Modern Makers #41 - How to become limitless
🦸♂️ How to upgrade your brain to learn faster 🚀 Stacker introduces StackerX
Welcome to issue #41 of Modern Makers.
This week in the agenda:👇
🦸♂️ How to become limitless - 5 learnings from Jim Kwik’s book
🚀 Stacker introduces StackerX
👀 Tally has a new native integration with Airtable (+ a promo code for Modern Makers readers)
💾 Integromat now have an autosave feature
🆕 Softr just keeps shipping new features
Enjoy!
Welcome to the new makers who have joined us since last week's newsletter. I hope you had a great week!
My project of a platform to discover book quotes is going well, the main work now being to add more records to the database on Airtable. If you want to give me a hand, you can send me your favorite quotes via this Airtable form. This will also allow you to get early access to the platform in a few weeks.
Also, there will be no newsletter next Sunday. I'm going to take advantage of the Easter weekend to rest, read and make progress on my projects (and eat chocolates). I'll see you on Sunday 11th April for the next edition of Modern Makers.
📚 Book of the week
Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life
Author: Jim Kwik
Release date: 2020
I discovered this book on Twitter a few months ago. I have absolutely no regrets about taking the time to read it this week. It's probably one of my favorite reads of this year. Jim Kwik has become in a few years a worldwide reference on the subject of learning and is helping international companies and celebrities to maximise their potential. With this book, Jim wants to motivate us to make the best use of our real superpower: our brain. Like a muscle, the brain needs to be trained and fed continuously to enable us to remove the mental limits and barriers we impose on ourselves. Here are 5 essential points:
What is Flow? And how do you find it? - the flow state requires absolute concentration and total focus. During a flow state, you usually feel as if time is either speeding up or slowing down. You will feel comfortable with what you are doing and the experience has the right level of difficulty (challenging but achievable )to keep you engaged and motivated. Several reports show that flow can improve your productivity by 5X! Flow can be one of the most addictive states in life. How do we find flow? First of all, make sure to eliminate all distractions and avoid multitasking. Then, give yourself enough time - it takes 15 minutes to reach the flow state and you will usually reach your peak after 45 minutes. You should then plan to set aside at least 90 minutes or 2 hours if you can. Flow will be easier if you do something you love doing. Finally, have some clear goals - what do you want to accomplish? why is that important to you?
Fixed mindset versus Growth mindset - With a fixed mindset, you create some beliefs that will hold you back and prevent you from achieving your goals. With a fixed mindset, people tend to believe that their knowledge, intelligence and skills are just fixed traits. And that nothing can be done to improve them. Learners with a growth mindset are constant learners and are taking responsibility for their own learning. They truly believe that you can get smarter if you work for it. Your background and the past might have influenced who you are but you are responsible for who you want to become. Every one of us can improve and grow. It's too simple to assume that if you are not a genius, there is nothing you can do about it and use that as an excuse for inaction. Being limitless is not about being perfect. It’s about progressing beyond what you currently believe is possible. There are no limitations when you align and apply the right mindset, motivation, and methods. It's not how smart you are, it's how you are smart.
How to read more and why you should do it - use the Pomodoro method to have 25 minutes reading sessions (with a 5 or 10 minutes break in between). It's proven that we tend to mostly remember the beginning and the ending of the things we read or listen to. This means that if you read for 2 hours non-stop, you will probably struggle to remember what you were reading and learning around the hour mark. The Pomodoro method can then help you maximise your learnings. Make reading a daily habit. Even just for 10 or 15 minutes every day. Find a time that works for you (before sleeping time is a great time) and stick to it! Have a great position, seating in a chair and holding your book upright instead of laying down on your couch on your bed. Finally, don't feel compelled to have to finish a book (a bad habit we inherited from school) and try to always have 2 or 3 books you're reading at the same time. Reading more will improve many areas of your life, including your memory, your vocabulary, your knowledge, your focus, your imagination and it will also broaden your vision of the world by exposing you to different points of view and opinions.
10 ingredients that are good for your brain - the book contains some recipes to follow for your breakfast and lunches (or even some smoothie recipes). In general, Jim recommends that you prioritise ten ingredients that have benefits for your physical and mental health. These are dark chocolate (especially the one with the highest % of cocoa), avocado, turmeric, blueberries, broccoli, eggs, salmon and sardines, nuts, green leafy vegetables (spinach) and water! (which we sometimes tend to forget). A large glass of water in the morning is a good way to start your day.
