You will have a million ideas, and they will happen constantly, and they will all seem great at the time, and you usually won’t do anything about them.
Ideas are constant and cheap. Ideas are not the key to your success.
The only thing that matters is what you take action on and the results you get. What you do matters, not what you think. Take action.
I don’t listen to what people say, I watch what they do. What the say tells you who they want to be or who they think they are, what they do tells you who they are. As you start toact, and things start to happen, other opportunities will come up, other possibilities will come your way. Action equals success. Ideas equal wishes.
Too often get get lost in the smaller details of our world, and we focus too much on our own problems, and we do not look at how large and how amazing things really are around us. We forget the great things we can do, that what we do can be great.
Everything we do matters, everything we do is important.
Anything and anywhere, if looked at close enough is simply magnificent.
It is one of those "a butterfly in South America flutters its wings and it results in a hurricane in Asia" type of things.
I truly believe doing everything you do as well and as consciously as possible matters, it just does, and it is obvious if you look at the results of small actions in your life. Today's world puts tools that used to be only accessible to large companies or countries into the hands of one person. You have more access to more information and to more tools for creation than anyone else if history, more than Leonrdo Da Vinci, more than Socrates, more than Edison, more than Einstein.
It used to be possible to read evey book in the world, there were maybe two hundred. Today, you have tools and knowledge that are simply staggering in power aand scope, and these tools truly are infinte.
What are you going to do with it?
Problems happen, things go wrong, but don't let what happens limit your world. You have the tools to solve any problem in the world.
Make your life a spiderweb of networks of people and options and tools and knowledge. Make sure you use all your tools.
Your potential future is infinite and it is filled with multiples of paths, and you should jump from option to option, choosing your own way among an infinite amount of possiblity, making the world better, one piece at a time.
We need to be people who are raw pure expression, of pure commitment, of pure being.
Action:
This week use one tool you have never thought of using. Any. Twitter or a power hammer. They are the same.
"What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed."
"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts."
"A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!" — Richard P. Feynman
Reading an brief article in the New York Times, Sept 9, 2010, I read how common accepted beliefs about how learning and studying are wrong. The article brought up four different concepts, that I have always used, that I know work, and these simple techniques can dramatically improve how much you can learn from studying and how fast.
These concepts undermine the assumption that to master a topic requires immersion.
Alternating Study Environments - don't stick to one study location but alternate rooms or places that you study. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may give that information more neural connections. I often will read or study by leaving related course materials in two or three places and when there, pick up where I left off last time I was there. I also will read for twenty minutes at a time, and then will get up and walk around to refresh and think about what I read, often repeating key concepts three times spacing them apart by one minute.
Mixing Content - don't focus on a single topic but study distinct but related concepts in one sitting.. When the context is varied, the information is enriched. Use multiple types of material - alternating in one session vocabulary, reading, and speaking in a new language. Musicians and athletes mix up workouts and practice sessions. I will read two to three related books on a subject, jumping back and forth, and also listen to audio podcasts or books when unable to read. On key concepts I will often write them down so that it helps lock it into my memory and then often will post on line so I can review from other locations ( this blog for example.)
Spacing Study Sessions - Spacing in study sessions, an hour tonight, an hour on the weekend, another hour a week later will allow you to hold and build concepts longer. The idea is that forgetting is a friend of learning as it allows you to learn, and then relearn, and to do so effectively.
Self Testing - testing is a powerful tool of learning more than it is a tool of assessment. Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it and charges it with more certainty than less. I often will try to do a concept to see if I understand how it works and test myself, or find on line tests to see if can complete.
It is the organizational structure that will matter the most.
Rigid structures are unable to adapt as quickly to a rapidly changing environment as a decentralized system. Ultimately, it is a battle of organizational theory.
Every once and a while we are lucky enough to come across a book that changes the way we live and the way we think. It seems to me that we are often searching for something, and synchronicity then steps in and throws that something to us, sometimes by us browsing in a book store, sometimes it is when someone lends us a book, or we are just plain lucky enough that the book or knowledge finds us.
The Black Swan - Nissim Nicholas Taleb
I had to read this in short bursts, as I would stop, make some notes, reread to make sure I understand, and then realize what I thought before I read this book was wrong. He writes of random events, those that change everything, and how we cannot predict them and how anyone who thinks they are predicting them is wrong. Basically we are predicting in a box with imperfect data. When I was getting my MBA, it used to bother when we would use forecasting models like Black-Scholes, and everyone acted as if it was fact, but it was so diluted and so many things were excluded that it was obvious to me that it was a model that functioned only in a vacuum. We don't live in a vacuum. This book made me realize I wasn't wrong. I will post some notes on this work later, but the short of it is, read it and think.
Out of Control - Kevin Kelly
This book is brilliant and hits artificial intelligence and life, networks, insects, swarms, you name it. and it has left me so that I see the world today as a series of networks making collections of networks all run by a few lines of rules or code. I see companies and its groups as connected network hubs, and when you realize that artificial life can be summed up in a few simple rules, you realize everything can be reduced to a simple form. You make the rules, and let the network run. The game is to find the rules.
The Four Hour Workweek - Tim Ferriss
This book did it and I didn't expect it at all. Sold as a productivity book, it really just takes some old business books, like Dan Kennedy's and Gerber's, and then takes Pareto's and Parkinson's law and updates them. It is good but not that unique. What threw me was the way he deconstructs everything, which is brilliant. He takes complicated scenarios or events and using Pareto's law and some grounded intelligence, and some basic good logic ( does anyone take logic anymore? Most useful class I ever took) and then finds a way to make it happen. He made me disbelieve the 10,000 hour rule. He also said something that made me change my career. We are all raised to think there is something out there we are supposed to be. "What are you going to be when you grow up?" is stated over and over, and most us don't ever really know, and as we get older we think we somehow missed it. He states what we do for money isn't the goal for our life, and we should minimize the intrusion, and then we live the rest of our life.
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
Read this twice as a High School student and at least twice as a college student, and then read it during the summer as a lark and now that I am older and I realize that I had just read the book before, but now I understand it and what he means. Thoreau understood simple basic true rules of life;
Own things, don't let them own you, most men let the world own them
Take care of the world, its our home
The world is just as fascinating in the mile from your house as it is one thousand miles away.
And there are more, many more.
It takes a few pages to get used to the way he writes but once you are in sync he is brilliant.
Enter the Steam - edited by Samuel Bercholz and Sherab Chodzin Kohn
A book of essays on Buddhism I picked up while in Las Vegas during one of those years when little goes right, and most things made no sense. It opened a new world for me.Not the best book I ever read on the subject, but the one that got me started.
To be clear right off, it is not a religion to me, and I don't believe Buddha was one of a thousand Buddhas or that light came out, that he levitated, or that nirvana is an actual place. He was just a man but that is what makes him special. he is just a very smart man who found a better way to live, and if he can do it, so can we.
I believe he was a brilliant man, who ignored the cultural binds of his time. Who understood that we are not stable consistent beings, and that we are all interconnected, and that we all strive to keep an ever changing world in stasis. And that makes us struggle and unhappy.
I will write more on the subject, but simply said, there is more to the world than the hours upon hours I have spent studying Western Philosophy and literature. The story about fish swimming about not knowing they are in water, they think that water is all there is, and that is exactly us, we forget how much our culture limits our world.
All five authors did the same thing, they showed the world was more than I thought, and they each showed the limit of my education and of the way my culture dictated my view of the world.
After each, it became a new paradigm, a new world.
“We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side.
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