More To Learn

Over the next three days, we'll be learning from the book Discipline Is Destiny by Ryan Holiday. 

Following on from his book Courage Is Calling (episode #xxx of the What You Will Learn podcast if you want to hear the best bits of that book), this is the second book in his four-part series on the cardinal virtues: Courage, Temperance, Justice & Wisdom. 

Over the next three days, you’re going to hear ...

I had the pleasure of speaking with Oliver Burkeman, who is quickly becoming one of my favourite authors. His books HELP!, The Antidote and Four Tousand Weeks have all been winners and I can't wait for what he dishes up next. 

In this episode we speak about happiness, making effect change, the power of identity, motivational seminars, writing, and all things self-help books. 

You can find more about Oliver and his work here: https:...

It's one of the most pervasive cognitive errors in our human psychology. When we assess others, we overemphasise personality-based explanations and undervalue situational ones. If someone is late to a meeting, we assume it's because they're a lazy person, not because they were stuck in traffic. And vice versa - when we assess our own behaviour, we tend to discount the negatives based on circumstances outside of our control. When WE...

You might've heard of Parkinson's Law, how tasks expand to fill the time alloted to them. Well this is Parkinson's on steroids. Hofstadter's Law says that: any task you’re planning to complete will always take longer than expected, even when Hofstadter’s Law is taken into account. It's a viscious cycle that feeds on itself - even when you expect a task to take longer than you expected, it exceeds your expectations and takes even lo...

In preparation for my interview with Oliver Burkeman, I revisited his three books: Four Thousand Weeks, HELP!, and The Antidote.

This was originally Episode #400 of the What You Will Learn podcast (published in November 2022) about the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals, which was in my top 3 books I read in 2022! I loved the contrarian views of time management and a new way to think about productivity (counterin...

Dan Ariely's 2008 book 'Predictably Irrational' highlighted "the hidden forces that shape our decisions". 

Rather than the standard economic theory that looks at how we think people SHOULD behave, behavioural economics looks at how people ACTUALLY behave. Ariely found that rather being in the driver's seat (as we like to think), we're really just pawns in a game whose forces we don't understand and can't control. 

This episode goes...

In preparation for my interview with Dan Ariely about his new book, Misbelief, I revisited a bunch of his previous books as well. 

The Upside of Irrationality takes some of Ariely's research and findings into human behaviour and applies them to the world of work and motivation. This was originally Episode #338 of the What You Will Learn podcast (published in September 2021) but a bit of background into some of Dan's work will give ...

Today I'm chatting with Owen Fitzpatrick. Owen is the author of 8 or 9 great books (with more on the way), he's the host of the Changing Minds podcast, and he delivered my favourite TED Talk of all time. 

On this episode, we chat about Owen's compulsion for inputting new information, how he went deep into some personal development sub-cultures, and how he picks what to read next. 

Owen's website: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/ 

Cha...

I met up with my old buddy Adam Jones (former co-host of the What You Will Learn podcast) to discuss our favourite short books. Some of these books are quick and easy reads, some are small in stature but hefty in nature, really packing a punch.

I guess the old adage holds true: it's not the size that counts, but how you use it. 

This was quite an unstructured chat, rattling off books we liked (or didn't like) that were 150 pages or...

Perhaps my new favourite framework for marketing and advertising - understanding where you customer currently is (in terms of their awareness of your product or service) and using that to inform your headlines and copywriting. You know the end point you want to get them to (buying from you), you'll now know where they currently are, so the job of your ad is to move them along the path from where they are to where you want them to b...

Breakthrough Adveritising was written by Eugene Schwartz in the 1960s. Recently, over the last decade or so, it's had a real resurgence and developed a bit of an underground cult following. And for good reason! 

While this book was originally written specifically about copywriting for newspaper ads, I see some of the underlying philosophies as one of the best lenses through which to view modern adveritsing and marketing in general....

Have you ever been sitting in a stock-standard, stale, boring, question-and-answer job interview? Whether you were doing the interviewing or being interviewed, it's not the best way to identify talent. 

Tyler Cowen & Daniel Gross have some suggestions as to how to conduct better job interviews. In their book Talent, chapter 2 is titled 'How To Interview And Ask Questions'. Today's episode is the best bits of that chapter. 

The firs...