April 2023 - Big Advice, Big Question, Big Idea

The?Big 3 newsletter gives?3 clear, simple, and powerful ideas every fortnight.

It shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes to read but will give you more than a week's worth of insight. For those of you utilising LinkedIn, we want this to be the most valuable email in your inbox.?

So here goes - 1 big?piece of advice for LinkedIn, 1 question to help you level up your business and 1 idea from a business icon.?

BIG ADVICE

POST IDEA: ALTERNATE UNIVERSE

Whilst it might seem that posts on LinkedIn should exclusively be about the industry you are part of, people connect profoundly with relatable ideas that encourage others to join the conversation.?

So here’s something to think about today.

The road to the job we have is often paved with the skeletons of many career paths we nearly took, but didn’t. Consider one of the paths you could have taken and write a few sentences about how your life might have been different had you followed that path instead.

Be sure to make reference to the positives of the career you now have and encourage your connections to share their alternate universe careers.

Posts like these help to make or strengthen connections by reminding people that you are, in fact… human! (Which is handy, since it can be hard to tell these days ‘GPT4 passes the bar exam’)

Business is about people connecting with people, so don’t forget to make things personal from time to time.

BIG QUESTION

Do you write things down?

Prepare yourself for the simplest piece of life changing advice you’ve ever received. And no, that’s not hyperbole.

If your ability to grow your knowledge around your specific business niche is connected to your ability to retain new information you learn, then there is one thing you can do to improve your retention of knowledge:

Write things down.?

For a variety of reasons, the act of writing things down improves the retention of information - and not just because if you forget something, you can simply re-read your notes (although that helps).?

It’s also because the intentional act of writing is the equivalent of listening three times.

First with your ears, then by ‘reconstituting’ the information through the act of writing it down, and finally by considering the words you have written and checking that they make sense of the words you originally heard. This final piece happens automatically as you write.

This turns ‘listening’ into ‘comprehending’ and ensures the information you received is more appropriately stored in your brain.

Memory is often less about information being received and more about it being ‘tagged’ in relevant neural networks, so it is recalled when thinking about other connected ideas.

When at school, we were taught to put our pens down to listen - but that might have been the wrong advice. The act of ‘listening’ with a pen in hand could well be the most valuable tool in retaining information and means that a student that takes notes is leveraging their learning against their fellow students.

Do you have meetings today?

Write notes as you listen.

Then read back the salient points to the person you are meeting with to check you captured their thinking.

Not only will you remember more from the meeting, but you’ll demonstrate you actively considered their point of view.

That’s two wins for the price of one.

BIG IDEA

"An investment in knowledge pays the best interest."?

Benjamin Franklin

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