The English Olympic Rowing Team Question
I heard an interesting question on the Release Notes podcast (episode 268). The conversation was about the purpose and best use of mastermind groups (Ken Wallace did a great job in clarifying the answer).
Ken brings up the story of the English rowing team and how they end up winning the gold medal by singularly focusing on the question: “will this make the boat go faster?”. There’s a great YouTube video discussing this as well as a book.
I like the physicality of the question and how it is a concrete implementation of the “what’s the next physical/visible action?” question from the Getting Things Done methodology. The key point is that for whatever goal you’re pursuing, you need to constantly ask the question if what you’re doing right now is getting you closer (or further) from your goal.
Book Inspiration
Studio Neat’s newsletter had a reference to a musical map site. From this site, I found a literature map site – http://www.literature-map.com/. The way it works is that you enter an author that you like, and then you get a map of other writers whose writing is similar (in terms of distance on map). You can then click on any author on the generated map and see a new map with other related connections.
For example, I’m a big fan of Ryk Brown and his Frontier’s Series. Here’s his map: Ryk Brown map
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