Coursera is opening access to its online education in a bid to help those newly unemployed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gizmodo notes the service has made 3,800 courses and 400 specializations available for free through government agencies hoping to find jobs for residents. The courses teach top-level skills like business writing and job paths like app development, and you’ll find professional certificates from companies like Google, IBM and SAS.
No one could have predicted our current reality as part of the 2020 employment forecast. As of March 26, over three million people have filed unemployment claims this week alone—the most in U.S. history. The stock market is in turmoil, drastically plummeting on an almost daily basis. The national government has now stepped in, offering bridge loans to small businesses to help them retain their employees.
We’re facing unprecedented times, and no one knows how long this will last. Since we cannot predict when the worst will be over or even when the virus will be contained, your best strategy is to focus on short-term solutions that will get you through this challenging time.
As with all global or national calamities, COVID-019 is going to cause a huge “reset” in its wake. Like 9/11, the 1918 Pandemic, Hurricanes, Tornados and more, people take stock in their lives and, in some cases, discover there is something more important than what they were doing before the crisis. It is only natural when faced with your mortality to reevaluate your life. What would people say about you had you died at that moment? How would your obituary read?
Alfred Nobel had a similar, personal, epiphany when he awoke one morning to find his obituary in place of his brother’s, who had died the day before. The newspapers obituary was scathing. It called him the “mercchant of death” and said “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.” Alfred created the Nobel Prize as a way of recovering his reputation, and perhaps, purging himself of a small bit of his guilt over all the harm his creations had caused.
While I don’t believe that any of us carry the guilt the Nobel did, we can still take a good example from his horrible experience.
Are you accomplishing what you want in life?
Are you affecting the world, both your small, local, world and the world at large?
What small concrete actions can you take to have that effect?
What long postponed change do you need to make NOW?
What is stopping you?
Why?
The world is being turned upside down in the wake of COVID-19 and instead of worrying about it, perhaps we can imagine how we can use this Great Reset to craft a new day, a new life and a new world for everyone!
Things that will be in large supply once this is over…
Retail/Restaurant/Commercial Real Estate
Talent — in all fields
Stimulus Money
Businesses looking to grow again
What can you build from these? Is it time to start your own business? Is it time to move to a better career?
You want to start your plans now so you are ready to move as soon as the opportunity provides itself. It will be the first movers that benefit the most because they will have access to the best unemployed/underemployed talent in their fields and, hopefully, stimulus money before it runs out.
COVID-19 continues to dominate the news cycle and raise important questions around health care and prevention. The spread of the virus has more recently caused the cancelation of many events and conferences, and many employers have asked their workforce to work from home.
In this article, we offer actionable steps you can take to position yourself for success during an unpredictable and challenging season.
Staying productive during COVID-19
Depending on your situation, there are a number of steps you can take to be proactive when it comes to supporting yourself and your loved ones and being content at work. Here are tips by circumstance:
Creativity is important regardless of which career you are in today. We all have to come up with creative and applicable solutions to the problems we face on a daily basis. In this article, we learn that drawing, not word, is sometimes the best way of releasing our innate creativity and problem solving skills. — Douglas
What’s the problem with meetings? Yes, many lack purpose and focus–and most go on too long. But there’s another underlying problem: Everybody talks too much.
Human beings simply aren’t wired to sit around all day in a closed room communicating verbally. Sure, way back when we’d gather around the camp fire at night but that was after a vigorous day chasing woolly mammoths or gathering nuts and berries.
So my idea for transforming meetings is very simple: give participants a chance to draw. Before you dismiss this approach, let me explain
Your career doesn’t — and shouldn’t — stand apart from other aspects of your life. Creativity in one area always helps to expand creativity in all area of your life. This article provides 15 great ideas for spurring your creativity in general so it can better be applied to specific aspects of your career — Douglas
We might not have time for big creative projects. But we can usually spare a few minutes per day or per week for a tiny task. Of course, the key is to find something that you enjoy, something that rejuvenates you and inspires you, something you can’t wait to do.
Because connecting to our creativity is a wonderful, important way to care for ourselves.
Last week, in this piece, I shared 15 such tiny projects from the beautiful book Creativity Takes Courage: Dare to Think Differently by Irene Smit and Astrid van der Hulst. Below are 15 more ideas, which I came up with.
The bestselling author of The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck and Get Your Sh*t Together, Sarah Knight, outlines her “NotSorry Method” to stop spending time you don’t have doing things you don’t want to do in her humorous talk.
After fifteen years working in New York City’s top publishing houses,Sarah Knight struck out on her own. Since then, her essay “I Quit My JobToday (And So Can You!)”- went viral, and her book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck: How to Stop Spending Time You Don’t Have with People You Don’t Like Doing Things You Don’t Want to Do“, became a bestseller. The escape from corporate life and transformation into an “accidental anti-guru” continued when she and her husband moved to Las Terrenas, Dominican Republic. Sarah’s new book explains how to “Get Your Shit Together: How to Stop Worrying About What You Should Do So You Can Finish What You Need to Do and Start Doing What You Want to Do.” Sarah graduated cum laude with a degree in English and American Literature from Harvard University.
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I first discovered Richard Feynman years ago when I read his book “Surely, You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” for a college class. I then went on to read his other book, “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” and almost anything I could find by or about him. His physics quickly left my basic science abilities in the dust, but he was an amazing and quirky person who’s interests ranged from lock picking to drumming to the nature of the universe.
Richard Feynman was a physicist who received a nobel prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics. He was notorious for asking his mathematicians to explain concepts in simple language to test their understanding.
Here his unique technique to learn new materials:
Step 1. Choose a topic you want to understand and start studying it. Once you know what it is about, take a piece of paper and write the topic at the top of the page.
Step 2. Pretend you’re teaching the idea to someone else. Write out an explanation on the paper while you describe them out loud. Like this you get an idea of what you understand and where you still have gaps. Whenever you get stuck, go back and study. Repeat that process until you can explain it.
Step 3. Finally do it again, but now simplify your language or use an analogy to make the point. If your explanation ends up wordy and confusing, that’s an indication that you do not understand the idea well enough. If that happens go back until you have mastered it.
It is the process of thinking about an idea while teaching it that make the method so effective. Once you can explain an idea with simple language and create graphic analogies, you have deeply understood it and will remember it for a long time.
Learn more about Richard Feynman with these books from Amazon
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