Hey there!

I hope you've had a productive week! If you are new here, welcome to our Friday Roundup.
What is the Friday Roundup?

A roundup of the best in productivity & systems for Entrepreneurs and small business owners with a ‘TLDR’ summary and our take on how to take action to systematize your business and your life.

Be on the lookout for our Tuesday Swipe file & Case study! Every Tuesday a free behind-the-scenes swipe file from an entrepreneur with the systems, tools, and hires that helped them build sustainable success.

-Jenae :)

The Rundown

• Quick Tip: Why You Should Stop Making New Year’s Resolutions

• How to be HAPPY? | Neuroscience of Dopamine

• 3 Daily Habits that Often Drain 90 Percent of Our True Potential in Life

• The perfect time for new habits, says Wharton behavior expert: It’s ‘the granddaddy of all fresh starts’

• Have 10 hours? IBM will train you in AI fundamentals - for free

• Social Media Accounts to Follow for Mental Health

• 🎉Introducing Celebration Corner! See your community wins & share yours!

Sponsor

Join our Lucky Draw and have a chance to win an Apple iPad by subscribing!

 🗞What’s the point of reading countless news articles while gaining no insight?

🦉Market Hedwig is a highly-rated platform where investors have access to 5-minute weekly financial articles created by ex-investment bankers, who summarize key market news from a professional finance perspective, including opinions across various asset classes.

🎁Subscribe to our FREE newsletter to stay ahead in the ever-changing financial markets.

🔥Quote/Prompt

Use the quote as a writing or thinking prompt to finish your week strong.

A bit from mine:

(posted in our Doer Entrepreneurs Free Community — off social media)

Did someone forward this to you?

📈 Performance

How to be HAPPY? | Neuroscience of Dopamine (YouTube: 5 min)

This video is worth the quick watch but we’ll summarize the points below. Not only is this video important to watch to really understand how social media is hacking your brain (and prevent it) but it’s also how you can hack your own brain to make this chemical work FOR you.

And don’t worry — he’s not recommending summoning herculean levels of willpower — or any at all.

Key Insights:

• Avoid cheap dopamine. The evolution of our brain means that the same rewards that were once very expensive (effort-wise) are now available for cheap, but still give the same amount of dopamine. Think how easy it is to consume a high-calorie/fat meal like pizza. Now imagine how hard it was for our ancestors who had to hunt/forage.

• Orchestrate earned dopamine. It turns out, the amount of dopamine is governed by the anticipation, not the reward itself. It is earned. You can hack your brain by creating this yourself.

• Creating earned dopamine: increase waiting time before your pleasure item/experience. Use obstacles or friction like doing a few pushups or accomplishing another task before your “dopamine reward”.

• Our take: One thing not mentioned in the video that we want to add is that we regularly see clients use this trick, but then fall into the trap of “well, that was so pleasurable, how about I ditch the friction and go straight to the reward”? Example: 1) I’ll finish this task, then go on social media for 5 minutes. Huge dopamine hit. 2) What if I just ditch the task and go straight to social media? Medium dopamine hit that requires another and another. 3) Back to cheap dopamine loop. — Remind yourself that it was the “earned” part that made it so good in the first place!

⚙️ Optimization

3 Daily Habits that Often Drain 90 Percent of Our True Potential in Life

Hindsight is 20/20 as they say — meaning it’s easy to see what we missed out on after we’ve missed out on it. This article is good food for thought on how to optimize our NOW. It also reminds us that we are human, and these “traps” are things we fall into through no real fault of our own, but just by being human.

Key Insights:

• Focusing too much on a future moment. For example, 5pm, the weekend, the holidays. Or hey, for us entrepreneurs, maybe hitting a revenue goal. Instead, consider creating your happiness now. Create joy now.

• Waiting for your passion to find you. The authors suggest that many things can be passion projects when we look for it. Likewise, something that seems like a passion, can quickly become not one. Looking inward and being introspective about passion and focus can help reorient our passions.

• Over-controlling everything. As a business owner — we know that’s definitely not you (wink, wink — sarcasm alert). 🙂 This can be a great thing, but the authors here discuss some ways in which it isn’t and another valuable trait — acceptance. Sometimes when things go another way, it can also be valuable to accept things for what they are — instead of wishing them to be different.

