Vol. 2; Modern Life Skills

Table of Contents

• Compounding

• How to Start a Meeting with Intention

• Act Like You Already Have the Job

• NotebookLM

MINDSET/MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK
Compounding

It’s not uncommon for students to learn about compounding in school. However, it’s almost always within the context of financial investments, or rice. Which is great - we need to have (and repeat) the importance of financial compounding, even with adults.

When sitting down with Morgan Housel, author of the wildly popular Psychology of Money book, Shane Parrish referred to compounding as the most important formula his kids will learn about in math class. From a real world utility/why are we learning this standpoint, I’d argue he’s right. 7% compounded returns over a few decades can change your financial future. I’ve never heard anyone say that about the pythagorean theorem.

The power of compounding comes from the exponential growth that accrues over time; an easy enough concept to understand in theory, but a little tougher in practice - especially when we’re looking at an outcome that’s 30+ years down the line; the reason we all know who Nostradamus is, is because as a rule we’re exceptionally bad at predicting, and in most cases planning, for the future. He’s the exception.

In school, I would love to see the conversation about compounding become a bit more cross-curricular so to speak. Meaning it’s not just financial investments that compound, but actions (ie skill & habit development) that have the ability to compound as well.

With the caveat that some actions are not conducive to the effects of compounding. For example, spending an hour watching tiktoks everyday won’t magically make you a better tiktok watcher in a year from now. Nothing in that scenario is compounding.

You could however, make a case that the skills accrued from taking the action to make a tiktok video every day for a year would compound - but let’s use a non-social media example.

Networking.

Let’s say we go a step further than saying ‘your network is your net worth’ and legitimately help young people begin to understand the importance of building out their professional network.

Starting in grade 11, if they set a goal of wanting to connect with just 1 person a week on LinkedIn, by the time most people are just creating their LinkedIn accounts at the end of university, these go-getters would have hundred of connections.

Hundreds of connections who also have hundreds of connections of their own; hence the power that is networking.

I saw this first hand with the students I’d coach at TKS. Combine that with helping students develop an understanding of how to write a cold email, book meetings with these people, be curious, ask smart questions, and from time to time, add real value - they develop a snowball of an unfair advantage, comparative to the control group.

Whether it’s money, or repetitions - in this case sending LinkedIn connections, compounding is just stacking experience over time. And father time is undefeated.

The formula is simple: Intention. Action. Reflection. Repeat.

After each repetition, and reflection, you’ve gained new knowledge, and experience, that stacks on top of the last.

I like to think of each repetition as a step in a staircase.

You’re constantly moving up, even when somedays, it doesn't feel like it.

What is something that one year from now, you will have wished you started today? Just start.

LIFE SKILLS
How to Start a Meeting with Intention

I’ve only just discovered Vanessa Van Edwards. I use discovered intentionally because her content really does feel like it’s straight out of a treasure chest.

Learning about human nature, and why humans are the way we are is one of my favourite things to do.

She runs a company called Science of People, so it’s safe to say, she’s got a new subscriber, and a new fan. In this 4 minute clip, you’ll see why. Her content is authentic, actionable, and usually backed up with a study or two to prove it’s not just bro science.

At the core of what she’s talking about is that emotions are contagious.

So if you’re intentional about that, when you start you kick off your next team meeting at work, or activity in the classroom, be intentional about spreading positive emotions, namely - excitement.

The unfortunate default is what we’re all guilty of; the hardwired & dreaded accidental openers:

• How are you?

• What do you do?

• Been busy lately?

But what Vanessa explains is that the brain tends to look for hits, not misses. Or in other words, our brain wants to look for direct connections to answer your question.

So if you kick off your next 1 on 1 conversation by unassumingly asking if I've ‘been busy lately?’, you're asking me to look in my brain for connections to a negative feeling that I've attached to the concept of ‘busy’.

And busy is generally friends with stress. It's an unintentional negative spiral that doesn't need to happen.

Easy fix is to invert that. Flip it on its head.

Knowing our brain is looking for hits (connections), and that emotions are contagious, be intentional about asking questions that create happy feelings, like excitement.

You ask someone to think about something they're excited about, they're going to start feeling excited. Brain magic.

And... it makes you more memorable in their mind. They associate you & that conversation with happy thoughts.

Start your next conversation with:

• Working on anything exciting these days?

