Sleepcations, Resilience, and Studies
Welcome to this week’s newsletter! For many people this week is a shorter week, so we’ll skip the preamble and get straight into our tip, insight, and our favourite new thing. Let’s dive in!
We began our primary research into the characteristics of people who thrive in the modern workplace before the pandemic. Today, over 3000 interviews later, we have a pretty clear picture of what connects everyone who is sustainably effective over a prolonged period of time, and it comes down to one word – resilience.
Assuming you live a reasonably long life, you will almost certainly experience good times and bad – both inside and outside of the workplace. Sustainably effective people navigate their way through these times, safe in the knowledge that “bad luck” is not a permanent state of affairs, but simply a reflection of their current situation.
But resilience is not just about dealing with adversity. At its heart, resilience is about dealing with change, and that change could be positive, negative, or anything in between. That is why resilience is so closely associated with being sustainably effective. The resilient person can deal with adversity AND capture the moment that it turns into opportunity.
Which brings us to the future of work. How we work is changing, and changing more rapidly than many of us could imagine. If you don’t believe that, here’s another reminder to immediately check out AI tools like ChatGPT and think about how it could change the way you work today.
We’ve spoken to leading futurists on our podcast – Making Work Work, and they all agree on one thing. No one can truly predict exactly what the how of work will look like in 5-10 years. Being ready for it requires one skill over any other – resilience.
Recommendation
All of this leads us neatly to our favourite new thing – something we are very excited to pre-announce here in this newsletter. We are calling it, simply, The Resilience Study, and it’s the next step in the evolution of us as a company.
Our goal is ambitious, but at its heart very simple – to create the most detailed study of resilience in the world. Resilience is an amazing human characteristic that got us through the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, the Blitz, and multiple pandemics. Resilience can be found in abundance in everyone from the homeless to the President – but surprisingly little is known about how it can be honed as a skill.
In the next few weeks, we will be launching resiliencestudy.org. This will be a comprehensive study of resilience across all walks of life – performing empirical analysis of experiences throughout the world, using a standardized set of questions developed with our advisors spanning academia, business, anthropology and clinical psychology. We will make all the results publicly available, with one goal – to help everyone become more resilient in the face of the massive upheaval to come.
Participants must be over 18 years of age, but other than that, there are zero restrictions. In fact, we are looking to include people from all walks of life, both inside and outside of employment.
Do you want to be a part of this? If you do, it’s easy. We need 15 minutes of your time to talk to one of our research assistants. You can contact us today at info@billionminds.com if you are willing to participate, and we will be in touch with more details.
The Tip: Take a Sleepcation!
Video Length: 102 Seconds
You’ve heard of a vacation, probably even a staycation, but what’s a sleepcation? Well, simply put it’s a way of truly prioritizing sleep for a few days and learning more about your sleep habits in the process. We’d recommend you do this at least once a year to help improve your well-being at work and help you make the best use of the hours you stay awake.
Check out the video below for more details about why you should take a sleepcation as soon as possible.
About Us
BillionMinds brings you this newsletter each and every week. But that’s not all we do. We also help employees and managers in companies around the world embed key soft skills to thrive in the modern workplace and get certified in those skills. Each of our Learn/Do experiences is less than 10 minutes a day and you can see meaningful change within two weeks.
We work with both companies and individual employees. Certification programs start at $200 and we provide discounts for those seeking work, alongside the option for current users to nominate low/no-income people to access the program for FREE. For more information, visit us here.