Go wide

For the next 5 minutes, let’s elevate your career.

In today’s email:

Learning is a motivating state. Dopamine, a rewarding chemical, is elevated in the learning process. Learning meets our desires for novelty and escaping boredom. It advances our goals. Lifelong, domain-specific, deep learning gives us expertise to stay relevant and compete in the job market.

Wide learning also has great value.

David Epstein, in his book Range (2019), studied world-leading athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, and scientists. He found that wide learning and broad skill acquisition primed people for success. Wide learning helps us make mental connections that siloed, specialized learning by itself cannot. Wide learning helps us be agile and creative when solving complex problems.

Investing in wide learning helps future-proof our careers. Learning about design thinking from engineering can help an HR professional design a training program. Learning about neuroscience can help a salesperson better understand how clients are persuaded. Combining disciplines leads to innovation.

Go wide.

Here is a roadmap to enjoy public speaking more:

Mindset

Content

Voice

Stagecraft

The bar is low to be rated as having spoken well. A lot of speakers under-prepare and waffle. There is much less pressure to do well than we fear.

This framework is how Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos identifies which decisions should be made fast or not fast.

Fast: two-way door decisions

If it's a two-way door decision, you pick a door, you walk out, you spend a little time there. If it turns out to be the wrong decision, you can come back in and pick another door.

These decisions are reversible so they can be made fast. Examples:

Not fast: one-way door decisions

Some decisions are so consequential and so hard to reverse that they really are one way door decisions. You go in that door, you're not coming back. Those decisions have to be made very carefully.

If we get high stakes, irreversible decisions wrong, we can suffer significant costs in money, stress, and reputation. One-way decisions require more time. Examples:

Identifying one-way and two-way door options in our work helps us optimize time spent on decisions. This leads to us adding value faster while reducing the probability and cost of mistakes.

Our self-talk determines much of our happiness.

We can narrate a future where we succeed because of our effort and persistence.

It’s much better than narrating gloom.

Shonda Rhimes (1970 — ) was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in a family that valued education and storytelling. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Dartmouth College. Rhimes later completed a master’s degree in screenwriting at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. After graduating, she worked in television and film while developing original scripts.

Rhimes rose to prominence as the creator of Grey’s Anatomy, which premiered in 2005 and became one of the longest-running medical dramas in television history. She went on to create and produce hit series including Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder. In 2017, Rhimes left ABC Studios and entered a long-term creative partnership with Netflix, where she expanded into global production through Shondaland.

Some of Rhimes’ career wisdom: