LEARN THEN APPLY

Hi there!

My friend Tyler challenged me to make a power ranking for Thanksgiving food.

I don't think I'm well qualified to do this because my favorite part of Thanksgiving food is mixing the turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry jelly, gravy, and a lil green bean casserole into a medley of sorts.

That being said, here's my attempt to rank individual items:

1. Pumpkin Pie
2. Sweet Potato Casserole
3. Turkey + Gravy + Cranberry Jelly
4. Green Bean Casserole
5. Mashed Potatoes and Gravy
6. Mac and Cheese
7. Ham

Now to the newsletter 👇🏾

First off, thank you so much to all of you who provided feedback on the direction I should go with this newsletter. The consensus was a combination of helpful resources and context on why, when, and how to apply them.

So welcome to the new format.

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🧠 LEARN

        The Challenge

This week I was struggling with the roadmap for Learn Then Apply.

The mission is "Turning Consumption into Creation". I wanted to compile resources that I've found, and then reference back whenever I used them in my life or in a project.

But I didn't know how to package all that together in a way that would be useful to others.

        Resources

📝 How to Take Smart Notes

I stumbled on this summary of the book, How To Take Smart Notes, while reading Tiago Forte's guide on how to summarize books.

It tells the story of Niklas Luhmann and how he took notes.

As time went on, he was able to find the gaps in his knowledge and contextualize new thoughts into his existing mental framework.

        Insights

This gave me a clear vision on how I could structure Learn Then Apply. I want to create a library of micro-learnings that are then referenced back to through live case studies that show when and how to their were used.

In the article, Tiago references three types of notes: fleeting notes (the basic seed of a thought), literature notes (providing a bit more detail to the thought), and permanent notes (categorizing and adding it to the mind index).

I added this widget on my home screen so I can write down random thoughts I might have during the day:

Then I set a daily alarm at 9:30 PM to remind myself to dump these notes into Roam Research (a note taking app) where I'll give it some more context and categorize/file it away.

If you were wondering.. In is for tasks or appointments based on the book GTD. Thoughts are for ideas. They could probably be in the same note since I'm dumping it all out at the end of the day, but trying this for now 🤷🏾‍♂️.

In Roam I created this database of ideas so I can start making subcategories:

I think this is a good baseline for capturing ideas.

As long as I'm consistent, I can use these ideas to build the articles that will live on learnthenapply.com.

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🚀 APPLY

        Project Updates

📖 Founder's Journal

I created a dashboard in Notion to store all the social posts that we've already made, and a sub-dashboard that Alex can check to approve next week's posts.

I want to continue standardizing these processes so it's easier to delegate and scale moving forward.

🚗 Ambassador Import

I went ahead and gave the mechanic the approval to continue working on the restoration. I've decided that even if I don't profit off the venture, it's something that I want for myself as proof that I followed through with one of my crazy ideas.

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✌ See y'all next week

Have a great Thanksgiving weekend! No one could have planned for this year, but I've been seeing many things to be thankful for in my life and the lives of my friends and family. Taking a second to reflect and be grateful.

If I don't send a newsletter by next Wednesday (11/25), venmo request me for $10 @monitormonkey.

Have a great week!

<3 Aswin