A simple tip for building your learning strategy in 2023.
If you try to do everything for everybody. 𝐘𝐨𝐮’𝐥𝐥 𝐝𝐨 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐧𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐲.
Focus on the 3-5 things (max) that will produce the biggest value for your goal.
Budgets are tight right now, 𝙨𝙤 𝙙𝙤𝙣’𝙩:
Commit to 20 things in 2023, realise that’s not possible, drop half of them through the year and do what’s left badly because you spent so much time stretched on all 20.
𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐝…
Get specific on the most valued-add tasks that will improve performance.
Whether that’s with hiring, retention or capability. Whatever your company needs to improve.
Be brutal and prioritise what will deliver the most value.
No more than 3-5 goals!
Then double down on these to deliver growth.
Focus on big plays, not small, medium and big plays combined.
Before you go… 👋
If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.
The power of ChatGPT is in the prompts you feed it.
It’s not a mind reader. Feeding it a few words and expecting it to return an award-winning novel is not going to happen. So you need to get specific with your prompts.
90% fail to use the tool to its potential because of this.
Let’s change that. In my 100 hours of research, here are the best prompt frameworks.
The Prompt Framework
I want you to act as a [person, roles, object, character].
You will [help, develop, create, report, apply, analyse] for [audience].
My first suggestion request is [your request statement].
Let’s put this together with a few examples:
“I want you to act as a learning and development manager. You will help create questions to ask line managers about their team’s performance. My first suggestion is “I need help writing questions for a survey on training needs”.
I want you to act as a super headline generator. I will type keywords via comma and you will reply with amazing titles. My first keywords are habits, skills, careers.
I want you to act as an SEO consultant. You will help me create SEO-friendly metadata. My first suggestion request is “I need help with my metadata for an article selling the features of the new iPhone”.
Get it? Use specific prompts to get the best results.
Get even more prompt examples from this PDF of the “50 Best ChatGPT Prompts” from the team at OpenAI 👇
We want too much too soon. Just as we discussed earlier, growth takes decades not days.
The infinite game is all about looking at the road 10, 15 or even 20 years ahead. The actions you take now are compounding towards that goal.
Sadly, too few think like this.
If they can’t get all the success, wealth and happiness in less than 6 months, they give up.
This is a classic example of finite thinking in the infinite game.
You can have all those things. Even more. Our time on this spinning rock is finite, but to reap the rewards is an infinite pursuit.
Instead, I encourage you to build micro-sprints across your time to reach your goals.
Think not just about short-term success, but long-term too.
More on setting micro-goals in next week’s edition 👀.
3. Small tweaks lead to big changes – keep compounding change
You see the big changes.
But, do you recognise all the little changes that got you there? Perhaps, not.
We all fall into this trap. Especially at this time of year.
We sit down (or you can stand, your choice) to write goals for the next year.
You get excited because you feel this time it’s different.
With pen in hand and inspiration flowing through your body, you ravish your notebook (or google doc) with the big changes you want to make in the next 12 months.
When you finish, you look down to review the words staring back at you.
This is the place where 99% of us already give up. This is why ⬇️
The changes are too big – you’ll need years not months to achieve them.
You have too many – you find 20 + staring back at you, when you really need the 3 most impactful.
You’re not specific enough. Broad statements lead to ineffective goals. You want to lose weight, great – but how much? By when? And how?
Thinking big is important.
It just needs the right structure to turn your aspirations into reality.
Try this instead:
Be brutal about what you can achieve in x months
Keep your big goals, but break them down into manageable chunks.
As an example, let’s say you want to be a writer.
This is great. But your starting point is most important here. If you’ve never written a thing before, saying I’m going to write once a day every day for 365 days is stupid.
A better approach is to say I will write something 2-3 times a week and learn how to build a system to scale my writing.
I did this myself. I didn’t start writing every day all of a sudden.
I spent years breaking down the process and putting infrastructure in place so I could do this long-term.
Unrealistic expectations lead to the death of too many goals.
Prioritise value and impact
What do you think is better?
20 goals that you half-ass across 2023 and feel meh about or 3 goals that you accelerate in??
I’m going to go with the latter.
Don’t worry, this is a classic goal-setting sin. You’re in good company too.
Society has drilled in the stupid slogan of “Go big or go home”. It doesn’t work – end of story.
I’d prefer “Big things come from small moments of discipline” But that’s not very motivational, ya know!
The point is lack of prioritisation kills our performance.
We all try to do too much too soon and at the same time. The human condition you could say.
Bruce lee said “It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.”
In other words, stop adding in filler and do the stuff that’s more killer (h/t to Sum 41 there).
Look at your goals with a clinical eye
Grab your pen (or mouse or trackpad or even phone screen) and rank your goals from first to last of importance in achieving your big changes.
Done that? Great. Now cross off anything outside the top 3.
I’m all for investing in the small thing to do the big things. But, we must invest in the right small things.
Get clear on the what and how
You already know the driving ‘why’ behind your own goals.
We won’t cover that in any more detail. We need to get clear on what we need to do and how we will do it in our little equation.
Here’s an example:
I want to lose weight is a bad example.
Why?
It’s vague, too broad and has no specificity.
Now let’s put it through our ‘make it better machine’.
“I want to lose 20 pounds by the 29th of June 2023. I’m going to join my local gym, seek advice on the best weight loss protocols and apply these in my day to day”.
Let’s expand on why this is better…
It’s specific: You’re clear on what you want to do and by when.
It’s action-oriented: You define how you’re going to do all of this with clear action steps.
Ok, let’s wrap this up, shall we?
TL;DR:
For explosive growth double down on less, not more.
Grow slowly to go far.
We’re playing an infinite game. Don’t play by finite rules.
Small tweaks lead to big changes – keep compounding change.
Before you go… 👋
If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.
This toolkit is focused on sharing ideas, thoughts, tools and experiments that I’ve picked up over the last 16 years (I’m getting old 😢).
Plus, I’ve loaded it with research from much smarter folks and curated ideas that have worked for some of the biggest organisations our world knows too.
The aim of this toolkit is twofold for me.
Pay it forward and share what I know to help others.
Get our global learning communities to iterate on today’s best practices and build together.
Think of this as an open-source type of project where we share and build together. I get it sounds very utopian, yet this is my intention with the work.
I’ll continue to update and build new editions of this product so it is the most up-to-date onboarding toolkit on the market, and always free. No one likes picking up free resources that are outdated!
What else is there to say? Not much really, as many of you will know, I like to let the work speak for itself.
So, the only thing left to do is hit that download button and grab your free onboarding toolkit.
Before you go… 👋
If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.