Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.

Good ideas without proper execution are useless. To see ideas come to life and drive value for your organization, you need a systematic approach to prioritizing and executing the best ideas.Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a powerful goal-setting framework for organizations. This system has been used by countless successful companies to direct efforts and grow over the long term.

Focus on Execution

It is a management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization. This goal-setting framework is used by Google, Airbnb, LinkedIn, and many other successful companies.Objective: a short, inspirational, and achievable statement that describes WHAT you want to achieve. Objectives are a “vaccine against fuzzy thinking and fuzzy execution.”Key Results: succinct, specific, and measurable actions that map out HOW you will achieve your Objectives. KRs are aggressive but realistic.

The Meaning Of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

OKRs surface your primary goals. They channel efforts and coordination. They link diverse operations, lending purpose and unity to the entire organization.OKRs help your organization prioritize the highest impact initiatives. They also align people across your entire organization, which creates unity despite people working on very different parts of the business.

Goal Setting

Goals may cause systematic problems in organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behaviour, increased risk-taking, decreased cooperation and decreased motivation.The wrong goals can be detrimental to an organization. The OKR process helps you set the right goals, but it must be used carefully. Sending people in the wrong direction or incentivizing the wrong behaviour through goals can be wildly harmful to an organization.

The Danger Of Goals

OKRs are a shared language for execution. They clarify expectations: What do we need to get done (and fast), and who’s working on it? They keep employees aligned, vertically and horizontally.OKRs unify the organization with a shared language and clarity about expectations.

A Shared Language for Execution

Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsting for meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission. And the process can’t stop with unveiling top-line OKRs at a quarterly all-hands meeting. People want to find meaning in their work. They want to know how their hours contribute directly to the mission of the organization. It’s the responsibility of the leader to explain why certain goals have been set, and how individuals working on their goals are contributing to the overall vision.

Communicating the 'Why'

When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.’

People who choose their destination will own a deeper awareness of what it takes to get there.Giving people a chance to contribute to setting OKRs within their functions can help increase buy-in, give a sense of ownership, and help them understand what it takes to achieve the goals. Leaders need to find the right balance between bottom-up and top-down goal-setting when using OKRs.

Involve Your People in Setting OKRs

A manager’s first role is the personal one. It’s the relationship with people, the development of mutual confidence, and the creation of a community. Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.Outside of setting the right goals and getting buy-in from their teams, managers need to focus on relationships. They need to make sure their people are developing and happy with their path.

How to Stop Being Embarrassed

OKRs need to include a healthy and continuous performance management system. This can be done with the CFR framework.Conversations: an authentic, richly textured exchange between manager and contributor, aimed at driving performance.Feedback: bidirectional or networked communication among peers to evaluate progress and guide future improvement.Recognition: expressions of appreciation to deserving individuals for contributions of allCFRs help promote transparency, accountability, empowerment, and teamwork.

Conversations, Feedback, and Recognition (CFRs)

Feedback helps people understand how others perceive them and their work. It’s naturally opinion-based but is often grounded in the experiences we have with colleagues. Managers need to learn how to give constructive feedback to their employees in a way that they can absorb and action that feedback.

Feedback

#1 New York Times Bestseller Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive. In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They'd have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress—to measure what mattered. Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove ("the greatest manager of his or any era") drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove's brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked. In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization. The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

business

Business

books

Books

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

#1 New York Times Bestseller Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive. In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They'd have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress—to measure what mattered. Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove ("the greatest manager of his or any era") drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove's brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked. In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization. The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

John Doerr

Measure What Matters

Our thought processes are affected by what we experience around us, and it’s normal to experience both good and bad times. However, when negative thinking becomes the norm, it can contribute to mental health problems including social anxiety, low self-esteem, and even depression. To avoid falling into that pattern, let’s explore the science of negative thinking and how you can develop a more mindful relationship with your thoughts.

