On metacognition, living longer and starting from scratch
Hello. I’ve always been fascinated by ways we can bridge inequality, but the more I read about the stressors that face those who have the least, the more impossible it feels to bridge it.
Then at times, there’s research that provides hope - and one involves metacognition, which is a fancy way of describing the process of thinking about thinking. When you’re double checking the method behind your work, or thinking about why you made a mistake, that’s metacognition in action.
It’s found to be really important in education, as it captures not just what we learn, but our understanding how to do so, making us better at solving problems.
I covered some exciting new research on the topic for Bold this week:
A research team in France has been looking at interventions to bridge inequalities so that all children are able to achieve their full potential. In soon-to-be-published research, they found improving children’s metacognition to be an effective means of improving equality. Metacognition – simply put, thinking about thinking – is a process that helps us learn. We use metacognition to reflect on what we have learnt, and to understand our own strengths and weaknesses. This can help us identify areas for improvement. It’s the process we use to understand why we got a maths problem wrong, for instance.
The team found that the children who had been taught metacognitive strategies had performed better than those who didn’t receive the training, and children from the poorest backgrounds benefited most.
Also this week, I was clearly so immersed in my work that I stopped thinking about something equally important - data storage.
It’s every writer’s nightmare, you spend days carefully crafting a narrative, rewriting words and phrases, weeding out repetition, you restart your Mac only to find that none of your recent changes saved, as you accidentally clicked ‘discard changes’ when shutting down word.
Take this as a lesson from me. Don’t rely on the cloud. I learnt the hard way, that I can’t depend on it to save my work. I’d been editing various articles for the past month, and had stopped obsessively pressing save, because the programme I use (OneDrive) usually auto syncs every time I type. Or so I thought. It turns out, for whatever reason, it had not been syncing throughout the month of May, so I lost a combined total of 5,000 words on four separate documents.
Even typing this it seems absolutely unfathomable that I managed to lose so much (I’m typing this piece directly into Substack, which seems to save updates instantly - but I backed up this post elsewhere nonetheless). As someone who produces content for my job, why wasn’t I saving daily, or even hourly? All those lost words made me feel sick, but after some time desperately searching for documents that had been completely wiped, I realised that spending time re-writing was time better spent than lamenting over what was now clearly lost.
And as luck would have it, re-writing is a lot faster than the first time round. I will never know which versions are better, but somewhere in my brain, the thoughts I had already put to paper were still present, and I managed in only a few days, to recreate more than half of those lost words. The rest are still to come.
I’ve spent so much time writing about the importance of a positive mindset, thinking bigger picture and not letting stressors we cannot control dominate our mood, but all this is clearly easier said than done. Thankfully, accepting the words were lost was a remarkably effective method of letting go of an irreversible mistake.
In the grand scheme of things, how much did these words matter? I still had time to recreate them, and the urgency seemed to kick my brain into working with hyper-focus. For now I’ll keep telling myself that the rewritten content is far superior than what I had before...
The lost words certainly won’t matter in the grand scheme of a long life - so I’ll leave you with something much more important: eight simple steps to live longer - a topic we covered last week on my Health Decoded series:
As a reader of this newsletter you’ll already know that Breadwinners is out in August 2025 and available to pre order now - if you are interested in reading it, please consider a pre-order for less than a round in a pub, to please the algorithm and justify all these hours of research that went into it.