⏲️ Time Management

The perfect time for new habits, says Wharton behavior expert: It’s ‘the granddaddy of all fresh starts’

We really went back and forth about including this article — and here’s why: The first part is total BS. Sorry — but she considers the best times as the exact times we do not recommend (Mondays, New Year’s, etc.). See this video as to why.

With that disclaimer, if you skip that part, the tricks listed in the article are great. The insights below are for the best bits. 🙂 Read the full article for her longer breakdown of these two main tricks.

Key Insights:

• Trick your brain into ‘temptation bundling’: Bundle a chore with a reward. (See the dopamine video earlier in our newsletter for why this is great advice!) She also mentions that even if adding the reward in reduces net productivity, in fact it might extend your ability to make sustainable progress — this is an excellent point!

• Make detailed plans with ‘bite-sized’ goals: Instead of “I should volunteer more” try, “I will volunteer for an hour at 6 p.m., right after work, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.”

💻 Tools & Technology

Have 10 hours? IBM will train you in AI fundamentals - for free

We keep seeing you guys talking about how you want to learn AI and we love that this article is from someone who tested it out. We linked to the article and not the course directly so you can get a feel of what his experiences were and whether you feel like this streamlined method might be a good fit for you. He lists his review of multiple classes in the program. I have chosen 3 and copy/pasted them below for you. Check how his article for more and for the link to the program.

Key Insights:

• Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (1 hour 15 mins): Less than a century old, AI has already undergone three waves of transformative development. Today it gives humanity the most powerful tools for analyzing complex data, not only to find meaning but also to learn without human intervention. In this course, you'll survey AI's history and explore ways that it can shed light on unstructured data.

• Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision (1 hour 30 mins): You might already know that some AI systems can understand human language, identify visual images, and even create original art. But do you know how these systems do it? In this course, you'll explore the theory of natural language and vision processing and learn how these technologies drive real-world mechanisms such as chatbots and photo analysis.

• Run AI Models with IBM Watson Studio (1 hour and 45 mins): In this course, you'll practice creating an AI machine learning model in a series of simulations, using IBM Watson Studio. This is hands-on time that can help you do actual work with AI.

👀 Read, Watch, Listen

This week’s awesome books, YouTube videos, newsletters, etc. to add to your list!

The Most Helpful Accounts to Follow for Mental Health Resources (Article on Social Media)

Normally we include a video or book here but this is a list of social media accounts that might help your mental health. That seemed especially important as we end the year and also especially for anyone for whom this time might not be as cheery as it is for others. So if you picture yourself doom-scrolling while Aunt Jackie and Uncle Bob fight over the ham, maybe scroll through these instead.

🎉 Celebration Corner

Every week Doers Inner Circle members do a weekly review & get help when they need it — check out the progress they made this week!

• I took care of myself when I was low on energy and I just rested.

• I had a great mastermind session to prepare me for my next career chapter.

• Pretty much everything [went right]. I was like a model student.

• I was able to take it easier on Thursday and Friday and even managed to attend the Goal Planning Workshop on Friday.

What did you do this week? We feature non-member successes too. Just post them here!

🔒Inner Circle: Events & Announcements

• 90-day Planning Formula Bash — Happening now + new module! Click here

• Tuesday: Work ON Business. Theme: Money

• Monday/Friday: Goal Setting + Plan Your Week Party

• Accelerators: December 29 is your Monthly Goal Setting Workshop RSVP here

🆕Enjoy the new newsletter?

We will soon be adding Referral Perks — Refer now to start earning! 👇

As a reminder, you’re getting this twice-weekly newsletter because you opted in to receive awesome productivity and systems tips through one of these methods:

Doer Entrepreneurs, Doers Express Newsletter, Productivity Stacks, Success by Rx, ClickUp Facebook Group, Productive & Successful Translators Facebook Group.

If you’re not interested in improving your and your business’s productivity so you’d like to break up, that’s definitely a bummer. But, you can always use the unsubscribe link at the bottom if you do not want to get these tips — but keep in mind I am hyper-focused on making these twice-weekly emails as valuable as possible.

Got a tip? Hit reply!

I hope you found this valuable!

Wishing you much productivity!

- Jenae :)