Cracking The Life Curriculum Code — PART 2

How I plan my personal Life Curriculum and how you can too!

“The truth is that the only education is self-education. Teachers can impart information and make suggestions, but they are like sign-posts — they can only by example and precept point out the way. A sign-post is of no earthly use unless the person who consults it wants to go somewhere.” — Robert Shafer, 1921

This is Part 2 of the Life Curriculum series, telling you how to implement it in your life.

In Part 1 of the series, we understood what a Life Curriculum is and Why is it necessary. We learnt that Planned learning with the help of Life Curriculum will help us in,

• Becoming recession-proof
• Living a Meaningful Life
• Constantly Moving out of Comfort Zone to move towards success
• Have the right people in Life.

The next obvious step after understanding the value is to build one. So, let’s begin.

Things you want to Learn. Your Curriculum content

Before you get excited and start listing every single thing on your mind to your list of things you want to learn, pause for a second. We need to be intentional here. Not only are we battling distraction and an overwhelming amount of information, but we are also massively short on time. So, it is pertinent to stay on the course.

Let’s start small and define a Goal. What is your broad goal of creating this curriculum? Is it Career oriented? or something you would want to transition into in the future?

Its better to read nothing, than to read something that’s not worth reading — Peter Drucker

Brandon Hakim, in his course Reading Machine Masterclass (it’s awesome BTW — go check it out. The value you receive from the course is immense and way disproportional to investment), explains that we’re in an era of Specialized knowledge

“Specialized talent is the way of the 21st Century and economy. Investing on specialization is what will get you to success. One hour a day dedicated to learning on speciality could make you an expert in an year “ — Brandon Hakim

Aim for T-Shaped Curriculum

The concept of T-shaped skills is used to describe the skills and specialization of a person. The vertical bar on the letter T represents the depth of related skills and expertise in a single field, whereas the horizontal bar is the ability to collaborate across disciplines with experts in other areas and to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than one’s own.

You’ll need to ask yourself, “What do I want to be world-class in?” before choosing a topic or skill.

Decide the depth, the topic you want to be world-class in. Ideally, this should consist of about 50% of your curriculum, effort & time.

DOCUMENT — DECIDE — ELIMINATE

• Once you decide on your world-class expertise, start with listing all the skills and topic you are curious about and everything that helps you with your “depth skill”
• Now decide the important skills that you’re very curious about and that are directly related to your Life Major, your expertise.
• Finally, eliminate everything else. You can perhaps revisit those topics a few years later when you have achieved Mastery over the current Focussed skill.

I use Notion as a database to track and plan my learning in the Curriculum. You can use mine instead of creating from scratch. You can find it here.

Just knowing what to focus on will seldom help in achieving. Like every successful endeavors you need a solid game plan and strategy to execute the learning.

The Basic Rules

An important part of any campaign, major or small, is structure. 

Your plan will collapse in its absence and before you know it, you’ve no clue what is happening or why did you even start in the first place and you curse yourself for not planning in advance. The world as you know descends to chaos and all because you couldn’t just put a structure in place.

What? You never felt that way? So that’s just me?

In all seriousness though, any project requires a certain set of principles that you agree or decide to abide by in order for your project to reach fruition. Having a structure gives you immediate feedback and you’ll hold the pulse of the overall progress. 

Even before you begin this campaign, commit to the basic rules, so that, when you hit a wall, which you will, you’ll know your grounds and don’t abandon the campaign prematurely

• The 3-year rule

Originally inspired by Matt D’Avella, this rule follows the basic philosophy that any worthwhile endeavour takes patience, hustle and persistence. Simply put, You’ll need to commit to your Goal for at least 3 years or more before you decide to pull the plug if at all you decide that.

There’s no giving up until then and You’ll need to build your Grit muscle. For the most part, things are not going to be easy and you’re going to fail — like a lot. But, it’s all going to be worth it.

The basic notion behind this rule is that it’s going to take time to create something meaningful. This is a gentle reminder to us that all good things do not happen overnight but over time.

It is all about long term commitment & short term goals. This beautifully crafted rule helps you balance out both things.

• The 5-hour rule

The Rule, originally taken up by giants such as Ben Franklin, requires you to commit an hour a day to learning, every single workday - that’s 5 hours a week. The major advantage you’ll reap of this philosophy is the compound interest. 

You’ll end up being more consistent and given that, it’s just an hour a day and you do this consistently, you can rise to the ranks of an industry leader, within 5 years.

Franklin, for his part, did this diligently and this was one of the major contributors of how he transformed, an average kid to a polymath that became a founding father.

