👉 You upgrade your phone’s OS almost every year. When was the last time you upgraded your mental software (your mind’s OS)?
The last big upgrade to your mind OS would’ve happened when you went to college, or had a big learning experience (or failure) at work, or had a big life change (got married, had kids etc). But this was all just happenstance, it wasn’t a planned upgrade.
Given your mind is all you have, the important question is – how can you work towards planned mind OS upgrades on a regular basis? How can you ‘sharpen the saw’?
My suggestion: 👉 Take up a big learning challenge each year. (e.g. my challenge this year is to dive deeper into my own mind by learning about meditation, the nature of work, the meaning of value creation etc). Then translate that challenge into a daily habit or a system (e.g. I will write about these topics in my journal & read a few pages of relevant books, every day). Over the course of the year, enough bugs will get fixed & features will get added to the mind OS; by the end of the year, you would’ve experienced a full upgrade. Pick the next big learning challenge, repeat.
One of the first challenges could even be ‘Learning to learn’. We’ve never been taught that, such a pity.
Resources on learning to learn:
Barbara Oakley’s course on Learning to learn: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn. She’s also published a book of the same name.
Ali Abdaal talks about Active recall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDbxPVn02VU
Thomas Frank talks about the Feynman method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f-qkGJBPts
Maria Popova on fueling the internal engine of learning: https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/05/13/dont-go-back-to-school-kio-stark/
Hope these help.