Negative Feelings Are Natural

Our thought processes are intimately connected to the way we feel. When you’re feeling content, your thoughts tend to reflect this. In times of happiness, you may be more satisfied with your career progress, perceive your personal relationships as more secure, or have a better body image. Conversely, if you’re anxious or unhappy, you may notice that negative thoughts start to emerge. This could include feeling stressed about work, worrying about your appearance, or questioning the loyalty of your friends.

The Science of Negative Thinking

If you regularly experience negative thoughts, this cognitive distortion can sadly worsen an already poor mental health, leading to low mood, poor self-esteem, and anxiety.To make things worse, a bias towards negative thinking will increase the likelihood that you’ll spend time ruminating on mistakes or dwelling on things that didn’t go as well as you had hoped. Negativity bias, or the propensity to focus on negative experiences, can cloud your judgement. Decisions will appear more complex than they truly are, which will make it harder to know how to handle difficult situations.

Negative Bias

<ul><li>Recognize negative thinking when it arises.</li><li>Ask yourself if the thought is truthful or helpful.</li><li>If the negative thought provides no value, shift your focus by rewiring your thought patterns.</li><li>Manage negative thinking by changing the way you respond to it and control how much impact it has.</li></ul>

The Principles of Managing Negative Thoughts

<ol><li>Create distance from your thoughts: Pay attention to your automatic thoughts and label them as subjective thoughts.</li><li>Start a thought diary: Journal down the date, the time, the event that triggered an emotion, and the resulting negative thought.</li><li>Use de-catastrophizing techniques: Negative thinking often leads to catastrophizing.</li></ol>Ask yourself: <ul><li>What am I worried about? Is it likely that my worry will come true?</li><li>What is the worst that could happen if my worry comes true?</li></ul>

How to Transmute Your Negative Thoughts

Once recognised, negative thoughts can be managed to reduce the impact on your emotional wellbeing. This in turn will break the cycle of negative thinking. By paying attention to your thoughts and interrogating their validity you can prevent cognitive distortions from skewing your beliefs and impacting your mental health.

The Bottom Line

When negative thinking becomes the norm, it can contribute to mental health problems including social anxiety, low self-esteem, and even depression. To avoid falling into that pattern, let’s explore the science of negative thinking and how you can develop a more mindful relationship to your thoughts.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

The psychology of negative thinking

Two biased forms of thinking that involve taking things too personallyPersonalisation: believing that you're the cause of a negative event, despite having little or no evidence to support the belief.Mind reading: believing someone is making a critical judgment about you, especially in an ambiguous situation where you've received no direct feedback.<ul><li>Misleading thoughts about social situations can become habitual.</li><li>Social situations are always somewhat unclear, so it's natural to try to make sense of them.</li></ul>

The Two Forms Of Thinking

If you experience a social setback or can’t get a good read on what another person is thinking, being self-aware can help you pinpoint and correct social problems. But if you resort to personalising or mind-reading whenever there’s a bit of social ambiguity, these well-rehearsed thoughts will start to appear automatically, even when you don’t have much evidence to suggest they’re true.

A Lack Of Self-Awareness

If you struggle with taking things too personally, it’s likely that these self-critical thoughts have been rehearsed so often that you don’t even notice them anymore, particularly if you’re wrapped up in the uncomfortable feelings and urges that accompany them. You can compare these well-learned automatic thoughts to the procedural ones that help you perform activities you’ve done countless times, like driving a car.

Your Mind On Autopilot

If you tend to take things too personally, it’s important to recognise your patterns of personalisation or mind-reading before deciding what to do with them. This can be challenging, however, because the line between feelings and thoughts is often blurred. A good way to distinguish feelings from thoughts is to remember that feelings can often be summarised in one word – nervous, happy, surprised, scared – and thoughts are the ideas that drive or follow the feelings.

Distinguish Your Feelings from Your Thoughts

To help you understand and separate the connections between feelings and thoughts, practise labelling them whenever you have the opportunity.Remember that feelings are not debatable – you just feel how you feel, even when you wish you didn’t. Your thoughts, on the other hand, can be challenged, revised or replaced with more realistic and useful ones.

The Labelling Exercise

The next time you’re experiencing a strong or difficult emotion, tune in to your thoughts.For example, you run into an acquaintance you haven’t seen in a long time, and after a brief and somewhat awkward conversation, you feel a sudden sadness. These thoughts might have an even greater emotional impact due to other events in your life – perhaps your brief encounter triggered a disappointing reminder that some close friends recently moved away, and you’re concerned that your interactions with people will more frequently resemble the superficial conversation you just had.

Look for Signs that You Are Personalising or Mind Reading

Remember that your thoughts may reflect biases in thinking, which is an important starting point. Now is your opportunity to consider the evidence for and against your thoughts, which will help you decide whether to stick with your original understanding of a situation or go with an alternative explanation that seems more plausible.

List the Evidence for And Against Your Thoughts

The best way to go through the process of gathering evidence is to write down your thoughts.Get out a sheet of paper. On the left side, write down a brief description of the situation.On the right side, write down how you felt: ‘sad’ or ‘anxious’ or ‘annoyed’. Between the situation and the feeling, write down your explanations for what happened and how you felt.Below the situation, thoughts and feelings, write down what you know that suggests your thoughts are true. Write down anything that tells you that your thoughts might not be true.

Find Out If The Feeling Is About You Or Not

<ul><li>Distinguish your feelings from your thoughts</li><li>Look for signs that you are personalizing or mind reading</li><li>List the evidence for and against your thoughts.</li><li>Consider whether it makes more sense to adopt an alternative account of what happened</li><li>Accept a reasonable amount of uncertainty</li></ul>

The Checklist

When you're overwhelmed by intense and persistent emotions, and you're grappling with the urge to overthink, run away, lash out or engage in some other counterproductive behaviour, it can be helpful to acknowledge and try to relate differently to your inner experience.Four interrelated components of emotional experiences, which you can remember by using the acronym STUF: <ul><li>Sensations: what is your body doing?</li><li>Thoughts: what’s going through your mind?</li><li>Urges: what do you want to do or not do?</li><li>Feeling labels: what do you call your emotion?</li></ul>

The STUF

Ask yourself, what’s useful?Once you’ve had a chance to explore, challenge and revise your thoughts, consider what would be useful for you to know or do now. So, what’s useful? If you take things too personally because you regularly overlook details that would help you think objectively, it might be useful to acknowledge the biases in your thinking.

Asking Yourself About What Is Really Useful In The Situation And Your Thoughts

By their nature, social interactions contain a certain degree of ambiguity or uncertainty. Although you can’t control what others think nor actually read their minds, you can make plans for change, practise social behaviour that’s generally effective, and learn to tolerate the uncertainty that comes with taking social risks. You can’t always know what people are thinking about you, but you can decide how you’d like to conduct yourself.

Accept a Reasonable Amount of Uncertainty

To bring more clarity to your thinking about your STUF, here are some good questions to ask yourself. You might find it helpful to write down your answers.<ul><li>What does my STUF mean or say about me?</li><li>Do I accept my STUF or criticise myself for it?</li><li>Do I try to distance myself or react impulsively to my STUF?</li><li>Am I satisfied with the way I think about and respond to my STUF?</li><li>What would I like to do differently? Why?</li></ul>

The STUF Thinking: Bring Some Clarity By Asking Questions

Practice accepting your authentic inner experience, without judgment, before redirecting your attention and behaviour to a productive response that's driven by your values and long-term goals.Below are some further ways to understand and relate to your feelings and urges:<ul><li>Objectivity</li><li>A tolerable annoyance.</li><li>Patience, warmth and kindness.</li></ul>

Accept And Redirect

Give some thought to the emotion-driven choices you make when you take things personally and consider the value-driven behaviours you’d like to choose in the future. These can include the plans for effective social behaviour we considered earlier. Examples of value-driven action:<ul><li>treating people with respect;</li><li>asking for feedback to improve relationships;</li><li>accepting responsibility for your actions; and</li><li>being kind to yourself when you’re feeling overwhelmed.</li></ul>

Value-Driven Action

Self-awareness is the key to conquer your feelings.

Always blaming yourself or assuming others think ill of you? A CBT therapist shares ways to break these self-critical habits

How to take things less personally | Psyche Guides

When trying to pick the best among many options, how many samples should you try before you commit? This is known as the optimal stopping problem. Mathematicians tell us that, to maximize the chances of the best outcome, we ought to ditch the first 37% of any options. In psychology, people tend to either "explore" or "exploit" more.But, sadly for us, relationships are a bit messier than probability would have it.

The 37 Percent Rule: Key Takeaways

The primary puzzle is asking how long do you spend sampling options to give the optimum chances of a successful final decision? How many frogs must you kiss to secure your chances of getting a prince?Mathematicians have given us an answer: 37%. The basic idea is that, if you need to make a decision from 100 different options, you should sample and discard (or hold off on) the first 37. The 37% rule is a calibration period during which you identify what works and what does not. From the rejected 37%, we choose the best and keep that information in our heads moving forward.

The Mathematical Question And The Solution

Mathematics offers us the best answer to the “optimal stopping problem.” But there’s just one big issue with it: Humans are not rational probability-crunching machines. In fact, the opposite is usually true. We’re beautifully, infuriatingly, creatively, and messily chaotic.In psychology and economics, there is what’s known as a “explore/exploit” tradeoff. This asks whether you should go with a guaranteed “win” (the exploit) or risk going somewhere else for an unknown outcome (explore). The degree to which someone will explore or exploit will depend on our curiosity and risk appetite.

Exploit or Explore

The world of interpersonal relations is hard to put a number on. Probabilities and game theory do funny things when you input the wobbly, fuzzy variables at play in human behaviour.But the biggest problem with the 37% rule, or the idea of “exploring,” when applied to dating is that one date(or even 10) is never enough.   When it comes to buying things or making life decisions, the 37% rule is a mathematically safe starting point. There’s a lot of wisdom to be had in sampling the field before settling down.

The Complexity Of Relationships

The optimal sample rate while deciding on something.

The 37% rule states that when making any major decision in life, reject the first 37% in a list and choose the next best that comes along.

productivity

Productivity

problemsolving

Problem Solving

Mathematicians suggest the "37% rule" for your life's biggest decisions

There’s no escaping boring tasks. While we all do our best to fill our personal and professional lives with engaging activities, there are countless menial, yet critical tasks that keep our organizations running.Pairing boring work with a secondary task that requires more attention can be an effective strategy to boost engagement and thus persistence. This insight can help individuals, managers looking to help their teams stay on track, organizations looking to encourage healthy practices, and product designers looking to improve customer retention.

Boring Tasks Are Inevitable: The Key Takeaways

<ul><li>People can really only pay attention to so much at one time. </li><li>﻿Tangential immersion, when there are two tasks of differing cognitive loads to be done, seems to increase persistence while decreasing boredom.</li><li>Tangential immersion only increases persistence if the two tasks together occupy most of - but not more than - one's total attentional capacity.</li></ul>

Tangential Immersion Decreases Boredom and Increases Persistence

So how can individuals, managers, and organizations start leveraging the power of tangential immersion? Many people already demonstrate an intuitive understanding of this effect in their personal lives — for instance, listening to immersive music or podcasts while at the gym is a great example of real-world tangential immersion. But there are also a lot of workplace situations in which both employees and their managers might benefit from this approach.

Putting Tangential Immersion to Work

When it comes to menial office tasks, many employees use monitoring tools such as <a href="https://todoist.com/productivity-methods/pomodoro-technique">work timers</a> to increase their persistence. In other cases, managers might rely on incentives such as extra time off or bonuses to motivate their employees. And to be sure, strategies like these certainly have a place.For tasks that don’t require much attention, tangential immersion may be more effective. That could mean encouraging workers to listen to an audiobook while filing paperwork, watch a video while cleaning their desks, or read a news article while stuffing envelopes.

The Office Use Case

There’s no escaping boring tasks. Of course, we should all do what we can to fill our jobs and lives with engaging activities — but given the prevalence and importance of low-attention work in our personal and professional lives (and the lives of our employees and customers), we all stand to benefit from finding ways to persist in these behaviors. Tangential immersion offers a simple yet effective strategy that can empower anyone to stick with the work they know they should be doing, boosting personal productivity, organizational success, and well-being on a societal level.

While doing a boring task, pair it with something interesting.

There’s no escaping boring tasks. While we all do our best to fill our personal and professional lives with engaging activities, there are countless menial, yet critical tasks that keep our organizations running — and we only stand to benefit by finding ways to get better at doing them. In this article, the author describes how a concept called tangential immersion can help anyone persevere in a boring task: Through a series of studies with more than 2,000 participants, she and her coauthors found that people often quit boring tasks prematurely because they don’t take up enough of their attention to keep them engaged. As a result, pairing boring work with a secondary task that requires more attention can be an effective strategy to boost engagement and thus persistence. This has implications not only for individuals, but also more managers looking to help their teams stay on track, organizations looking to encourage healthy practices, and product designers looking to improve customer retention.

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

Research: How to Power Through Boring Tasks

Learning new things has become a skill everyone has to develop in order to thrive in the mordern world where change is an everyday occurance. In order to handle this everyday change, we need to be able to learn and unlearn just as rapidly.Every field out there is constantly changing, everything is becoming bigger and better and to keep up with the changes we have to be able to develop ourselves in such a way that we thrive, and that can only be by having the habit of learning (all the time!)

According to the book by Scott H Young, “Ultralearning is a strategy for aggressive, self-directed learning.” Simply speaking, it is a way of dealing with the ever changing world by taking the power of effective learning into your own hands.It’s about taking decisions concerning the idea of learning, more so, the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of learning. Ultralearning tends to have unusual steps/methods for the most effective learning, and these “ultralearners” are those who make/search for some of these bizarre steps for maximum learning efficiency.

What is ultralearning?

<ul><li>Start by learning the ‘how’ of learning. To put it simply, understand how you want to learn the new skill.</li><li>Practice makes perfect, so try to implement what you’re learning in everyday life.</li><li>Your comfort zone is your biggest enemy. Step out of it when it comes to learning new things.</li><li>Feedback from outside can be your biggest help. Learn to take criticism and suggestions.</li><li>Dissolve difficult and complex tasks into smaller simpler tasks.</li><li>Constantly testing your knowledge helps in making an assessment of your own skills and changes you need to make.</li><li>Explore different concepts and ideas.</li></ul>

Ultralearning aims to highlight some of these core points

Some of the work that we wish to pursue can be a little too difficult, making it easier for other things to distract us, or simply seem like a “better” use of our time. That’s when the idea of breaking complex tasks into simpler task comes into play. When you try to do something complex it’s difficult for your brain to take in all the new and complex information. Breaking a difficult task/skill into smaller, more manageable chunks allows our mind to accept and process information much more easily and effectively.

Distractions - Your Work

It’s obvious enough, the things in and around your surroundings hold the power to grab your attention and distract you from the work right infront of you. Surrounding yourself with a “learner friendly” environment is essential to make the most out of your learning time. To test out how well a work area is for you, try learning something for a set amount of time, during that timespan keep track of how many times you get distracted by something and at the end of the timespan test yourself to see how much of the information you were able to retain. Try it with a few possible options.

Distractions - Your Environment 

The biggest distractor! If you feel constantly distracted, without it being your environment or any other external medium, it might be that it’s all internal! The negative emotions – depressive, angry thoughts, the whirlwind of thoughts travelling in your head, the daydreamings, the million notes going through your mind – it all plays a big role in messing up with your ability to learn and have a clear head for recalling information you’ve already learnt.