• The 2-day rule

Another classic from Matt D’Avella, that accepts your humanness. In an ideal world, you would do everything as planned, get shit done and be a machine while making time for your family. But in reality, life is messy. Interruptions and Unexpected things pop up, whether you desire it or not. There is no getting around that.

What the 2-day rule states is that you are allowed to skip a day if something inevitable comes along. However, you cannot miss 2 days in a row. If required, you can miss 3 days in a week, provided, you completed the assigned tasks in between those days as planned. 

This one rule, D’Avella says, accounts to his most consistent fitness habit, along with other career success.

Showing up every day is the simple key that most of us struggle with. The antidote to Resistance, he says is Consistency. And it couldn’t be more true.

The Mindset

In order for you to learn effectively, you need to come out of the old mindset of ‘School’ and embrace the Infinite Mindset.

Infinite Mindset is your ability to play the Infinite game. Infinite games are the ones where the rules are less clear, and the objective is not to beat someone else but to keep the game going. It is about sustainability and long term vision rather than short term wins, instant gratification and completing the game.

You will need to decide consciously to play the long game, and not get swayed by short term pleasures. And this mindset shift isn’t going to happen overnight and is definitely going to take some time. However, it’s not tough either. It’s a muscle that you build which gets stronger every time you flex it.

So, what exactly characterizes Infinite Mindset?

• Embrace Curiosity & Conscious Obliviousness

Curiosity is often the cornerstone of development and growth. It is only when you’re curious that you’ll be able to open up your mind for the possibilities and cultivate learning as a practice.

Once you start learning, it is inevitable that you’ll start facing resistance and doubts once the initial excitement fades away. It might be a few weeks or even a few days, it is going to happen. The best strategy to beat this is to embrace what I call “The Conscious Obliviousness”

Being Consciously Oblivious is a state of mind, where you decide, consciously, to be blind to the possibility of Failures. It is being consciously blind to the enormity of the topic you’re learning and how little you know. It is being blind to the long road ahead and just taking one step at a time.

Aim for sustainability and show up every day. Be the longest standing person, learning a little every day. You’re going to beat all the excited and “smart ones” that you admire so much. Think about sustainability. A little step every single day. That’s all it takes. You’ll reach the top 1% over time. With this small step, taken consistently over time will help you beat even the giants. All you need is commitment and patience.

• The Art of FLOW

In order for you to perform optimally, you will need to be in the state of flow for a prolonged period fo time. Best selling author and a leading expert in this concept, Steven Kotler defines Flow as an optimal state of consciousness, a state where you feel your best and perform your best.

In order for you to achieve a flow state and stay in it requires Practice, no doubt, but what really is critical along with that is knowing your flow type. Knowing your flow type helps you manage your time and learning sessions based on that. You can find your “Flow type” and plan your approach accordingly.

Jamie Wheal’s Flow Genome Project offers a free quiz to know your type. You can take your quiz here.

(I’m DEEP THINKER btw. What was yours? Let me know)

• Grit

In order for you to rise above all the distraction and resistance from within, you’ll need to persevere. If you don’t already know, I don’t believe in Talent. I believe in skill acquisition. Talent, what I believe is often just the result of skill acquisition for a prolonged period of time.

Any skill for that matter hence requires you to put in the work. Of course, you can use all the knowledge you’ve to your advantage and plan learning strategies personal to you. But remember that, it is all about the process.

As Angela Duckworth beautifully put it on her bestseller, Grit, “Our Potential is one thing. What we do with it, quite another”

• The Failure Philosophy

Failure is not just an inevitable factor on the journey, but a necessary teacher. Failing is never an option. It is going to happen, whether you ignore it or try to wish it away. What is optional, however, is your Attitude.

Failure is always the prerequisite of any intentional success. It is the one that didn’t let failure deter him and took them as lessons that often succeeds. How you perceive Failures is going to have a massive impact in your success and you can let it either be positive and let it help you or fall prey to the victim mentality and let it defeat you

When you see failure for what it is — nothing more than a lesson, you increase the odds of success in your favour. The moment you stop taking Failures personally and become objective is the moment you’re heading in the right path.

Learning Strategy

The 20 Hour Rule

Josh Kaufman in his famous Ted talk, says that we grossly underestimate how faster we can learn a new skill. This is also because partly to avoid the feeling of being horrible at something, even if it’s not permanent. 

We are very incompetent in the beginning and are very bad at it. So, most of us do not even try.

If you want to learn something new, you’ll have to follow Josh’s strategy he gives in his books, The First 20 Hours. 

