Hey Reader, 🌟

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Happy New Year! I hope you had a great holiday season and I sincerely wish your 2024 to be filled with even more curious moments and adventures!

Thank you for sharing with me your ideas last month on what you would like to see more / less in the new year from our team! We take your feedback onboard to make even more engaging and actionable content that helps you learn new things and grow. If you continue having any other ideas please don't hesitate to shoot me an email.

As we are now in January and the annual goal setting season is at full swing, I wanted to share with you the method I use for setting my personal learning goals.

The idea's pretty simple: you start by making a list of all things you'd like to learn over the next 10 years: be that learning new language, getting on the surf board, upgrading your cooking skills, understanding philosophical concepts, or anything else. Think big and don't limit yourself by any constraints - anything that you've been dreaming about.

Then at the next step, for each item in your list, you put a number by the item, that corresponds to the timeframe for the dream, in numbers of years (1, 3, 5, or 10).

Here's the example of my personal list:

• Cook healthy and tasty meals for my family and friends - 1
• Upgrade Spanish to the confident conversational level - 1
• Invest time into executive coaching - 3
• Be able to easily navigate philosophical concepts - 3
• Get better at surfing - 5
• Improve DJ mixing skills - 5
• Be able to draw really well - 10

And then the final step is to look through those things that you want to learn in the next year and decide on the concrete small actions you could take to get you there. I encourage you to extend this exercise into 3, 5 and 10 to ensure you understand what you need to start doing already this year to get there.

The reason for planning these "goals" for the next 3-10 years is not necessarily to start working on them immediately. Life is unpredictable, and we can't predict what will happen tomorrow. These "goals" are not fixed plans; they just show the general direction you want to learn right now. You might change your mind as time goes on, but for now, it could feel like a reasonable direction to set for the future.

I'd love to know how you like to set your goals? Feel free to share by clicking the reply button.

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💡 Curious Bites

🐣 'Easter Eggs' of American Gothic The artist Grant Wood painted the iconic 'American Gothic' in 1930, at the very beginning of the Great Depression, which plunged the American rural world into great poverty.That fact provides the first clue to understanding the plot but there are more hidden meanings here. ​ Find out more

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🧠 See what your brain does when you look at art The short episode from BBC News on the headsets that show the impact of art on human brainwaves. The technology has already been used at the Courtauld Gallery in London where people were able to see the impact pieces by Vincent van Gogh had on their brains. ​ Watch video

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✍️ Quote of the week

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Stay curious and have a great 2024! 💙

Artem & Curious Muse team

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