 Hello you marvellous human being, welcome to part 2 of our 2021 Year in Review. In yesterday's podcast we spoke about all the amazing books we have read this year and in this part 2 we are going to discuss the key learnings that we've absorbed. And near the end Chris, the founder of 42 Courses will speak about the plans for the company for 2022 and how the user experience will improve even further. So without any further festive season adieu, let's jump into the learnings. I went first last time so I won't go first this time. Okay well look, I'll go first to set the mood, because it's not things that I've learnt from books as such so the real thing that stood out for me is that I have met so many amazing nice good people through 42 Courses like when I joined I was calling customers every single day to find out what kind of lives they lead and how 42 Courses is part of their life and it was just extraordinary, speaking to people in Mexico, Australia, all over Europe, America and every single person that I met was just fabulous and the different stories that they have and I just it's just so enjoyable especially in the years that we've had because of the pandemic and when you reach out to people to speak to people and so many people are just so extraordinarily nice it's just really heartwarming and yeah so that lesson that I learnt was just reach out to people and talk because you just get so much back from just listening to people and hearing amazing stories and things that they do so just fantastic and the second thing I learnt also from the 42 Courses thing one of our big podcast videos this year was with Mark Bowden and it's kind of going viral I would say on YouTube and I think it's because so many people are leaving comments because Mark is dyslexic and he speaks we speak about that in the podcast and how he was with that at school and everything and how it's a gift for him and it's like so many things have been given to the world by dyslexic people because they've got a different look at the world and in the comments so many people are saying like my child or I was like you know not diagnosed as dyslexic at school and their stories in the comments section absolutely some of them are real tear jerkers actually and some of them are really heartwarming and that lesson for me is like everybody's got a story and everybody's got something going on in their lives and it's just to be mindful of that in your everyday dealings with everybody and you know give people a break you know if someone cuts in front of you in your car or something you know it's probably something else going on in their life it's not just you trying to get in front so that was a real a real lesson for me from the YouTube comments there yeah and the last thing is you need to become a professional YouTube commenter or something because I think it's like the only base in the internet probably the only video on YouTube where all the comments are positive and lovely it's like actually people said that yeah in some comments my third learning of the year is Jake and I have been speaking a lot about simplification and it seems that in every kind of book that we read there is a rule about simplifying your life to you know make everything so much more efficient and effective and so I tried to encapsulate the three rules to have a good life by simplifying so rule number one for me be kind rule number two if it moves and it shouldn't use duct tape and if it doesn't move but it should rule number three use wd-40 that was on my three rules for a great life very good I love that Elisa you had three amazing things that you've learned uh thank you a lot of it was down to 42 courses because if anyone doesn't know I was a superman before I joined the company I did absolutely every course I could lay my hands on I'm sorry to the team in advance for irritating you all times of the day but one of the most amazing learnings this year was the concept of Hofstatus law which is it always takes longer than you think it will even taking into account Hofstatus law and I'm sorry that was just my dog a postman has dared to enter the neighborhood uh but basically anyone is liable for this Daniel Kahneman bought a project would take two years it ended up taking seven and he's the king of behavioral economics so if it can happen to him it can happen to anyone and I found it incredibly relevant to my professional life the second thing I learned this year was the antithesis of childhood and Freud Freud which is instead of being taking joy in other people's misery it's join other people's achievements which I just think is a really lovely thing it's so psychologically healthy and with the spirit of Christmas and everything I absolutely loved it the third thing is a bit left field but I spent most of my year trying to save this collection of trees that are some of the most spectacular in the country inevitably it was one of those things where you walked past every day you didn't think about it and then uh homeowners went to their insurance company saying we want the house underpinned because you have these huge trees next to some 90s and 30s houses and basically the insurance companies did not want to pay for the underpinning so they said we're going to take the tree out but these are 170 year old trees they're some of the finest specimens in the country you will see them in uh Jesse Nelson's video because the opening shot is perfectville and it's a picture of these trees so most of my year was spent like just fighting getting the signatures with positions trying to go to every community group making sure that these trees were not in danger and temporarily they the insurance companies have backed off but the two protection orders two protection orders were going to be removed because councils are now liable for true protection orders when historically it was the central government and completely unintended consequences that councils can be strong armed into taking away true protection orders at a