• You need to have a clear goal, specifically how good do you really want to be, and in what?
• You move on to breaking down the skill into further smaller parts, next. This will also help with the overwhelm. 
• Once you have deconstructed the skill into smaller parts, all you have to do is START. Just start and learn by doing. You cannot learn everything from books or courses.

This is the exact blueprint I use for learning anything new. Easy to look, but not so much in implementation. I’ll be honest, there are many times I’ll fail constantly. 

However, I’ve observed that whenever I’m pushing myself or learning with intense focus, I tend to get better. There is actually a term for this — Progressive Overload. 

You push yourself to failure and then give sufficient time to recover. Just practising an hour a day for the next 20 days, with an intense focus can actually make you sufficiently good enough in that skill or language or anything you want to learn. Just be sure to add sufficient sleep for the brain to recover.

Network

Ugh! I know. I just cringe when somebody tells me I have to “network” or go to conferences to “meet new people”. It’s not that I’m bad with people or hate talking, it’s just that the modern trend of “networking” feels so superficial and impersonal. 

What does that mean anyway? Network? Aren’t human relationships supposed to be spontaneous and natural?

Anyways, your network truly does play an important role. It is about who you know, not what you know that matters. I will even go one step further and say, it is not just who you know, but who knows you that matters even more in the current economy.

You’ll have to sculpt your network, predominantly with these 3 types of people; The Mentors (the people who are already in the place you want to be in life so that you can learn from them), The peers, (from whom you learn and also teach them about your learnings) and finally the Mentees (people who are currently in a place, you were in the past)

We’re all good with people. Most of us have our own ways of approaching networking. Whether you’re a hardcore introvert who finds solace in personal meetings or a total extrovert who goes to a crowded party, gun blazing and pulls the crowd with him, or perhaps you’re somewhere in between — whatever it is, you need to know your type and go for it. 

Just Go for it and sculpt your network, like a master sculptor carving his sculpture.

Having a network of people will often result in saving you time and mistakes, which you can learn from mentors and solidify your learning by teaching others, usually your peers or mentees and finally give back to the people who could use your help. Ideally, you must spend approx 33% of your time with all these three groups.

Bringing the concept to everyday Life

Let’s be practical, you might learn all the facts and knowledge that there is, of a skill or topic. But if you fail to bring it to action or fail to act on it, there’s absolutely no use to your knowledge. It is just a potential power, waiting to be utilized. Until you start using the knowledge to create or build something, your potential knowledge is of little or no use. You need to just START.

Lot of us fear the thought of failure than failure itself. So we often procrastinate to learn a bit more, so that it can be “Perfect” when we start.

This is a classic form of Procrastination and sadly, I’m speaking by experience. There were tons of times when I should have just begun and the learning could’ve been way faster and efficient. But I waited for the “Perfect” moment wasting precious time, finally starting a bit too late with wasted time.

It is better, hence, to make it a habit to start DOING and learning on the go. This applies to most of the skills you want to learn. And the best way to bring that to practice is to make it a habit and a part of the routine.

Daily Actions

• Dedicate 1-hour every day for at least 5 days a week, where you turn off all the distractions and just focus on learning. Remember the power of ‘the 5-hour rule’
• Always go for Creation more than consumption. You need to DO something more than you READ or STUDY it. The best ratio that works for me is 1:3 — for every hour of Consumption, I spend 3 hours in Creation.
• Start a blog or Youtube channel, where you teach others what you learnt. The goal of this channel is not to make money or become popular or even make that channel famous. It is just about Public accountability. Trust me, it seriously works.
• Remember Progressive Overload and push yourself in every session and sleep well every day for optimal recovery, so that you can repeat the same, the next day.

Tracking

• Having a system of tracking will do wonders for your morale. It need not be fancy. Just a small excel sheet with hours in one column and learning summary of each day on the other is more than sufficient. You’ll get a view of your progress, and nothing beats the excitement of seeing your progress Visually
• Document everything you learn. Document in a way you’re teaching to someone new with no clue about the topic or skill you’re learning. Post this learning in your channel. This will also act as content to your channel and also learning material for your mentees.
• Schedule a weekly review session, ideally on a weekend to review your progress and plan your next week’s learning plan or strategy. You might want to change the strategy if you are constantly falling short of your intended target

With all these strategies and mindsets, you’re more than equipped to handle any complex learning curriculum you would want and master it over time.

The copy of Notion template for you to assist in your Personal Life Curriculum is here.

Did I miss something? What are your thoughts? Let me know

Thanks