The LookUP List: Learning New Tricks

5 things for learners to check out, a reading list, and some LookUP updates

The mid-career moment can be challenging for many, but it can also be a time of extraordinary opportunity.

To get the best from this phase of life, we have to stay mentally flexible, and take control of our own learning journey.

That’s been the big theme of this month’s content on LookUP. Old dogs need to learn new tricks…and despite the misleading proverbial wisdom, we can! You can dig into it in our monthly newsletter here, and if you’d like a framework to build your own Stay Ahead Plan, it’s here (full access to the framework is for paid subscribers only.)

If you’d like to get some diverse, fun and interesting places to get started - or you are building your summer reading list - check out the resources below!

The LookUP List

1. Find your new community here - or somewhere.

There’s no substitute for trying something new, that stretches your horizons physically, mentally, and spiritually.

It’s even better if that journey opens up for you a new community of like-minded people that you didn’t know existed.

That’s what’s happening at Board Women, run by LookUP’s very own Caroline Keylock, a community driven-business with a mission to inspire and empower 30+ women (and gender minorities) through the world of board sports (snow, surf, skate).

If you’ve ever thought that might be your bag, go along and get involved!

If boarding isn’t your thing…what could it be…?

2. Go here to re-think your brain

We have all kinds of strange assumptions about what our brains are like, how they work, and what we can and can’t do.

A huge amount of it turns out to be wrong under closer examination.

For a good reintroduction, you can have a read here, or for a quick, free, fun and accessibly exhibition that’s enlightening for all ages, try this…

3. Get ahead of AI here and here

We’ve had a lot of requests for a focus at some point on AI, and how we respond to it as individuals. So that will come later in the year!

For the moment, there could be almost no better microcosm of the need for new tricks than how we respond to the rise of generative AI. For us it’s a thing to approach with some knowledge, and the Google free course here is definitely to get started(though of course not sufficient!) It’s also a moment to pause and reflect - how do you think we can prepare for the impact of AI? What role do you want to play? If you are just starting that journey you could do worse than starting with Moustafa Souleyman’s 'The Coming Wave’.

4. Find your inner Bowie or Simone here

We gave a tip of the hat to the topical Taylor Swift in our main newsletter, but she is just one of many songwriters who have had to embrace the challenges of neuroplasticity and flexible identity to maintain their observational and creative mojo.

There are some spectacular music documentaries that get you inside that process and that journey - if that’s a rabbit hole you’d like to go down you could start with Nina Simone, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, or even the Sparks Brothers.

5. To rethink education, watch here

Thinking about learning makes you think about education - and this provides a second showing for AI in our list.

How could AI change education, beyond the headlines about exam cheating and homework corner cutting?

A great TED talk from Sal Khan here.

LookUP Updates

As we head towards the summer break, there’s a lot going on at LookUP…including some big announcement on the next chapter of StoryTeller.

We’ve been running StoryTelling workshops and programmes with all kinds of organisations over the last few months, helping with pitches, client relationships, and selling ideas.

In response to demands from those clients we’ve got three new workshops:

• Presenting You. We've built a new approach to presentation and influence, built on accentuating people's character, more than critiquing their weakness

• Collaborative StoryTelling. We are helping teams to think about the practice, process and alchemy of StoryTelling as a team sport

• Narrative in Numbers. We've connected the worlds of data and entertainment to build an approach to StoryTelling through data, whether that's focused on commercial business cases, or consumer insights

If this sounds relevant for your, or your organisation, please get in touch via matthew@wearelookup.com, we are currently building sessions and programmes for the post-summer period.

We will also have exciting updates about mentoring, open workshops, courses and new forms of subscription very shortly, stay tuned!

New Tricks reading list

Learning and the mid-career has proved an incredibly rich area in terms of reading.

Here’s a few of our favourites from the last month - but if you’ve read anything great that we’ve missed, please pop it in the comments or share on our socials!

The Power of Fun. A cracking recommendation from Bruce Daisley. If you are having a rethink of how you spend your time, after a few months spent on Teams calls, or glued to your phone, this is a good corrective.

Range. This may not be explicitly about the mid-career moment, but it’s an emphatic and delightful reiteration of the power of mastering, or at least trying, as many disciplines as possible. Already a classic, well worth a read if it’s new to you.

An Everyone Culture. Recommended by Jo Royce after our great interview with her, and a great companion to last month’s Humanocracy. How do we build organisations that are driven by the learning instinct of the people within them?

The Status Game. Will Storr has written some great stuff about StoryTelling, and here he has gone deeper in search of a unifying theory of human behaviour, based on play and competition. It’s incredibly smart…and maybe a bit bleak. Depending on your mindset, you might love it or hate it, but it’s definitely interesting…

Confidence Gap. An incredible accessible entry point to lots of useful thinking about self-confidence and self-progression. It’s the kind of book you can dip into and find concentrated thinking that can help you to overcome invisible barriers to change.

Gnar Country. A brilliant challenge to the assumptions about getting older, through the lens of extreme performance sports. Enjoy!

We are pretty much done for this month, apart from a quick summary next week. If somehow you’ve missed it, read our monthly newsletter here, and if you’d like a framework to build your own Stay Ahead Plan, it’s here (full access to the framework is for paid subscribers only.)

Next month we’ll be digging into the art of Presenting You. It’s going to be another great one…subscribe and stay tuned!