Distractions - Your Mind

Interleaving is another skill that people who are forever learning swear by, especially while learning something new. It is all about spacing out the learning process over a long period of time, randomising the information and frequent active recalling of past information that has been already learnt. It allows the brain to hold focus for longer periods of time and forces you to adjust yourself to probelm solving in every step, allowing the information to be stored as a long term memory rather than passively learning and re-learning the same thing with no positive result.

What is Interleaving?

<ol><li>To learn a concept completely, it’s important to understand it fully. And to understand something thoroughly visualising it plays a very big role.</li><li>Practicing everything you learn – be it in the form of tests or quizzes or even using it in real life situations helps fixing something to your mind.</li><li>Whenever you face roadblocks, take a break. Overly obsessing over a particular topic might not always help solve it, instead, taking a break and looking at the problem from a different angle can help get a better perspective.</li></ol>

A few final tips for all the hungry learners

4. Plenty of sleep is always a key aspect of learning. Sleep not only affects your recall and memory, it also helps your mind calm down and helps functioning of your creative side.5. Self motivation is the most important aspect of learning something while being happy. When you learn something that you actually love and have full interest in, you feel motivated to be the best at it.

In the modern world where being aware of changes around us is expected from everyone, the skill of learning is gaining more and more attention. So let's learn about learning. 

health

Health

education

Learning & Education

About Learning - Love.Peace.Happiness.

Experimental observations conclude learning is mainly performed by neural dendrite trees as opposed to modifying solely through the strength of the synapses, as previously believed.The brain is a complex network containing billions of neurons. Each of these neurons communicates simultaneously with thousands of others via their synapses (links), and collects incoming signals through several extremely long, branched “arms,” called dendritic trees.Source: Bar-Ilan University

New Neuron New Learning

For the last 70 years a core hypothesis of neuroscience has been that brain learning occurs by modifying the strength of the synapses, following the relative firing activity of connecting neurons.This hypothesis has been the basis for machine and deep learning algorithms which increasingly affect most of all our lives. After decades, this long-lasting hypothesis has now been called into question.In an article published today in Scientific Reports, researchers from Bar-Ilan University in Israel reveal that the brain learns completely differently than has been assumed since the 20th century.

How The Brain Learns 

The new experimental observations suggest that learning is mainly performed in neuronal dendritic trees, where the trunk and branches of the tree modify their strength, as opposed to modifying solely the strength of the synapses (dendritic leaves), as was previously thought.These observations indicate that the neuron is a much more complex, dynamic and computational element than a binary element that can fire or not.Just one single neuron can realize deep learning algorithms, which previously required an artificial complex network consisting of thousands of connected neurons and synapses.

Neuronal Dendritic Trees

“We’ve shown that efficient learning on dendritic trees of a single neuron can artificially achieve success rates approaching unity for handwritten digit recognition. This finding paves the way for an efficient biologically inspired new type of AI hardware and algorithms,” said Prof. Ido Kanter, of Bar-Ilan’s Department of Physics and Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, who led the research.

Prof. Ido Kanter

“This simplified learning mechanism represents a step towards a plausible biological realization of backpropagation algorithms, which are currently the central technique in AI,” added Shiri Hodassman, a Ph.D. student and one of the key contributors to this work.The efficient learning on dendritic trees is based on Kanter and his research team’s experimental evidence for sub-dendritic adaptation using neuronal cultures, together with other anisotropic properties of neurons, like different spike waveforms, refractory periods and maximal transmission rates.

Simplified Learning Mechanism

The brain’s clock is a billion times slower than existing parallel GPUs, but with comparable success rates in many perceptual tasks.The new demonstration of efficient learning on dendritic trees calls for new approaches in brain research, as well as for the generation of counterpart hardware aiming to implement advanced AI algorithms. If one can implement slow brain dynamics on ultrafast computers, the sky is the limit.

The Sky is the Limit.

