Bill Gallagher has spent 35 years doing weekly reflection: 20 to 30 minutes each weekend writing down key lessons and how to apply them. He adapted this into a quarterly exercise for leadership teams at companies like Joie de Vivre and Airbnb, where each leader shares their biggest lesson and next steps.
And I started a practice that I've been doing for 35 years now, which is every weekend I spend 20 to 30 minutes making a list of my key lessons I learned this last week. Often they're painful, both professionally and personally. And then I say, how am I going to use that lesson in the future? And so that practice on every week, that doing that has helped accelerate my wisdom because it's allowed me to metabolize my experiences. What I do with my leadership teams, whether it was at Joie de Vivre or Airbnb or now at mea, is the following. I don't require them to do this every week, but I do say once a quarter we are going to sit down and talk about our biggest lessons of the quarter. So each person on the leadership team says, here's my biggest lesson and here's what I learned from it and how it's going to serve me in the future.
