Welcome

This course brings together what is worth knowing in order to direct your own professional life before directing anything else. It is designed to be used: in each block you will find an idea, a case and something to do with it that same week.

What you will find

• Block 1. Success and happiness: know yourself. Before managing anything you need to know what for. The purpose of your life seen from dharma and from the selfish gene, Leonardo da Vinci as a model of a complete mind with Michael Gelb's seven principles, and your own definition of success with indicators to measure it.
• Block 2. Motivation: chase your dreams. What sets you in motion and what keeps you going: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, the three needs of self-determination theory, how to turn a dream into goals with dates, and how to sustain them with habits and discipline on the days when motivation does not show up.
• Block 3. Strategy: manage your dreams. The strategic analysis a company uses, applied to your life and career: personal mission, vision and values, SWOT and its four crossings, your personal business model, how to generate options before choosing, and a plan with objectives, dates and review.
• Block 4. Learning and reading: the foundations of knowledge. How you really learn and how to read so that it sticks: the illusion of knowing, active recall, the forgetting curve and spaced repetition, three-pass reading, notes that get reused, and the method for researching a topic and building your own library.
• Block 5. Brain and mind. What is worth knowing about your head in order to manage yourself: a brain with limits and without myths, attention and the cost of multitasking, working memory and long-term memory, Kahneman's two systems of thinking, the biases that recur most at work, and the physical conditions of performance.
• Block 6. Communication: express yourself efficiently. How to make yourself understood: asking so that the other person reasons (maieutics), persuading with ethos, pathos and logos (rhetoric), preparing and delivering a public presentation (oratory), and writing an email or a report clearly, in your language and in others.
• Block 7. Empathy: the foundation of human relationships. What empathy is, what pieces it is made of and where its limits lie; and how it is practised in a real conversation: listening to understand and asking without attacking.
• Block 8. Leadership and teamwork. How a team thinks and decides —brainstorming, six hats, arguing without fighting— and how the people who form it are led: leadership styles, delegation and feedback.
• Block 9. Human relationships: friendships, family and partner. Relationships with friends, family and partner as something that is built: giving before receiving, dedicating time to them, sustaining a support network, setting boundaries and arguing in a way that leaves the bond stronger.
• Block 10. Negotiation. The Harvard negotiation method: looking for the interests behind each position, inventing options, relying on objective criteria, and preparing your alternative and your zone of possible agreement before sitting down.
• Block 11. Personal marketing. Marketing applied to your career, without pretence: what you want people to say about you when you are not there, how to find out what they already say, your professional value proposition, and how to tell it in a CV, on LinkedIn, to your network of contacts and in an interview.
• Block 12. Money management. What money is for and what it is worth spending it on, how to organise income and expenses with a budget that saves first, why time and compound interest weigh more than the amount, where to invest and with what risk, and the logic of the taxes a person pays.
• Block 13. Time management. Time is the only resource that is not replenished. You will learn to see it as an asset that is spent, invested and bought, to get tasks out of your head with a five-step method, to prioritise with the urgent-and-important quadrants, and to plan and execute without having it stolen from you.

How you will work

Each lesson opens with a short introduction and, below it, several pills: short pieces that explain a single idea and end with a case or something to do. Read them in order the first time; afterwards you can go back to the one you need.

Where you see an interactive practice, do it before reading on: it is there for you to decide, calculate or classify, and the explanation comes afterwards. It does not save what you write, so copy whatever you want to keep.

Each block ends with an exam of six questions. All the answers come with a comment, including the wrong ones: failing and reading why is part of the method.

At The Singular Academy you learn by solving real cases. If at the end of a lesson you do not know what you would do differently tomorrow, go back over it.