Reflection Title: Profoundly Simple!
Book – Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (Part 1 of 2)
Book Description:
Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the "human scale principle", using the "Velcro Theory of Memory", and creating "curiosity gaps".
In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds (from the infamous "kidney theft ring" hoax to a coach's lessons on sportsmanship, to a new-product vision at Sony) draw their power from the same six traits.
Reflection:
Ever since the day that Emilia passed away, I’ve been on a search for meaning and purpose in my life. I needed to understand why this happened to my daughter and my family and needed a reason to get up off the mat and keep moving forward.
Following my soul teacher’s clues on my quest to solve this mystery, we’ve slowly and surely made progress each day toward understanding what this life is all about and how to find a way of living that provides sustainable happiness, fulfillment, and purpose.
That journey has taken me, per my audible account total listening time as of today (2/20/23), more than 2 Months, 10 Day, 13 hours and 52 minutes’ worth of learning on this platform since 3/15/20, the day Emilia was born. Add in another couple 100 hours of learning consumption on other platforms, traditional reading, 1,000+ hours of writing about what I’ve learned, and hundreds of hours of discussion about these topics with my co-founder each night for me to safely say that I’m now at least a little closer (maybe 10%) to being able to distill down all this questing into something that might make sense to someone else if I tried to explain it.
Think about that for a second, it has taken me thousands of hours of learning, action, and reflection over the past almost 3 years to get to the point in time where I feel like I’m finally making a tiny bit of progress to answering the question that launched this journey.
I have a whole lot of wisdom built up in this mind and I want to help anyone that is willing to listen.
I could talk for days, months, and even years about what Emilia and I have been through, learned, and discovered together since this journey began if someone were willing to listen. In the early days of this adventure, I tried just that. Anyone that was willing to listen, I would try to tell them the whole story, what I’ve learned, where it came from, and how I’ve applied it to my life. I quickly learned that this was not sustainable for either party. I got tired of saying the same thing over and over again, and I’m sure that I exhausted my friends and family who were gracious enough to even listen.
So, I wrote a book, but even that wasn’t enough to get people to listen. Spending 18 months of my life documenting these lessons and sharing them with the world was a good start, but expecting people to spend a couple of weeks with my words is still not feasible.
It was at this point in the journey that I decided that it was finally time that I shut up! I started to think to myself that I’m too far down this rabbit hole for anyone to catch up to me at this point, so what’s the point? I’ll just keep living my purpose and that is enough for me.
And then, The Year of Magical Learning adventure spontaneously popped into my head one day. Just for fun, I wanted to see if I could work my way through my thoughts and what we’ve learned so I wouldn’t forget them in the future. What ended up happening was Emilia and I slowly began breaking down this mountain of knowledge into what really lies at its heart.
Bird by Bird, we’ve chipped away at the slab of marble to reveal the David that was staring at us all along.
That profoundly simple answer to our question of how to live a life of sustainable happiness, fulfillment, and purpose was this…
Focus on Your Values and Bring Them to Life Each Day!
Question: What is your profoundly simple answer to your beautiful question?

Links:
What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction
YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon
YOML Bookstore - Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
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