Habits - Review Game Footage
Review Game Footage
All the good habits in life are great and they will produce beneficial results in your life. But if you want to get the most out of them, you got to make time for this important habit - review the game footage.
Defining what winning the day looks like is only half the battle. The other half occurs when we review our performance for the day. This is one of the most important steps. Because if you don’t do this, you just go through life on autopilot, repeating the same actions again and again and again, never really stopping to question whether or not you’re actually getting any closer to your goals.
Living life is a skill. Like all skills, it is something that can be improved if we deploy something called The Learning Loop.
Improving at any skill requires three things:
- Feedback
- Feedback is required so we can know whether or not the thing we just tried worked out or not.
- For example, if you shoot a basketball and it hits the backboard and misses, then you’ve got immediate feedback that whatever you just tried didn’t work.
- Reflection
- Now we need to reflect on what we did and come up with a hypothesis for what we might have done wrong.
- Iteration
- Then, we use that information to iterate, which is really just another way of saying we change our behavior to test our hypothesis.
This leads us back to the beginning of the learning loop. Because one way or another, whether the ball goes in or out, we’re collecting more feedback.
Our rate of learning any new skill depends on how quickly and effectively we can cycle through the learning loop.
Unfortunately, most of us aren’t improving our living life skill because, while we might be collecting feedback and maybe even iterating, if we’re not actually taking the time to reflect on what and how we’re doing, then we’re just a monkey throwing a ball mindlessly at the hoop, hoping it gets lucky. This is why it’s so important just to take time each evening to just do a quick scan and evaluate your day’s performance. Personally, I like to use my values as the scorecard. To do this, I use a technique called Vision casting. I found value casting to be a really powerful tool for solving many of my life’s problems. If you combine that with the other four habits we’ve discussed, I don’t think you’re ever going to get stuck in a rut again.