About this neuroscience and learning research newsAuthor: Press OfficeSource: Bar-Ilan UniversityContact: Press Office – Bar-Ilan UniversityImage: The image is credited to Bar-Ilan UniversityOriginal Research: Open access.“Efficient dendritic learning as an alternative to synaptic plasticity hypothesis” by Shiri Hodassman et al. Scientific Report

 Bar-Ilan University

Experimental observations conclude learning is mainly performed by neural dendrite trees as opposed to modifying solely through the strength of the synapses, as previously believed.

artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

New Brain Learning Mechanism Calls for Revision of Long-Held Neuroscience Hypothesis - Neuroscience News

Courses on EdX are interesting but can be quite challenging. The courses are probably the best and the most reknowned. Started by Harvard and the MIT, it now contains courses from around 30 universities from all over the world.Courses are free but you will have to pay to receive a degree.

Coursera offers over 500 courses from more than a hundred universities. Those are some of the best ones like Stanford, Princeton, Bocconi, Centrale Paris, …Courses are free but you will have to pay to receive a degree.

Coursera

Udemy is the perfect tool to acquire more practical skills in one particular domain. Udemy now contains around 20000 courses. The main difference here is that anybody can create his own course. Which means quality of courses vary a lot. This is also the reason why you won’t get a degree. The price depends on the teacher. Be sure to check the reviews of that particualr course before paying.

Udemy

Udacity’s mission is to give access to knowledge from all the best universities around the globe. They are not linked to one particular school. Their offer is generally focussed on science and emerging technologies. The best solution for those particularly interested in that subject.

Udacity

Everything on Khan Academy is free. Courses were created to be very simple yet rigorous. There are a lot of interactive features to test yourself during the course.

Khan Academy

Contrary to other solution like EdX and Coursera, Canvas isn’t limited to prestigious universities. It contains courses from a much wider selection of less reknowned universities. This makes the courses somewhat more accessible and less intimidating if you want to jump in a field you don’t know anything about.

Canvas

FutureLearn was initiated by prestigious English universities. It is still in beta version but it already looks very promising. Courses seem to cover wide ranges of subjects.

FutureLearn

Founded by the European Commission itself, Open Education Europa is fulled with not only MOOCs but also articles on numerous subjects. This platform is surely the one containing the most information. Sadly navigation is difficult and user experience not really convincing.

Open Education Europa

The Open University is the perfect option if you’ve never tried MOOCs before. The platform is easy to understand and the courses are accessible. People looking for advanced courses will have to look elsewere.

The Open University

Massively Open Online Courses’ audience are growing steadily and their recognition as equivalent to a regular university is slowly establishing itself.

Massively Open Online Courses’ audience are growing steadily and their recognition as equivalent to a regular university is slowly establishing itself. A lot of MOOC platforms where launched in the…

career

Career

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

The 9 best MOOCs platforms

He, who abandons the things he loves, loses the meaning of his life. That is why, even after having finished your "official" work life, it is essential to continue doing things of value, bringing beauty or usefulness to others, helping and shaping our little world.

1. Always stay active, never retire.

Also, in food for long life, "less is more." According to the 80% law, to preserve health for a long time, instead of cramming, eat a little less of the hunger we have.

2. Do not eat until full. 

When water moves and flows fresh, it doesn't stagnate. Similarly, your vehicle for life needs a little daily maintenance so it can last for many years. Besides, exercise secretes the hormones of happiness.

. Get fit for your next Birthday.

Although most human beings live in cities, it makes us merge with nature. We need to regularly return to it to charge the batteries of the soul.

4. Reconnect with Nature 

They are the best medicine to dissolve concerns with pleasant talk, telling and listening to stories that lighten the existence, asking for advice, having fun together, sharing, and dream; In other words, Living.

. Surround yourself with wonderful friends.

The rush is inversely proportional to the quality of life. As a proverb says:"Walking slow gets you far." When we leave the urgencies behind, time and life gain a new meaning.

. Take it easy.

Within you, there is a passion, a unique talent that gives meaning to your days and pushes you to give your best until the end. If you haven't found your Ikigai,Keep searching until you do.

