Welcome to Graymatter, a weekly newsletter with ideas and strategies to unlock full potential through self-leadership and technology.
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🌟 Leverage a nugget to put it into practice this coming week.
✍️ Share your comments at the bottom of this post.
Happy Easter Sunday to those who celebrate this holiday.
📚 Books
Human connection in a busy and complex world has never been harder. In a recent interview, Charles Duhigg, the author of the new book Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, reminds us of the Harvard study that revealed that the number of relationships and social connections we have is crucial to happiness and longevity.
Supercommunicators is a guide to teach us how to engage in deeper conversations and understand the three types:
Practical (What’s this really about?)
Emotional (How do we feel?)
Social (Who are we?).
You're unlikely to connect if you don’t know what kind of conversation you’re having.
When I read an article or hear a valuable idea, I always reflect on how it reinforces a concept in the Career Strategy Framework. Supercommunicators is a reference I will add to Strategy 6—Connect Intentionally.
🚀 Careers
I talk to and coach several people each week who seek career growth and transformation. This includes graduate students seeking to land a job after graduation and professionals seeking to take their craft to the next level. Through many years of experience and coaching, I see two essential themes to catalyze change in a new direction: awareness and attention. I know that does not sound groundbreaking, but the simplicity of engaging in these at a deep level and practicing them daily is at the core of personal transformation. Often, people look into the external world and overlook the value of getting an accurate view of who they are, who they want to become, and what beliefs and habits may limit their potential. This is the objective of Strategy 1 - Know Yourself in the Career Strategy Framework. With a stronger self-awareness, you can look outward with clarity to discover and pursue choices and paths that align with your best self (Strategy 2).
Here are a few actions you can take to start the transformation process.
👀 Read one of the twelve Strategy 1 articles and reflect on the questions to calibrate your self-awareness. Cultivating deeper awareness is a process and a life-long practice that will pay dividends in many ways, personally and professionally. Reading is the first step, but change happens through action. What are you willing to do (or not do) this week?
🎧 Meditation apps such as Calm and Headspace are powerful tools for strengthening mindfulness. Recently, I have been listening to focus and concentration meditations and found that I am better at recognizing distractions and focusing on what is important. We are all given the same amount of time each day, but how we apply that time with focus and discipline often makes the difference in achieving our desired outcomes.
🗣️ Make it a priority to connect with one or two people in your field during the week to share your perspectives and learn from others. Communicating your current focus areas and how you describe yourself can broaden your awareness. People who know you may also reinforce your unique expertise and how you may channel that to deliver on your goals.
🤖 Tech
For those interested in learning AI and building stuff, here are a few artificial intelligence articles and references I explored over the last two weeks related to my consulting projects and as an AI instructor.
LangChain is an AI orchestration framework for composing LLMs for end-to-end applications. The LangChain YouTube channel includes many practical examples of building Retrieval Augmentation Retrieval (RAG) apps.
16 Changes to the Way Enterprises Are Building and Buying Generative AI (A16Z)