  • now written on a post it note on my monitor until it becomes habit 💡

• Have any vacations coming up?

• Anything good happen today?

CAREER ADVICE
Act Like You Already Have The Job

I’m a big fan of this type of move, but the comments section is much more divided.

To me, this is simply an example of initiative on display. Proof that this person wanted it more. Growing up playing sports, we were told not to blame the ref if we didn’t like a call that we felt cost us the game. We should have just played so well that the refs involvement in the game was inconsequential - that’s what this feels like to me.

What do you think?

Maybe I’m a fan because I did something similar for my first big boy job, to a much lesser extent. After the first round of interviews, HR told me the 3 characteristics that the final decision maker loved to see in the people they hired. I made a crude, visual infographic (essentially a portfolio) of the experience I had that demonstrated those attributes. I brought it with me to the final interview.

I thought that was common sense. He said no one had ever done that before. I got the job.

This screenshot is just an exaggerated example of if you’re doing the same thing as everyone else, and expecting different results, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Most importantly in my opinion, the applicant showed proof of what he was capable of. Just like numbers on a report card, words on a resume don’t tell the whole story. The proof is in the pudding portfolio. In this case, a proactive portfolio 😍.

THIS IS COOL
NotebookLM

I’ll be the first to admit that when I saw this making the rounds on LinkedIn, I thought it was going to be yet another AI tool to have it’s 15 minutes of fame, and then be forgotten about. I still don’t fully see this as a tool sticking around for the long haul, but it is fun to play with, and I can see some legitimate niche use cases, for me anyways - given the way I like to learn; conversationally.

NotebookLM (a free Google tool) has been around for a little while now, but what’s getting everyone talking is their Audio Overview aka generative podcast feature.

The core features of NotebookLM aren’t anything we haven’t seen before with a LLM like ChatGPT or Claude. You can upload pdfs/text and then talk to the AI about the content/context of that text. That’s nothing new; though very cool, and in my opinion, an under rated study tactic when prepping for an assessment.

Let’s talk about that Audio Overview feature.

You create individual notebooks for whatever content you want in that specific instance.

In this example, I added the pdf versions of 2 books about human nature that I’m a big fan of; Influence by Robert Cialdini and Thinking Slow and Fast by Daniel Kahneman.

It doesn’t have to be full pdfs, but I believe it has to be text. So you can take the transcript from a zoom call recording, or Select All on a webpage you like and do the same thing.

This is what it looks like in that notebook before I start chatting with it. You can see on the left that both books have been selected (by default), it gives me prompts and suggested questions to get the convo started - all classic stuff at this point in our LLM journeys.

But in the top right, you'll see Audio Overview. The AI reads both books, and then generates a 12min conversational podcast with a male and female voice going back and forth as if they were having a real conversation.

And it sounds good. All of the ones I’ve made do. I think that’s why people are so excited about this feature.

Instead of me telling you about it, give it a quick listen and decide for yourself. The file is called Human Nature Books because that’s what I titled the notebook in NotebookLM.

Obviously it’s still early days of AI, so you want to be careful about the generated content, but from my experience with NotebookLM, there’s no hallucinations since you’re giving it the specific content to reference and nothing else; today I learned that’s called source grounding 😎.

To me, this is cool because if if I was a student that had a test coming up, or more realistically for me - just wanted to go a little deeper into a new topic, this is how I would prefer to do it.

I crush podcasts; easily my number one form of entertainment. And I like to ask questions. When it’s just static information, there’s certain content where I myself re-reading that same sentence a few times to help it land.

It’s also obviously not cheating; at least in this specific use case - I’m sure I could ask NotebookLM to write a book report for me if I wanted to.

I hope this newsletter helps to show examples of how AI can help enhance learning outcomes, not just write your essay for you.

Using a tool like NotebookLM isn’t a replacement to understanding the content, but rather one engaging tool in a tool belt of options to help me contextualize and seek alternative perspectives it in a way that works for me. Try it out for yourself.

If you go down a rabbit hole like I did, you’ll find a bunch of examples on Youtube of people using it, and many who have figured out how to create videos of people talking to line up with the audio, and are making videos out of it. Pretty cool stuff.

Here’s a couple other helpful resources to help your exploration.

• 10 Ways To Use NotebookLM, in Less Than 10 Minutes

• A reflection on how NotebookLM was built in 2 months, from a Sr. Interaction Designer on the Google Labs team that shipped this