WORK LESS WEDNESDAY
WLW #64
✅ 1. Would You Pay To Get Brutal Feedback About Your Life? This Guy Did. – The 360 Review
Would you pay money to get the most brutally honest feedback about yourself possible?
Andrew Wilkinson did.
And he ended up divorced.
It’s called a 360 Review and it is wild.
Here’s how it works:
- Hire a psychologist like Dr. Jack Skeen to conduct the review.
- He’ll spend 6-8 hours with you asking questions like “Are you a good person?” “What is your purpose?” and “Are you well liked?” and have you fill out a bunch of personality tests.
- Then, he’ll conduct 10 hours of interviews with your close friends, family, and colleagues.
- All of this data will be turned into a report – your 360 Review.
But be warned… It will be brutal.
Here’s what Andrew Wilkinson said…
“It was chock full of gut wrenching feedback and anonymized comments from the people who knew me best.
There were lots of positive things too, but it was a shit sandwich. Positives wrapped around the stuff nobody wants to read.”
Some of his feedback included:
“He is quite hard to work with. He is a terrible manager. He never gives positive feedback.”
“He is oblivious of how he comes across to others.”
“He needs to do the hard work of ‘real’ relationships. He can drop people when the work gets hard.”
“Sometimes I feel like he’s acting in social situations.”
“I get the impression often that Andrew isn’t happy.”
Painful.
But the insights led to powerful change in his life…
- He got divorced.
- He changed his day-to-day life completely.
- He changed what he works on and how he interacts with friends.
Andrew called it “10 years of therapy in a month.”
If you want to go down the rabbit hole, you can reach out to Jack Skeen here.
🧠 2. The Relationship Between Doing Nothing & Creativity – Twitter Thread By Billy Oppenheimer
As if you needed another reason to spend less time working…
An incredible study concluded that if you want to be creative, you need to STOP WORKING.
It turns out, when you are doing absolutely nothing, the brain engages in what the researchers termed “random episodic silent thought” or REST.
And guess what?
REST is a requirement for creativity.
This becomes a huge problem if you never stop working.
Need some inspiration?
Try doing what these famous authors do:
Neil Gaiman, Raymond Chandler, Dr. Suess, George Lucas, and many other writers all have/had a similar habit.
They gave themselves two options:
a) You don’t have to write.
b) You can’t do anything else.
It turns out eventually writing becomes much more interesting compared to doing nothing.
You sit down, stare out the window, and eventually… the creativity flows.
You can read the full report here: “A Journey into Chaos: Creativity and the Unconscious.”
☕ 3. How I Make Home Coffee Better Than 98% Of Coffee Shops
If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I’m a coffee & tea aficionado.
I’ve been getting a lot of questions about my coffee set up recently.
So I’m here to break it down.
If you don’t make these 3 mistakes, you can make home coffee 50x better than Starbucks at a fraction of the cost.
My Machine: Breville Barista Express
I received this machine as a gift from my business partner.
It is expensive, but if you drink coffee daily, it will pay for itself 100x over.
It makes truly great espresso for the price point (IF you follow my guide!)
1️⃣ Mistake 1: Not Using Fresh Beans
The secret to beans: Beans MUST be freshly roasted
5 days to 3 weeks post-roasting is ideal.
Vigilante Coffee is my favorite roaster.
2️⃣ Mistake 2: Not Using A Scale
Coffee is a math equation.
Beans + Water.
Hard to figure out the math without a scale. (I use this one)
Don’t forget this.
(For my machine I use 18 grams of beans and 30 grams of water.)
You can read more on coffee ratios here.
3️⃣ Mistake 3: Not Grinding Fresh
Beans should be ground IMMEDIATELY before consumption.
Fresh beans, freshly roasted, ground fresh.
No matter what equipment you’re using, two things matter more than anything else:
- Fresh beans – Roasted within 5 – 21 days.
- Freshly ground – Ground immediately before consumption.
And that’s it!
If you want to watch me go through these steps, I’ve got a short video here.
🇫🇷 4. How We Planned Our Paris Trip In Notion
My wife & I spent a week in Paris over Christmas.
It was our first visit and we had an amazing time.
I wanted to share a bit about our trip planning process, and how we used Notion & Google Maps to plan it.
🧠 Step 1. Notion Brain Dump
Step 1 is to create a shared Notion page where we can collect ideas and inspiration.
We use it as a dumping ground as we picked up items for the itinerary.
Recommendations, museums, restaurants, shops, etc.
Just dumped in without any real structure.
🗺 Step 2. Google Maps
Once we had a sense of what we MIGHT want to do, we created a custom Google Map using Google My Maps.
This is so cool because it allows you to put all the things you want to see on your own map.
That way you can get a sense of the layout of the city, understand which things are near each other, and start to plan an itinerary.
📌 Step 3. Notion Itinerary
After all of our research and planning, the final step is to get a plan in place.
We aimed to have activities and restaurants picked out for Morning, Afternoon, and Evening for each day.
That way we have a plan, but it is flexible.
We can always not do them if we want to just explore.
And that’s it! We found it to be super helpful.
What tools do you use to plan your trips?
🧳 P.S. One final life hack – Notion Packing List
I have a packing list template in Notion that I use for domestic and international travel.
It has saved me SO much time over the last few years.
For each new trip I just duplicate it and have 90% my packing list done.
👀 5. How You Can FINALLY Stop Paying Attention On Zoom Calls – Maxine by NVIDIA
Ok, this one blew my find.
You need to watch this short 15 second video to see it in action.
A new software from NVIDIA called Maxine combines AI & Augmented Reality for video calls.
This technology allows you to:
- Read a script on a live call without looking away.
- Translate your voice to another language and look like you’re speaking it.
- Fix your eye contact with the camera on a call.
- And you can finally stop paying attention on Zoom calls.
Things are happening fast people!