7. Follow your IKIGAI.

Lesson form Book "ikigai" by Hector Garcia 

Los Angeles Times bestseller • More than 1.5 million copies sold “If hygge is the art of doing nothing, ikigai is the art of doing something—and doing it with supreme focus and joy.” —New York Post Bring meaning and joy to all your days with this internationally bestselling guide to the Japanese concept of ikigai (pronounced ee-key-guy)—the happiness of always being busy—as revealed by the daily habits of the world’s longest-living people. *And from the same authors, don’t miss The Book of Ichigo Ichie—about making the most of every moment in your life.* * * * What’s your ikigai? “Only staying active will make you want to live a hundred years.” —Japanese proverb According to the Japanese, everyone has an ikigai—a reason for living. And according to the residents of the Japanese village with the world’s longest-living people, finding it is the key to a happier and longer life. Having a strong sense of ikigai—the place where passion, mission, vocation, and profession intersect—means that each day is infused with meaning. It’s the reason we get up in the morning. It’s also the reason many Japanese never really retire (in fact there’s no word in Japanese that means retire in the sense it does in English): They remain active and work at what they enjoy, because they’ve found a real purpose in life—the happiness of always being busy. In researching this book, the authors interviewed the residents of the Japanese village with the highest percentage of 100-year-olds—one of the world’s Blue Zones. Ikigai reveals the secrets to their longevity and happiness: how they eat, how they move, how they work, how they foster collaboration and community, and—their best-kept secret—how they find the ikigai that brings satisfaction to their lives. And it provides practical tools to help you discover your own ikigai. Because who doesn’t want to find happiness in every day? A PENGUIN LIFE TITLE

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • 1.5 MILLION+ COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE “Workers looking for more fulfilling positions should start by identifying their ikigai.” ―Business Insider   “One of the unintended—yet positive—consequences of the [pandemic] is that it is forcing people to reevaluate their jobs, careers, and lives. Use this time wisely, find your personal ikigai, and live your best life.” ―Forbes Find your ikigai (pronounced ee-key-guy) to live longer and bring more meaning and joy to all your days. “Only staying active will make you want to live a hundred years.” —Japanese proverb   According to the Japanese, everyone has an ikigai—a reason for living. And according to the residents of the Japanese village with the world’s longest-living people, finding it is the key to a happier and longer life. Having a strong sense of ikigai—where what you love, what you’re good at, what you can get paid for, and what the world needs all overlap—means that each day is infused with meaning. It’s the reason we get up in the morning. It’s also the reason many Japanese never really retire (in fact there’s no word in Japanese that means retire in the sense it does in English): They remain active and work at what they enjoy, because they’ve found a real purpose in life—the happiness of always being busy. In researching this book, the authors interviewed the residents of the Japanese village with the highest percentage of 100-year-olds—one of the world’s Blue Zones. Ikigai reveals the secrets to their longevity and happiness: how they eat, how they move, how they work, how they foster collaboration and community, and—their best-kept secret—how they find the ikigai that brings satisfaction to their lives. And it provides practical tools to help you discover your own ikigai. Because who doesn’t want to find happiness in every day?

Hector Garcia was born in Spain in 1981 and has been living in Tokyo since 2004. During his spare time he writes aGeekinJapan.com, one of the most widely-read blogs in the world in Spanish and in English, as well as books about his experiences in Japan. He is the author of the bestsellers: Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life and A Geek in Japan. You can find more of Hector's musings at ageekinjapan.com

Héctor García

Francesc Miralles Contijoch is a Catalan writer, essayist, translator, and musician.

Francesc Miralles

Ikigai

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How to take things less personally | Psyche Guides

Mathematicians suggest the "37% rule" for your life's biggest decisions

Research: How to Power Through Boring Tasks

About Learning - Love.Peace.Happiness.

New Brain Learning Mechanism Calls for Revision of Long-Held Neuroscience Hypothesis - Neuroscience News

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Ikigai

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by- Mark Manson

It's time to Read like a Pro.

It's time to
Read like a Pro.