Every Thursday, I provide simple tips to help you create more pauses — with a generous sprinkling of humor — in 5 minutes or less.

7 Days Of Lessons Learned

My daily journaling routine is set up as follows:

I want to zoom in on that last one, Lessons Learned.

During my recent full moon celebration, I realized many of the lessons I was learning at the conclusion of each day weren’t new.

In fact, I’ve written about many of them (e.g. gratitude, comfort with death, just getting started) already.

With this realization, I’ve decided to experiment with something new:

I’ll share the seven(ish) lessons I learned the past seven days, and expand upon one of them as the theme of that strong’s newsletter.

As I mentioned, I’ve already kind of been doing this without realizing it. Now, there's the added fun and context of seeing six other lessons I've learned.

For insight into my process, I’ll share that I write these down by hand in my journal…

then bring the lessons over to my Second Brain to make sharing them easier.

Next week, when I share a similar screenshot of 7 lessons learned, I’ll dive fully into one of them.

However, if there's one key takeaway for today, it's this:

Writing one thing I’ve learned each day has been, and continues to be, a very helpful exercise.

And it isn’t difficult to do today.

Ways To Keep Track Of Lessons You’re Learning

Writing them down seems like the best—and perhaps only—solution. (If you have other ideas, I’m curious—please share them with me.)

Whether you choose your notes app, a post-it, or a dedicated journal is a matter of personal preference. 

Having a physical artifact in existence stating the lesson learned provides 2 key benefits:

1) It engrains the knowledge of the lesson deeper as you spent time with it (the time spent to write it).

2) It drastically increases the likelihood you’ll read and/or do something with it again in the future, repeating benefit #1.

This is a great place to start.

Eventually, you’ll have written a lot of learned lessons down, and you’ll probably want an easier way to recall those lessons without re-reading everything you’ve ever written by diving into a pile of post-its Scrooge McDuck style.

I have a recommendation for doing that, and that will be what I write about next strong.

If you start tracking your lessons today and accumulate seven by next Thursday, please share them with me. 

Because that would light me the fuck up with joy.

😄 Funny Business

📊 Community Poll

Results for last week’s question: Which pant leg do you put on first every morning? and is it the leg you kick with?

I’m surprised over half of us put on the non-dominant leg first. I tried it this morning and had to do that half-jumping thing to keep my balance. I envy the one person who switches it up all the time, I think that’s a great practice. I do it with my tooth brush and eating utensils frequently.

On to this week’s question…

"Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if you will ever dig." - Marcus Aurelius