Some habits to learn faster and study better - Use spaced repetition to get things resurfaced to you so you can get exposed to them on a regular basis (this is why I love Readwise's Daily Review). Use active recall once you finish reading a book chapter, watching a Youtube video or listening to a podcast. With this method, you try to remember as much as you can what you just learn by writing it down. How can you take better notes? First of all, make sure to know why you are taking notes. What are you're trying to achieve with these notes? Distinguish what's important from what's not. You can only capture a fraction of what someone is saying. You need to make sure you capture the best things. Write with your own terms and make sure you understand every single word (nothing worst than reading your notes two weeks later and not understanding what a specific word means). When you capture something, try to ask yourself the following three questions - How can I use this information? When will I use it? Do I agree with this?
Three other content that caught my attention this week:
💻 Learn Airtable scripting - Automate All the Things - On his YouTube channel, Aron Korenblit offers a 4-part video series on how to develop a script on Airtable. Knowing how to develop your own scripts is a great way to get the most out of the data in your Airtable databases. For these videos, Aron is joined by Giovanni Briggs (who works as an Integration Engineer at Airtable). This series lasts just over 4 hours in total and I intend to take the time to watch it all over the next few weeks
🏎️ A Newbie's Guide to Formula 1 - I'm really excited about the new Formula 1 season that started this Sunday. This guide is a great introduction for people who don't really know the sport. It’s also a great example of the kind of projects that can be created using Notion
📵 Why I'm unreachable and maybe you should be too - the founder of Nomad List explains in this post why he is almost unreachable. A rather radical approach but with obvious benefits: by cutting himself off from outside noise, he is able to focus fully on his projects and keep a good life balance.
🌎 What’s new in the world of no-code
Stacker was on Product Hunt this week to present StackerX, an upgraded version of Stacker, a tool used to create customer portals or internal dashboards with data hosted in Airtable. StackerX will bring a lot of new features, especially in terms of the data that can now be integrated: in addition to Airtable, this new version will be able to connect with Salesforce, Google Sheets, Stripe or Intercom.
We don’t yet have any details about the pricing of StackerX, which will be officially released in the next few days. If you want to know more and evaluate the potential of StackerX for your company, you can fill in this form to join the waiting list.
Tally now has native integration with Airtable. With this integration, your Tally form responses are sent directly as new records on your Airtable database, removing the need to use a tool like Zapier in the process. Even better, this integration is available to all Tally users, even those with a free account. Here are the instructions for connecting Tally and Airtable
🚨 Good news for Modern Makers readers, Tally is offering 20% off its PRO plan this week with promo code TALLYMM20
Offer valid until Sunday 4th April so hurry up!
It's very difficult to go a week without talking about Softr at the moment, as the teams behind this tool continue to release new features at an incredible rate. This week was again rich in announcements, judge for yourself:
New pricing: 4 plans are proposed, from the free account to the Business account at $165 per month
A custom domain name included with the FREE plan: very few tools to my knowledge offer this, it's hard to be more generous!
The List Detail block finally allows you to add more fields, opening the door to more customisation options for your pages
More advanced options for the SEO of your pages
Hidden fields in your forms
New templates (including a Maker Profile template)
New blocks
Integromat now has a new autosave feature. This is a very useful feature that will allow you to avoid reconfiguring an automation scenario from scratch or rebuilding a particular step after mistakenly closing a browser tab or simply forgetting to click the save button!
📦 And also…
Notion widgets are finally available on Android
See how On Deck uses no-code tools to develop its internal tools
Free templates to create agendas in Notion
Some new updates from Dorik including a new e-commerce template
Coda and Zapier are organising a webinar together on April 9th
A free database of no-code tutorials for Bubble, Webflow, Adalo, Zapier & more
Airtable has released a new feature that allows you to group multiple views of the same table in the same section
Parabola announced this week a new native integration with Airtable
Some new features on Substack, including better analytics
Adalo brings new customisation options for its App Bar component
As always, if you're enjoying Modern Makers, I would love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up. I do my best to make it one of the best emails you get each week, and I hope you're enjoying it!
I also invite you to contact me if you have questions or need help with no-code tools or if you want to have a virtual coffee with me ☕
Have a great Easter!
Martin,