I started on my (company-sponsored) d.MBA course this past week, and… whew. I’ve been doing other MOOCs — massive open online courses — over the last few years, but this is the first one where I’m actually feeling stretched.
Stretched, both in terms of the materials and the amount of work and time I’ve already been putting in it, and it’s just week one. There are six weeks in this course, and I’m glad that I didn’t take up a teaching opportunity that would’ve overlapped in this time right now because there would have been zero chance I could juggle both teaching and learning at the same time.
I think I’m an okay student. Not great, sometimes bad — hello, my high school teachers who could tell when I didn’t put in effort at all sometimes — but in the meta of learning, I think I do pretty well.
Standardized tests (this question on the PSLE mathematics test has, unfortunately, stumped me this Saturday morning) were okay too, and I know myself and my own flaws enough to know that if I had put in just more time, I would have scored better.
Still, it’s not just about the optics of learning, but actually truly internalizing and accelerating my learnings and progress (growth being one of my core values). I know that I’ll have to give a playback of the course to the rest of my team, since it’s being sponsored, so I’m already trying the Feynman Technique and drafting quick outlines of the concepts to teach them to a wider team.
A few books I’m putting on my list, on this topic:
- Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential by Barbara Oakley
- Mastery by Robert Green
- The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle
- The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda (ironically, the ex-CXO of my global team)
(In other news… working with our team in the UAE for two weeks, and that means I’m day-shifted from a Monday-Friday week to a Sunday-Thursday one, and this week is particularly rough since I only have today — Saturday — off as my weekend. Makes me more appreciative of all my days off.)