(2018-12-28) Pearson How To Unlock Your Creative Potential In 2019

Taylor Pearson: How to Unlock Your Creative Potential in 2019. In the same way that the middle manager was the archetype of a successful career in the 20th century, I believe that the blockchain individual (2017-10-10-PearsonTheBlockchainMan) will be the archetype of the successful career in the 21st century.

Why Should You Care?

The first stone mason is “cutting stones” (short-term). The second is “building a wall” (medium term). The last is “building a cathedral” (long-term).

*There are two key components to the success of the stonemason:

• Having the vision to see what small actions are building up to stay excited and motivated about work.
• Knowing how to do that day-to-day work

The first is that we now have to choose what exactly to build.

However, there are two major differences between how these things are done successfully today versus two centuries ago.

The second shift is that we increasingly have to manage our own continuing education and improvement.

Learning to adapt to the first shift means adopting a system of personal priority management (PPM). (Effective Entrepreneur, Hack Your Life)

This was a problem I ran into many times myself and why I built a strategic planning masterclass

Learning to adapt to the second shift means adopting a system of personal knowledge management (PKM).

Personal Knowledge Management means continuing to stay open to new sources of information. To not do so is to become irrelevant. PKM instead focuses on processing new information in a way that allows it to be translated to usable knowledge and eventually into career-advancing outputs.

Beyond that, I believe it is an essential component to creativity.

The Three Pillars of Personal Knowledge Management

PARA 2017-02-08-ForteParaMethodAUniversalSystemForOrganizingDigitalInformation

PARA, which stands for projects, areas, resources, and archives, is a taxonomy for organizing all your digital files.

Each task (e.g. cutting a stone) can be related to a project (e.g. building a wall) which can be related to an area (e.g. stone masonry) which can be related to an exciting and motivating goal (e.g. building a cathedral).

In my Effective Entrepreneur masterclass, I call this vertical coherence and it’s the most important component to sustaining motivation over the long run

Progressive Summarization

The next component of PKM is Progressive Summarization (PS), a technique for formatting and structuring information to turn it into usable knowledge and make it easily discoverable and implementable in the future.

The challenge today is not acquiring information; it’s all just a Google search away. The challenge is knowing which information is worth acquiring, then building a system to convert that information to knowledge which can be used in a future situation where it is applicable.

The first step is to save these notes in the applicable section of your PARA system

but before long, you run into a pretty big problem: too much information

Enter progressive summarization (PS).

Layer 1 of PS is creating notes

Layer 2 is the first round of true summarization, in which I bold only the best parts of the passages I’ve imported.

I typically do this at the end of the day or prior to my weekly review.

I’m only doing this if I have some reason to be going through the note in the first place

For Layer 3, I switch to highlighting so I can make out the smaller number of highlighted passages among all the bolded ones. This time, I’m looking for the “best of the best,” only highlighting something if it is truly unique or valuable.

For Layer 4, I go beyond highlighting the words of others, to recording my own.

I often do this after I highlight notes

I summarize layers 2 and 3 in an informal executive summary at the top of the note, restating the key points in my own words.

*And finally, for a tiny minority of notes, the ones that are so powerful and exciting I want them to become part of how I think and work, I remix them.

After pulling them apart and dissecting them from every angle in layers 1–4, I add my own creativity to turn them into something else.*

Just-in-Time Project Management

The final component of personal knowledge management is Just-in-Time project management.

The challenge with deep work for most people is that there are a lot of setup costs.

For a typical two to three-hour deep work session, the first thirty minutes (or more) is spent getting ready to do tangible work that you can show to someone else, be it a colleague, manager or client.

it means that Thursday afternoon hour between meetings is nearly useless

The solution for what to do with that hour on Thursday afternoon is to strategically structure your work in the first place into a series of intermediate packets, that can be done in smaller chunks of time.

Creating a series of intermediate packets has five big benefits.

For one, interruptions become less problematic

Second, you have more frequent opportunities to get feedback.

Third, you can create value in any span of time. If we see our work as creating these intermediate packets, you can find ways to use your time in a more valuable way, no matter how short. Productivity becomes a game of matching each available block of time (or state of mind, or mood, or energy level) with a corresponding packet that is perfectly suited to it.

Fourth, big projects become less risky. (LittleBet)

If you change your mind or the idea isn’t as great as you thought, you still have something to show for it.

Fifth, you gain the ability to reuse previously built packets for new projects.

I’ve partnered with Forte Labs (Tiago Forte) to offer a specially discounted bundle that includes my masterclass, The Effective Entrepreneur, and Tiago’s course on PKM, Building a Second Brain.