One Skill That Will Make You More Curious
Advice on the most underrated professional skill, an amazing invention for home construction, and why you need a personal mission statement.
Blatant product placement of the Megabeta Climbing Sling Bag
Hello there,
I made it out climbing with friends last weekend in Red Rock Canyon outside Las Vegas. We lucked out with gorgeous weather and terrific conditions!
My word for 2024 is “balance” and taking a trip away from family helped me find some of that. I returned energized to chase our toddler around shouting, “It’s cold outside, you need to wear this sweater!”
This week we’ve got advice on the most underrated professional skill, an amazing invention for home construction, and why you need a personal mission statement.
The Most Valuable Prompt to Take Other’s Perspectives
The executive coach Carolyn Coughlin demonstrates a surprisingly underrated skill. She has an extraordinary gift for listening, which has helped her coach leaders and executives across industries.
Here’s her advice for being a better listener:
One big problem Carolyn points out is that we tend to oversimplify the perspectives of others. When you acknowledge that your first impression is likely wrong, you ask better questions to find the truth.
I love the question she suggests bringing up in meetings and during important decisions; “What’s not being said here?”
And there’s an important mindset shift you can make to improve your experience. When you are “listening to win” as Carolyn calls it, you close yourself off to the other person’s perspective.
Even simple language like, "That isn't true" or "Don't worry about it" causes the other person to feel ignored. Instead, she suggests striving to understand, to truly hear what the other person is saying.
“When people feel really really truly seen and heard it's one of the most extraordinary experiences that a person can have.” — Carol Coughlin
The quality of the questions we ask can influence the depth of answers we receive. When she and her team asked the leaders they coach where they find the most challenging questions, one answer kept coming up; their children.
The innate curiosity of children leads them to ask unconventional questions like, “Why is the sky blue?” Tapping into that curiosity unlocks an ability to see the complex mosaic of the world rather than our own narrow perspective.
Carolyn Coughlin offers a terrific prompt to make you more open-minded. When talking to someone else, ask yourself, "how could I be wrong?"
This forces you to consider not only gaps in your judgment but also the logic that got you there. And if that’s uncomfortable? Terrific! The world requires us to be uncomfortable and adapt.
Listening is immediately useful because it helps you find perspectives you might need to solve a problem. And because listening tends to be contagious. Try using just one of these questions for a week to see how it changes your perspective.
Worthy & Remarkable
Simplicity for the win! - the Bullseye Bore offers a remarkably simple way to drill a straight hole (raised $400k+?!)
A wallet from an MIT grad - Shuffle Wallet - raises $170k on Kickstarter opens like a deck of cards and offers RFID blocking
One fun glimpse into next-gen technology is Casey Neistat’s review of the Apple Vision Pro, skateboarding around NYC while wearing these crazy goggles
First Ascent of the hardest route in Italy by Stefano Ghisolfi (9b+) - yeeehaw!
Here’s a throwback, but the video of Magnus Midtbo free-soloing in Red Rock Canyon with Alex Honnold had us all laughing last weekend
Mary Oliver reads her most wonderful poem paired with beautiful surf footage from Australia in this Patagonia film (thanks Jordan)
One Thing from Me
I’ve been painting the walls of our newly renovated garage and listening to podcasts. I found a gem in the interview with best-selling author Greg McKeown about the importance of your personal mission statement.
Greg calls this your directional documents and emphasizes the value of revisiting it weekly.
He points out the metaphor that a flight is off-track 90% of the time and it only arrives at the correct destination by readjusting constantly along the way. What might that look like for you?
In the short term, you are as good as your intensity. In the long term, you are only as good as your consistency.
— Shane Parrish
The biggest danger out there is that 20 years will go by. And you can either get 20 years of life experience or have the same year of experience over and over.
Directionally,
Jono
PS - we have the technology…