?”

Adopting the Growth Mindset…

My parents taught me to question the status quo and think for myself. While my defiant nature got me into a few mistakes, it also led me to the ultimate journey of personal growth:

To write daily, I have to deconstruct my past experiences, turn them into actionable knowledge, and articulate the most valuable insight for you.
To grow LivingOS, I have to coach myself and my team to build something that reflects our true values and serve our core audience.

Personal growth is not only the secret formula but also the lifeblood for LivingOS. If we stopped growing, the venture will eventually plateau and die.

And as Beyoncé said, “I don’t like to gamble, but if there is one thing I’m willing to bet on, it’s myself.”

How you can do the same

Build your personal knowledge database
With my second brain, I can easily search for knowledge, distill my learnings, and productize my takeaways all in one place.
Here are three principles to building your personal knowledge database:
1. Durable: Trust your system and design for your laziest self.
2. Universal: Apply the same formula to all of your software.
3. Centralized: Keep everything in one place to make it easy to search.
If you want to learn more about how I build my second brain, you can read more here.
Learn with a project in mind
Now that you have a second brain that supports your learning, create a few meaningful projects for yourself.
In the early days of LivingOS, I would write down the hypotheses I was testing, build the minimum viable product, and iterate on key customer feedback. This incremental approach helped me move the most important needle to drive my personal and business growth.
Be a specialized generalist
I am a big fan of being an expert at the intersection of multiple fields. By doing so, I can cross-pollinate my ideas and create something greater.
That’s why I had majored in Computer Science + Applied Math + Economics in college. At work, I prioritize working at the intersection of two product areas because the intersection gives me an edge in running the business.
If you are interested in the science of being a specialized generalist, check out this amazing post written by Chris.

If you are not sure where to start, take a look at the biggest challenge in your life, turn them into a project, and document your learnings from now on.

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See you next week,

Charlene

Productivity, Life, and LivingOS

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