time of climate emergency so that's something I want to work on next year trying to change the law because whoever designed it had this completely unintended consequence but it was quite reassuring how the community just banded together and everyone was fighting to save like what are effectively national assets oh yeah I mean that's such a lovely story and they're well done you for for taking initiative and following through it's kind of been easy dealing with insurance companies and uh to be fair there were so many people involved and I was just kind of on social media trying to get the signatures for the petition I would wear a sandwich board I would practically do anything to save these trees at one point I even like wrote international newspapers saying happy to pose in front of the trees but nobody got back to me surprisingly maybe if you'd stuck yourself to one of the trees change yourself to the tree yeah you know I I didn't see myself as a member of Extinction Rebellion but who knows yeah maybe next year maybe next year keep trying because the trees are still growing so you're going oh yeah they're only in their infancy a lot of them came from America it's amazing how much I now know about these trees having more than most of my life and they're only in their infancy they can live for thousands of years oh wow their baby's 170 years old well done what type of trees are they um they're a collection of redwood, caesars and wellingtonia sequoia oh wow yeah so they they grow really big they're redwood yeah no it's this very random thing they have in harrow of this amazing collection of trees because it used to be the Duke of Chandus as a state and then he went bankrupt and the land got sold off but this tree lined avenue remained we're all gonna have to come and visit it now you've you've told such a wonderful story I now need to see these trees no they are wonderful trees I may be biased but they're spectacular there is someone called Jenny Martin so if Jenny you're listening hi she told us how these trees were integral to Native American culture and she was showing us how you could use all the tree and they were sacred and they're just sacred entities so really really moving experience so many interesting people and Bren it goes to your point of everyone has a story it's surprising how the community will unite over important things and in a world like where the news cycle sometimes focuses on the most negative aspects of humanity it's a really really good thing to have yeah for sure reach out to people it's all doom and gloom in the news but people are so lovely for Jake come to 42 courses thank you there you go that's a very yeah very convenient segue you gave me there in terms of of that that point about the news because one of the the things on my list of things that I've learned this year was this this thing called via negativa which is obviously Latin and I think it originally comes from Christian theology about proving you know God exists by saying all the things that he doesn't represent so it's kind of the the opposite the other side of the the coin so to speak and it's this idea that in life you know we're always trying to improve our lives through addition like you know I'll get this or I'll start doing that and actually it's much it's often much better to take things away so it's this concept of addition through subtraction so you can make improvements in your life by taking away the bad things as opposed to trying to add the good things so the news is a fantastic example you know one way to improve your happiness is simply to just stop watching the news because you rightly say it's this endlessly negative cycle and obviously that's very an easy and an easy thing to do as opposed to trying to add something into your life to make you more happy and when you start to think about it's an incredibly powerful thing because you can apply it to you know all domains of your life so you know instead of trying to improve your diet by learning how to cook healthier food options you can just remove all the extra processed foods or sugary foods or foods with other additives and E numbers and so when you start to think about this idea of addition through subtraction it's amazing how you can apply it to all elements of your life so yeah I guess it's ultimately you know rather than trying to think out figure out what you should do it's it's better to work out what not to do so yeah the news is a great example yeah that's the great application of the VN negative is stop watching the news it's all doom and gloom and you open the window and you hear birdsong and see the sun shining yeah we'll get out there and save some trees or or pick up the phone and talk to some people in Mexico yeah that that was that was a good one and I think that's you know one of the many brilliant ideas that come from reading a lot of Nassim Taleb's books like the inserto is a masterful piece of work is kind of five five books on uncertainty and I can't remember which one the negative is in but those books are an incredible read I don't think there's anything I've read with more you know useful practical information than his stuff and then my second one was this Tibetan word I came across I'll obviously completely destroy the pronunciation of it but um it's Redock R-E-D-O-K I'm not sure how how it's actually said in the language but it's um it's a portmanteau or contraction of the words Rewa which means hope and docker which means fear and it's kind of this idea of acknowledging that they they both coexist and come from the same place sorry which is uncertainty essentially um and I I suppose I'd never really thought about hope and fear being two sides of the the same coin and I know that seems silly because so many things in life are you know love and hate or light and dark or happiness and sadness but yeah I thought it was a very interesting one to think about hope and fear being being the same the same thing or the same side of or different side of the same