Summary

In this episode, Andy welcomes back Steve Kahle, entrepreneur, executive, and fractional CIO, author of Leadership Recall: Harness Insights. Accelerate Innovation. LEAD WITH AUTHORITY. Steve first joined the podcast in episode 184 to discuss email overload. This time, the conversation turns to a challenge every leader faces: the forgetting curve. Research suggests we forget up to 83% of what we learn within a week, and Steve argues this is not just a learning problem, it's a leadership problem.

Steve shares his CCR framework (Capture, Catalog, and Recall), along with practical tools such as the Anki flashcard app and the Email Me voice-note app, to build what he calls a learning operating system. The discussion covers how to design a recall fitness practice in as little as three minutes a day and how removing friction at every step keeps the system sustainable.

If you're looking for a practical system to stop letting great insights slip away and start leading with more authority, this episode is for you!

Sound Bites

"I think God put in my heart to be a relentless optimizer. I like to see things work and work well."
"When you really zoom out in life, those who are really successful have figured out what are the frameworks, what are the methodologies that work, and they simply apply those."
"Our subconscious mind can handle about 11 million bits of data per second, but about 40 bits conscious mind."
"I went all in. Christ totally transformed my heart, and I'm realizing that scripture memory is a superpower."
"Time swiftly washes away the obvious."
"Learning really is a privilege, and we need to be able to find time that works with our daily rhythms."
"Three minutes a day is really all you need to be able to see tremendous traction on being able to recall things that matter"
"Instead of 'I'm bad at remembering names,' you could, do a reframe like, 'Hey, I'm getting better at remembering people's names.'"

Chapters

00:00 Introduction
01:48 Start of Interview
02:06 Early Experiences and the Instinct to Remember
04:08 Is Memory a Natural Gift or a Trainable Skill?
05:19 Forgetting as a Feature, Not Just a Bug
07:10 The Leadership Cost of Forgetting
09:10 Shifting the Bottleneck from Input to Retention
12:02 The Five-Hour Rule and Three Learning Archetypes
14:19 The CCR Framework in Practice: Capture, Catalog, and Recall
19:50 Removing Friction from Your Learning System
23:23 Inside Anki: Cloze Deletions and Building Cards
26:10 Organizing Your Recall Decks
27:30 Real-World Results: When Readers Apply the System
28:56 Building Recall Habits in Your Kids
32:50 How to Get the Book
34:01 End of Interview
34:17 Andy Comments After the Interview
37:46 Outtakes

Learn More

You can learn more about Steve and his work at leadershiprecall.com.

For more learning on this topic, check out:

Episode 184 with Steve Kahle. It's our previous conversation about keeping your head above water when drowning in email and commitments. Definitely recommend checking it out.
Episode 411 with Laura Mae Martin. She's the head of productivity at Google and shares ideas that I still use to this day.
Episode 376 with Nick Sonnenberg. It's a book about helping you and your team stop drowning in all the information and commitments at work.

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Thank you for joining me for this episode of The People and Projects Podcast!

Talent Triangle: Power Skills

Topics: Leadership, Memory, Learning, Productivity, Knowledge Management, Recall, Spaced Repetition, Personal Development, Continuous Learning, Networking, Project Management

The following music was used for this episode:

Music: Imagefilm 034 by Sascha Ende License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Music: Tuesday by Sascha Ende License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license