What did you learn last year?
The question can be hard to answer because it’s so broad.
What did you learn about what? About life? About yourself? About the world?
What did you learn in terms of new information or a new field of study? What did you learn about a new skill?
What new insights and awareness did you have?
Broad Questions Create Overwhelm
I have found that for myself, and for many of my clients, big general questions like this often create a sticking point.
It’s too vague to yield responses that might prove meaningful as you consider what you want to take into this coming year.
It’s similar to talking about “fear” or “anxiety.” It’s hard to work with something when it’s so general.
Sometimes it’s nice to start with a high-level view of a topic. Taking some time to think broadly about what you learned can be a useful exercise. You might uncover insights about things that you’re not actively thinking about in your day-to-day life.
The point of distilling what you learned is to be able to apply it as you move forward in life.
General lessons are often too abstract, making it harder to apply them going forward.
How to Extract Useful Lessons From Your Year
To extract lessons that you can actually apply in a practical and useful way, the key is to get specific.
Life unfolds in patterns. Everything is a fractal of the whole.
By using the skill of adaptation and the technique of metaphor, we can apply the lessons we learn in one arena to other areas of life.
This happens to be one of my gifts.
Several years ago I recorded a weekly livestream of lessons I learned in my weekly trampoline practice, applying them to various aspects of life.
I never once gave instructions about trampoline skills; my purpose was to take what I learned and apply it more broadly.
In the same way, whenever I have a big moment in the gym, I often will share it with the reminder that “it’s not about the deadlifts.”
I have taken lessons I learned through weightlifting, CrossFit, flying trapeze, trampoline, and yoga and applied them to business, relationships, creative work, and life in general.
When I analyze a workout to determine its effectiveness in helping me generate a flow state, I am doing so for the purpose of applying it to my other work.
How to Hack Your Year-End Review
This principle also offers a great hack for your year-end review:
If you feel overwhelmed at the prospect of looking back at your entire year, then don’t do it that way.
By looking in depth at a small number of defining experiences, you can extract the most important lessons you learned from the whole year.
Those lessons will apply beyond the arena you learned them in.
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