The Open Master's community occasionally hosts "member spotlights" on live google hangouts on air to hear more about what our peers are studying and doing. This is also a great method to force ourselves to do a little reflection and self-evaluation, periodically. This summer, we featured Alex Simon, Tim Rann, Mike Durante, and Alison Jean Cole.

Alex Simon recorded a short (3 minute) summary to give you a short taste of what the longer presentations often entail:

Alex's study of chairs has involved reading, recording his own podcasts, drawing a chair a day, collecting and building chairs, experimenting with using or not using chairs, visiting chair expos, and even giving chairs as gifts. Now he hopes to launch a chair consultancy to apply what he has learned.

Alex had three pieces of advice from his first year of Open Master's study:

1) Whenever it involves other people, it works better.

2) Whenever something is actionable- e.g. if it requires a product or outcome that is very specific and is something that I have to deliver- that works better, too.

3) The most effective learning happened when I had an equally effective reflection system. Regardless of what technique I used to learn stuff, whenever reflection was baked into it, that was the most effective.