coin um so that was number two it's a little bit like uh a little bit like Memento Mori from the Stoics isn't it like you know when you realise that you're going to die then you see the beauty of life and you know yeah yeah no that's a that's a great parallel yeah that's another fantastic um idea and I think my third one is probably this this idea of the difference between um errors of uh commission and errors of omission um and you know when we when we talk about mistakes we always say oh I made that mistake it's like making it's always an active thing you know I filled out the wrong part of the form or I misread the the number on on the ticket you know that those are errors of of commission because you you did something actively you know to make the mistake um you misread the number or you didn't fill out the right right thing um but what we kind of speak about less frequently which I think is in some ways more interesting are errors of omission as in mistakes by cause by not doing something you know as in not taking any action at all and you know one example might be something like you know not setting aside money for retirement um because obviously you wouldn't notice it at the time but that that's obviously a huge error of omission when it comes to the time to retire and there's there's no money in the bank um and I think Elon Musk talks a lot about this in the context of of risk you know we always think about risk of the risk of doing something we never talk about the risk of not doing something as in if you don't take any action um or if you're not in the game you'll never have a chance to to compete or to win um and yet the way we frame risk and the way we frame making mistakes is always from from the active um which I think is very interesting um and I guess no doubt it's something to do with with schooling right like being told making mistakes is a bad thing um maybe the only way to find out is to do it yeah yeah absolutely yeah and I think it's yeah it's that idea that you've never really thought about that you know not taking action is a form of action in itself um the marketing slogan nobody ever got fired for buying IBM works on that basis absolutely yeah that's a great a great example yeah yeah I was talking about that very same line last night bizarrely enough in a conversation with someone here in Sweden who used to buy IBM mainframe computers in the 70s so it's kind of weird that you mentioned it then that's strange but I think peer pressure plays a phenomenal role in um mistakes by omission I think it was on one of the courses actually that study where they had people deliberately give the wrong answer and people were willing to follow along with the wrong answer even though they knew it was incorrect because they didn't want to violate the group norms yeah those are fascinating all of those experiments I think yeah yeah they yeah they're fascinating like um how yeah intelligent people will give the wrong answer to something even though they they know it's wrong just just to fit in with the with the group cool stuff Jay thank you for those um Irene what's what your key learnings I must say when I was um I was chatting to Chris about this earlier and we were saying it's so difficult to actually really think about everything that you've learned over the course of an entire year in pick three because we think like you learn something every day whether it's like big or small there's you know always something that you're learning so so I think um I do a lot of research into fun facts which is always great um and I I must say like I learned a lot of super interesting things they might not be like you know life changing um that kind of things that I've learned but one thing that I thought was really really quite amazing is that um I learned that the smell of oranges can instantly make someone happier so if you ever have somebody who's um sad or just needs a little bit of uplifting you can literally slice an orange and instantly smell of oranges make people happy which I thought was really interesting um but not not a chocolate orange it has to be a real orange right a real orange apparently yes very chocolate orange make me happy as well I had one last night very christmasy um yes I'd say that's definitely one um and then at the moment this is just like a very recent one which I just thought was um very interesting we currently running something called the um worldish cup of christmas ads and um one of the things that I actually learned was that coca-cola inspired santa claus's red suit from a 1920s advert I didn't know that I think that was super interesting and now I've been telling all my friends and family and it's amazing how many people actually don't know it and I think it's just a really interesting fact so it used to be green green yeah so that I thought was was very interesting and then I think just um from like a professional point I think what I learned this year is something like the concept of marginal gains which I think is just a really interesting way to frame the goals that you set out to compete within a year so instead of focusing on one goal as a goal in its entirety if you actually break it up into smaller parts you'll deliver something that even exceeds the bigger goal because you actually have time to focus and put a lot of energy into all of the small parts of a goal which then when you combine them to actually make the full goal you'll actually exceed a lot of the you'll exceed what you basically set out to do which I always I think that's a really interesting way to think about working and and you know applying it to big goals small goals any any kind of goal which I love just cool I was I was thinking about that um maybe a day ago or maybe two days ago and I was thinking that for the next year instead of like trying to do a new year's resolution is would be better to have like a goal and to do as you're saying marginal gains to try and reach that goal eventually in that kind of like James