Book I am reading: Why we sleep by Matthew Walker. I recently realized that the skill I am mastering is a good night’s sleep. That is hard work as it requires me to stay awake all day, have great routines, eat right, exercise and do things with highest integrity. This book by Matthew is driving home the importance of sleep. A habit I stared few months back was to throw my alarm clock away and just get up to my natural rhythm.

Tech that impressed me this week: AI in MS Office. Excel in mobile will now let you take a photo of a pdf and convert it to a table. A good portion of my youth was lost in writing stuff from pdf to excel and I am glad people don’t have to do this anymore.

Article of the week: Everything you knew about feedback could be wrong. A must read for managers who think they can are good at synthesizing and providing feedback to their peeps. I am huge fan of Marcus’s strengths based leadership model and he combines that well with research on why evaluating someone for complex skills is flawed.

Podcast of the week: Trust battery from Shopify founder Tobi Lutke. What a story and from the interview Tobi sounds like a great leader. As an example he defines failure as the successful discovery of a way things do not work.

Hardest thing this week: Cold showers. After watching this video of Wim Hof, I was motivated to try out cold showers. So far, the only benefit I have seen is time savings from showering as fast as I can, to get out of the cold water.

Quote of the week: “Success isn’t about how your life looks to others. It’s about how it feels to you. That’s what it means to be true to yourself.” — Michelle Obama