Make smaller bets on learning

Let's talk about starting small. A variety of smart people have developed an approach called little habits or tiny habits. The idea is that most of us change not through big leaps forward but through tiny incremental changes in how we think and what we do. There are lots of great ideas around small habits. BJ Fogg at the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab wrote the book, "Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. " The author, Charles Duhigg, wrote about The Power of Habit. And my friend, Dr. Evian Gordon, pioneered the process of using small habits to go from knowing what you want to do to actually doing completely new habits. It turns out that each of us has a variety of cognitive biases, ways that our brains work that shape our thinking and our behavior. Good news. Even though we can't see those brain functions, we can change them. And one of the keys to unlocking that door is small habits. Some people can read an entire book or watch hours-long video courses, and they remember everything they learned. Not me. I need to read something, digest it, maybe even make some notes about it, and then I can dive back in. So take out your curiosity commitments list from the last video. Is there something on your list that would take you a relatively short time to learn? Pick that one to start with. But what if your commitments list doesn't have something small on it? Go back to your curiosity catalog and find something small from that list. Perhaps it's learning how to solve a particular problem at work. Maybe it's learning how to cook a new dish. It could be learning a new technique in a sport you already enjoy. Whatever it is, pick one that you can learn in a fairly short period of time. Here's a good time to go to your favorite AI chat tool. Write a little bit about what you want to learn, and either paste that text into your AI tool or read the description out loud if you use a voice interface. Ask the tool, what are some small steps I might take to learn this? What are some alternative ways I could learn it? What would be great resources to help me learn it? Just make sure you're using small steps that you can apply what you learn as quick as possible so you can practice it. The most important thing to learn from small steps is that you can set a goal and reach it. One of our regular cognitive biases is that tiny voice in our heads that continually criticizes. You tried this before and failed. You're going to fail again. But small habits give us the opportunity to shut that voice right down. By setting a small learning goal and achieving it, you're essentially saying to that tiny voice, see, you're wrong, I got this. I can keep learning what I want to learn. And this is actually a learning skill set that you can develop, allowing you to apply the small habits process as a foundation for learning even bigger things.