Weekly I/O: How to make effective New Year's resolutions, Knowledge Pyramid, How to praise and criticize
#79: New Year Resolutions, Knowledge Pyramid, Balloon Effect, Praise and Criticize, Entropology not Anthropology
Hi friends,
Greetings from Lake Tahoe!
Here's your weekly dose of I/O. I hope you enjoy it!
Input
Here's a list of what I'm exploring and pondering on this week.
1. How to make achievable and meaningful New Year's resolutions? Five Questions, Wheel of Life, and Ideal Week methods.
If you're wondering how to make effective New Year resolutions, Ali Abdaal and Waki have three methods to help you set achievable and meaningful goals.
The first one is the Five Questions Method. Many people struggle to achieve their New Year's resolutions because they set unrealistic goals. To set practical goals for the upcoming year, reviewing our previous year and using that as a baseline to calibrate our new year resolutions is essential. A simple way to review our last year is to ask ourselves these five questions in order:
What went well last year?
What didn't go so well last year?
What did I learn from last year?
What does it look like to live like a winner in the new year?
What are my New Year's resolutions?
The second method is the Wheel of Life. It consists of dividing our life into three categories and nine segments, which are work (money, mission, growth), health (physical, mental, spiritual), and relationships (romance, family, friends). We then rate our current satisfaction level for each segment on a scale of 0 to 10. After that, we identify the areas of our lives that we are not satisfied with and think about how we can align our actions with our goals to improve our satisfaction in those areas. For each segment, we should write down one specific goal and regularly reflect on why it is important to us.
The third one is the Ideal Week Calendar Method. First, we create a new blank calendar in Google Calendar or any other calendar system we use. Next, we block off time for essential activities we ideally want to accomplish in a perfect week. For instance, we should mark when we want to wake up and do our morning routine and when we want to sleep. We can also block time for hitting the gym, doing creative work such as writing, and hanging out with friends. When blocking time in our Ideal Week Calendar, we ensure that the time we spend aligns with the goals we set in the previous methods.
For more resources on planning for a new year, the Annual Report Framework and Three Ways to Change are the tools and thoughts I've noted before in Weekly I/O.
2. Knowledge Pyramid: Information can only be transformed into knowledge, then Insight, then vision after you process them. It takes time to think and transform summaries of the past into predictions for the future.
Video: Leadership in a Fragmenting World: Morris Chang of TSMC and Joe Tsai of Alibaba Group
How can someone become insightful and visionary? Morris Chang believes one should establish a knowledge base by following the so-called Knowledge Pyramid.
The first step is to gather enough information from the data. After we spend enough time processing and thinking about the information, the information becomes our knowledge. With more thinking and reflection on our knowledge and understanding, we start gaining insights. We can use these insights and repeat the process to develop knowledge pyramids in different fields, which leads to a certain level of competencies. By combining this knowledge pyramid, you can start to have a vision.
In other words, it takes time to transform outside information into your own knowledge, then into insight that summarizes the past, and ultimately integrating insights in various fields to have a vision for the future. Transform outside information into your own knowledge, then into insight summarizing the past, and ultimately integrating insights in various fields to have a vision for the future. A common framework to accomplish this process is through the Knowledge Lifecycle framework, which involves the following steps: Explore, Collect, Think, Create, and Share.
Another version of this Knowledge Pyramid is called the DIKW Pyramid, which refers to models representing relationships between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.
3. Praise publicly, criticize privately. Praise specifically, criticize generally. Praise by name, criticize by category.
Thought
When we want to give recognition or praise to someone, do it publicly, specifically, and use their name.
However, when we need to criticize or provide feedback for improvement, it's better to do it privately. This allows us to give thoughtful feedback with enough time to explain the context. If we need to criticize someone in public, it's best to criticize the category of behavior we would like to change rather than the person directly.
4. Balloon Effect: Focusing on solving a problem in one area can unintentionally inflate the problem elsewhere.
Article: Balloon effect - Wikipedia
Why is it so hard to cut down on illegal drug production? One reason is that when you want to crack down on drug production or trafficking in one region, it might simply push the activity to another region or country. For instance, if you heavily enforce anti-cocaine policies in Colombia, growers and traffickers might shift their operations to Peru or Bolivia.
This phenomenon is known as the "Balloon effect". It describes a situation where focusing on solving a problem in one area displaces or worsens the problem in another area. It's like squeezing a balloon. The pressure applied in one spot will cause the air to go elsewhere.
The Balloon effect also applies to software development or business contexts. It describes how fixing a bug or problem in one area of a system or business can unexpectedly create new problems elsewhere. For example, a software update that improves one feature might unintentionally break another. Similarly, a business decision that benefits one department might harm another.
5. Entropology, not anthropology, should be the word for the discipline that devotes itself to the study of this process of disintegration in its most highly evolved forms.
Book: Tristes Tropiques
I found these lines from the French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss beautiful and intriguing.
“From the day when he first learned how to breathe and how to keep himself alive, through the discovery of fire and right up to the invention of the atomic and thermonuclear devices of the present day, Man has never -- save only when he reproduces himself -- done other than cheerfully dismantle million upon million of structures and reduce their elements to a state in which they can no longer be reintegrated.
No doubt he has built cities and brought the soil to fruition; but if we examine these activities closely we shall find that they also are inertia producing machines, whose scale and speed of action are infinitely greater than the amount of organization implied in them. As for the creations of the human mind, they are meaningful only in relation to that mind and will fall into nothingness as soon as it ceases to exist.
Taken as a whole, therefore, civilization can be described as a prodigiously complicated mechanism: tempting as it would be to regard it as our universe's best hope of survival, its true function is to produce what physicists call entropy: inertia, that is to say.
Every scrap of conversation, every line set up in type, establishes a communication between two interlocutors, levelling what had previously existed on two different planes and had had, for that reason, a greater degree of organization.
'Entropology', not anthropology, should be the word for the discipline that devotes itself to the study of this process of disintegration in its most highly evolved forms.”
Output
Here's what I've published since the last time we met.
1. First Impressions of Paris
A log of my first impressions I jotted down and some photos I took when visiting Paris.
That's it. Thanks for reading. Please share which input you found the most helpful or intriguing. Just reply to this email with a number—it's quick and easy!
And as always, feel free to send me any interesting ideas you came across recently!
Looking forward to learning from you.
Cheers,
Cheng-Wei