Clear atomic habits kind of way rather than trying to just change overnight to this yeah makes sense yeah so how apt Chris in the Christmas hat with the Christmas tree what are you're at this time of year what are your three key learnings I think I've got the most festive background but not the best background like I think Irene with you know lion's head and blue sky and the background's kind of takes takes it I think wins it for the day very jealous that's what happens when you live in in paradise in Cape Town um yeah for me I think it's interesting listening to everyone else there's lots of similarities I think between some of the things that I was thinking about and and some of the things that you're saying I had I'd had down here um I had down here a few things I think the one of the the first one was was actually from that book no no rules rules which was and it was not necessarily a new lesson I think it was just a really good reminder of when particularly in a business sense when something goes wrong it's important not to overreact and then stop you know put loads of rules in place to stop that thing from ever happening again um in that if you look at most uh very large old legacy companies it's often very hard to get stuff done and normally it's because 50 years ago someone did something which someone didn't like and so they put a rule in that meant that you can't do that anymore so if you look at like a an old company's rulebook um you know often the the rulebook is ginormous um you would need an insane memory to be able to know what you can and can't do and there's tons of processes in place to stop things that they don't want to happen from happening so for example if even if people are given a company credit card there's there's a whole load of you know very strict rules and when you can use that and when you can't and often they don't make any sense um and so I just think particularly for us as we're a new newer company and we're growing and we're starting to see you know every now and then some things happen and you're like oh I wish that wouldn't happen I mean very mindful to to not just go ah like right let's stop this from ever happening again because I think um in the long run it could actually just uh just um slow us down and and make make life not so helpful I think the other one was was one which I mentioned before which was that user manual for me I loved that idea so much um we talked about it at the beginning so I'll kind of skip it over a bit and then the third one which I think relates to the simplicity thing is just something of it's not again not necessarily I think it's just something I've been pondering on it's not necessarily a brand new lesson it's just something I thought about a lot was there's that I think it's the phrase is like you know are you running your business or is your your business running you and and I I think at certain times this year I've been guilty of letting the business run me and that I find myself running around trying to you know get stuff done and working on things that you know we're kind of already there as opposed to spending more time on on thinking about the future and doing fun things and there's good reasons for it and you know we can't we can't control what comes up in the day but you know it's just something that that came up I think actually this is a fourth random one but we were all chatting to our developer and one of our developers is in in Nigeria and he um we said oh when when are you leaving and he said I'm leaving next tomorrow and we were like what did he say and he said next tomorrow and apparently in parts of Africa next tomorrow is a very common saying which means the day after tomorrow I just thought that's next tomorrow what a cool what a cool slang um yeah I mean I think that's that's kind of that's it but thank you so much for for for posting this brand and for being amazing at your your podcasting hosting skills off the charts as always and totally enjoyable all the people that you speak to and all the things you find out as we in all of our work it's amazing just the learnings that you can get and how you can apply them to life we're very lucky and I mean to anyone listening is our customers thank you so much for allowing us to to have this job and um you know it's your support that makes it all possible and we hope we do a good job and you enjoy it and uh and wherever you are in the world you're having a fantastic festive holiday season whatever you celebrate um wherever you are and um yeah I hope hope to see you back learning again soon and yeah I look forward to to marking all your stuff growing hope you enjoy all the new courses that we end up building got some really fun things going forward for next year I think we were supposed to have a whole section on this on the podcast but we probably run out of time but there are a few big things that we're we're hoping to do for next year so I think we've got a lot of work around community stuff that we want to do so we really want to help make it easier for learners to to connect with each other um so we're setting that up at the moment I think you'll enjoy it we're also about to launch a way that you can comment on different people's opinion answers so in our courses you can obviously see other people's answers a lot of time we're making it so that you can reply to those and the other thing was I think we we're reaching a point where we've got so many courses we're going to create we're going to make it a little bit easier and a little bit more enjoyable for you to help find the course that's right for you and so whether this is for our business customers or whether this is for an individual uh there's some more design improvements that we're working on for that which hopefully will come out you know early-ish next year but um yeah I guess till then thank you and thank you everyone here for joining um yeah huge huge love and a merry christmas to all merry christmas thanks everyone thanks bye bye bye