Happy Tuesday!

Failure was a very big theme of my journey as a national web development competitor. After winning the national competition in 2018, I did poorly in 3 regional competitions and came back empty-handed.

These failures crushed me, especially because I was struggling with self-doubt back then.

My coaches, however, encouraged me to view these failures as “learning checkpoints” and focus on how I can do better.

Since then, I’ve been experimenting with the type of feedback I collect and how I collect them. Along the way, I realized:

Your efforts will always pay off.

You'll always be paid in lessons and experience. Getting paid in achievements is a bonus.

Introspecting your feelings, ideas, and progress helps unlock those lessons.

😶 Feelings

Progress is great. But are you progressing on the right things?

Noticing your negative feelings can tell you what’s wrong:

• Misalignment between actions and values/purpose/goals
• Flaws in your strategy and execution
• Overexertion

How to collect data

Any mindfulness practice that promotes self-awareness works.

Ideally, you’d want to record it so that you have something to refer back to in the future.

I prefer to journal about my feelings, describing:

• the situation(s) in which I had the emotion(s)
• my thoughts and feelings at that point in time

💡 Ideas

As you work towards your goal, you’re likely to encounter new information and perspectives.

These can spark ideas for:

• improving your quality of work
• improving your systems & processes

How to collect data

Make your ideas actionable.

Write them down so that you don’t forget them.

I usually collect ideas during my learning sessions—listening to a podcast, going through an online course, or dissecting the strategies my role models are using.

There are hundreds of note-taking systems out there, but a good system boils down to 2 things:

• Efficiency in capturing ideas
• Efficiency in searching for captured ideas

⚠️ Don’t be afraid to use separate apps or tools for these 2 things!

I like Google Keep for capturing on-the-go thoughts. At the end of the day (or week, if I have fewer notes), I transfer whatever’s still relevant to my permanent knowledge base, where things are more searchable.

I also find satisfaction in watching my pen ink level deplete, so I’m still journalling and brainstorming on paper.

📈 Progress

After trying a lot of progress measurement systems over the past 7 years, I found that most systems boiled down to these 3 questions:

• How much progress (relative to a goal) did I accomplish?
• What actions were effective in creating this progress?
• What didn’t work, and how can I do better?

These were good enough for me, but feel free to use other prompts to get a more detailed analysis of your progress.

How to collect data

Record your answers to the above questions and keep them in one place.

🤨 What to do with all this data?

Double down on the actions that worked

It’s working, so keep implementing it.

Re-alignment (if necessary)

If you’re overexerting yourself, you might need to delegate your tasks to someone else.

If you’ve been having negative emotions toward a pursuit for a while, you should re-evaluate the alignment of the pursuit with your values, principles, purpose, and goals.

Experiment with ideas (and iterate)

You now have a bank of ideas for accelerating your progress.

1. Pick one idea
2. Define what you hope to achieve from it
3. Implement the idea
4. Evaluate the results

For example, if I’m trying to grocery shop faster:

• Idea: Organize my list of fruits and vegetables according to their nutrients. When shopping, pick whatever ingredient is available, one from each column.
• Purpose: Save time choosing between ingredients when grocery shopping
• Implementation: Adapt my list from similar lists online and use it when shopping.
• Evaluation:
  • I might save 10mins of trying to recall which nutrient group the ingredient belongs to.
  • I might also end up picking ingredients that don’t go well together when cooking.

Bonus: I’ve tied the above concepts together into a simple weekly reflection template.

If you’re a subscriber, you’ll see it linked at the end of every email.

If you’re not a subscriber yet, subscribe below 👇🏼 and you’ll receive the template link in the welcome page.

• Let me know if you find the template useful (or not).
• If you’re already using another set of prompts, I’m curious to hear about it too!

Either way, have a great week 💪🏽