RWL #156 - read more, permissionless, & habits
Happy New Year from the University of New Hampshire! Wow - another year and another decade. I hope you had a great holiday and you’re charged up to do great things this year!
2019 was a pretty good year for me: I had a few articles published, had the chance to present at ACHE, and continued to innovate in my teaching including publishing more than 160 videos to help students with finance. I also finished my daily art challenge for 2019. The picture above is my final painting for 2019. In case you can’t read it, the quote is from the May Sarton poem, The Summer Day: “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” It seemed a fitting question to ask on the eve of the new year.
I’m looking forward to exciting things in 2020 - I’ll be teaching some new classes, continuing with some important research, and with any luck, get tenure. I’m also looking forward to doing more traveling and I’ve started a daily photography discipline for 2020 (take a picture a day for the year). Having disciplines like the daily sketch or daily photograph are important to me to keep me in balance, even though many days they feel like a real burden. This newsletter is also a discipline - it keeps me looking for new ideas to share each week, and that forces me to be actively scanning the environment. If you don’t have a discipline right now, why not start one? Something to expand your horizons and push you?
Happy new year and, as always, thanks for reading!
Read
What: Austin Kleon, How to read more
https://austinkleon.com/2019/03/21/how-to-read-more-3/
Why: This is pretty much my resolution every year, right after “lose weight and get in better shape.” Austin Kleon is an artist and author. His first two books, How to Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work! Are fabulous, and actually have excellent lessons for business leaders. This link is to Kleon’s blog, and he has a nice list of five ways that you can increase your reading. I think number one in particular. A little fun to motivate you to do more reading this year!
Watch
What: TEDX, Zach King: The storyteller in all of us
Why: King tells the story of how he wanted to be a film maker some day when he was in high school, so he applied to film school… and didn’t get in. But he didn’t give up - instead he became a famous internet video maker with videos racking up tens of millions of views. While making cat videos (he literally shows a cat video in the talk) is entertaining, that’s not the learning point here. The learning points are: 1) in 2020 there are fewer gatekeepers to do anything now than there were back in the dark days of the 90’s or even the ‘00’s, 2) so just do it, and 3) don’t give up - success might not look quite the way you expect it to.
Listen
What: HBR Ideacast, James Clear, The Right Way to Form New Habits
https://hbr.org/ideacast/2019/12/the-right-way-to-form-new-habits.html
Why: I’ve read James Clear’s blog on and off for years now. He writes about habit formation. In this interview he talks about his new book, Atomic Habits (which I have not read yet). I like his two categories of habits: habits of energy and habits of attention. Habits of energy are things like sleep and nutrition that enable us to be at higher performance levels. He describes habits of attention as “For almost all of us, certainly for people who are spending their time doing knowledge work, or who are paid for the value of their creativity, the ideas you come up with are often a product of where you allocate your attention.” He talks about choosing what we let in to our attention as shaping our ability to work, and he talks about finding techniques for removing distraction. The whole podcast is worth listening to.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
Also, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/markbonica
Have a great weekend and do amazing things!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." - Henry David Thoreau