“You’re jumping from thing to thing with often very little context… The challenge is one of kind of not knowing what you don’t know.”
“You’re jumping from thing to thing with often very little context… The challenge is one of kind of not knowing what you don’t know.”
“I think back in school, the way I used to study and learn was really about just going through and doing like round after round of practice… doing practice exams, doing questions to the point where you get familiar with the concepts.”
“It was a real sort of reflection on… what you think you know, or what the system tells you you know, may be very different to what you actually know. A lot of the strategies I had employed in the past were just not effective at all here.”
Minh also describes a leadership trap he sees often:
“Almost any leader I’ve met that’s kind of moved into a leadership role… you know they can do it better than their team. And then that completely… destroys and circumvents the whole idea of the leverage that you get… from leading teams.”
“Probably the first aha moment would have been the initial assessment… you’re kind of given a type of learner that you are… Just reading through that profile and going, yeah, that kind of sounds like me… to have that very clear explanation of it as a dynamic.”
“Sometimes it’s like something’s happening in your life and then somebody can just describe it so cleanly and you’re like, yes, that’s the thing.”
Minh connected the dots between learning dynamics and leadership outcomes:
“Some of the things that help you be successful… can be complete… polar opposite skills to what’s going to help you in the next phase.”
Real-time visual thinking became a hallmark of his meetings:
“I had my iPad out and I was just drawing on concepts… how they get their customers… this kind of links into this type of technology… they have gaps over here… And at the end of the meeting… I shared that… My CTO saw it… He’s like, ‘Minh, did you draw that during the meeting?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I did.’”
He now teaches the approach to others:
“I added it to my farewell message. I said, ‘Hey, this is the type of way you can take notes. This is the type of way you can help to conceptualize and understand information.’”
The impact is speed and clarity:
“Once you can conceptualize and understand how all the different things fit together, you can just move so much more quickly.”
He also recognized how to translate stakeholder asks into what they truly need:
“They would actually deliver on what people wanted versus what they asked… you’re asking the deeper questions… even the one of why is it important?… Why is this concept important?”
Foundational habits mattered, too:
“What really left an impression on me is the comprehensiveness of the initial phase… Everything from scheduling time in through to working on what’s important, not what’s urgent… These are just good concepts of how to operate… even if they took one or two of those concepts out, they would be just more effective.”
Join the iCanStudy program today and experience the transformation for yourself.
Get started