Incite Your Month: February 2021
At CTQ, we kick each month off with a 5 min collection of ideas & recos from the team’s recent curiosity diet. It helps us ‘incite’ the rest of the month. Here’s this month’s edition.
(You can watch instead of reading this.)
One insightful book
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
We’d read this book summary before and found it so good, we began reading the whole book. Bill Gates said this book put him to sleep - in a good way. The book delves into the importance of sleep and why we should not ignore it at any cost.
Top Takeaway: The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) has declared sleep deprivation as a public health epidemic! It's that serious.
Check it out if: ...you like reading about the human body and how to get the best out of it!
One article
We are all confident idiots
The author is David Dunning (of the Dunning-Kruger effect fame) who talks about... well, whatever we say will just prove the article right! One thing I can say is that we read a lot of great articles but when we read this one, we internally gave it a rating of 5/5. #longreadalert
Check it out if: ...you are curious about why we get some things so spectacularly wrong and yet, are very confident about ourselves!
One tool
Otter.ai
Voice tools are growing in stature and usefulness. Last month, Ramanand began experimenting with Otter, a tool for real-time speech-to-text transcription. It’s handy for quick notes, keeping your hands free for gesturing than for note-taking, and it also creates tagged keywords. Give it a shot.
(Yup, he recorded this note in Otter; it was 95% accurate)
One book summary
Ping Pong Diplomacy: The secret history behind the game that changed the world
The book gives an account of how Ping Pong helped the Americans start diplomatic relations with Communist China. The visit of the US table tennis team set the ball rolling which led to China rejoining the world after decades of isolation.
One takeaway: The historic moment when American player Glenn Cowan boarded the Chinese team bus in Japan was a staged PR exercise.
Check it out if: ...you like to read about world politics and history of the sport.
One newsletter
Recomendo
Recomendo is a weekly newsletter that sends you 6 brief personal recommendations of cool stuff. It’s crisp, very useful, and is a good dose of randomness.
One smartcast
Karthik Srinivasan on How to build social capital - brand You online
Karthik Srinivasan is an expert in personal branding, corporate communication and the author of 'Be Social, Building Brand YOU online'. In this episode I speak to him about demystifying personal branding.
Check it out if: ...you are curious about how to build a system for building your personal brand online.
Closing with our favourite reflective ‘FutureRing’ question from last month
“What do you want to do less of over the next 30 days, to free up time for more important/interesting/fulfilling things?"
[We also have a video version of these recommendations here.]