Developing an appetite for hard ideas - Scott H Young

Original link:  http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2011/08/09/learning-smart-hard-ideas/

Highlights:
After reading Feynman’s memoirs, a different idea struck me. While his intelligence is obvious, what impressed me most was his persistence in learning hard ideas. He would reread physics papers meticulously for hours, and all of their sources, until he understood an idea from the bottom up

Perhaps genius isn’t best defined by raw intellectual ability. Instead, maybe it’s the appetite for hard ideas that makes someone smart.

Intelligence as Endurance

Students who believed smarts were malleable wanted to take on harder challenges, and became smarter than students with more talent but less motivation.

In my own experience working with students, I’ve seen how appetite for hard ideas translates to success. When faced with a concept that they don’t understand, most students simply accept the correct definition and memorize the solution. Top learners don’t do this—they struggle obsessively to figure it out.

Hunger for Hard Ideas

A hunger for hard ideas is a specific subset of curiosity. It’s seeking explanations for things because they are hard to understand. Because, when those ideas are understood, the satisfaction of knowing something difficult to learn is even greater.

People who believe in superstitions lack this hunger. They are curious for explanations, but they prefer naïve explanations that are easily understood. They prefer incorrect explanations, than accepting hard ideas exist.

Developing Your Appetite

If you believe certain domains of knowledge are too difficult for you to understand, then you’ll avoid hard ideas.

People with the right attitude believe no idea is too difficult to understand. The only reason you don’t know everything is that you haven’t spent the time to learn it all yet. Effort is the only barrier, not ability in 99% of all cases.

Feynman was a perfect example of this. He may be renown for physics, but less people know he was also an amateur musician, artist, linguist, engineer and lock picker. There isn’t enough time in one life to become perfect at everything, but that’s a constraint of lifespan, not talent.

Seeking Hard Ideas – Why Aren’t More People Autodidacts?

A question that has bothered me is, why aren’t more people self-educated? With the internet’s immense resources, almost anything can be learned online for free, or for a fraction of the cost of tuition.

Some possible answers are that learning is difficult without instruction, the content is boring, there aren’t good systems for proving knowledge obtained outside of an institution. To a certain extent these are all correct.

However, a bigger culprit is that people simply don’t like hard ideas. The reason millions of people pay billions of dollars to attend university, but only a tiny fraction watches brilliant MIT, Harvard or Stanford lectures online is because most people won’t learn for fun. Without the prospect of a diploma, most people would rather watch television.

Those people, armed with the near-infinite resources of our age and a hunger to learn for the sake of learning, will outrun the prodigies and gifted who shy away from the challenge.

Twenty Ways to Stay Productive When Working at Home - Scott H Young

Highlights

1) Build a Work Ethic
2) Don’t Overestimate Your Productivity
3) Don’t Count the Low-Value Tasks
4) Cut Out Distractions
5) Start Early
6) Know Thy Energy
7) Learn to Say No
8) Set Daily Goals
9) Use Parkinsons Law - a task will expand to the time you give it. Crunch your workload by giving yourself only a few minutes to finish tasks where completion is more important than perfection.
10) Learn to Churn - This means that once you run out of ideas, you tell yourself that your goal is volume not quality. Tell yourself that you will redo it later if it is too horrible.
11) Create a Professional Space
12) Set Work Hours
13) What’s Your MIT? Always know what your Most Important Task is. Even if the rest of the day is unproductive, your day was still valuable if you get that task done.
14) Have a Social Life
15) Vary Your Tasks - I like to split up different tasks throughout the day so I can use different mental “muscles.” This keeps me fresh and productive without the need for long breaks.
16) Boredom before Quitting - resist the temptation to go online or do something else. Even if you could postpone your work hours, stick it through another ten or fifteen minutes.
17) Get Outside Perspectives
18) Give Yourself Overtime
19) The Extra 15 - When you get stuck or feel a strong urge to quit, just commit to do an extra fifteen minutes of work. Usually this is enough to carry you out of the slump and move forward. If it isn’t then you probably need a break.
20) Utilize Your Flexibility

Double Your Reading Rate/How to Read 70+ Books in a Year - Scott H Young

Double Your Reading Rate
Original author/link: http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2007/03/10/double-your-reading-rate/

Highlights:
I believe there are six major keys to improving your reading skill. Like all skills, success only comes through practice, so just reading this article won’t be enough. But if you are interested in how you might be able to make dramatic improvements in both speed and comprehension, I’ve found these six points to be the best start.


1) Remember, Reading is Not Linear
2) Stop Subvocalizing
3) Practice Reading
  Practice reading doesn’t mean reading. Practice reading involves reading faster than you can actually read. Chances are you won’t comprehend much of what you are reading because your brain is so used to going at a slower rate and subvocalizing. The point is simply to see the text faster than you can read so you can untie the habit of sounding the words as you comprehend them.
4) Use a Pointer
5) Eliminate Distractions
6) Find Your Motivation

How to Read 70+ Books in a Year

Original link: http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2007/08/06/how-to-read-70-books-in-a-year/

Highlights:

Step One: Learn to Speed Read
Step Two: Always Have a Book
Step Three: One Book at a Time
Step Four: Fill Gap Time With Reading
Step Five: Cut the Television and Web-Surfing
Step Six: Keep a To-Read List

Getting Started
Set a one month reading goal. Try to read 10-30 pages a day just for the next month. Nothing too challenging, but enough to help you install the habits of regular reading.

How to Get More Done in Less Time

http://jimsmarketingblog.com/2013/04/09/how-to-get-more-done-in-less-time-and-improve-your-thinking/

Highlights: 

Reacting or acting?
You can start the day by checking your email inbox and reacting to what you find. Alternatively, you can start your day by listing what’s most important and getting started on that – then opening your email.
You can react every time your phone alerts you to a text message. Alternatively, you can finish what needs finishing and then read any messages you’ve received.
You can react every time you see a social networking notification. Alternatively, you can wait until you’ve stopped for a coffee etc, then use that time to check your notifications.


Regaining your time and your focus
One of the reasons small business owners find it such a challenge to get important things done, is that the distractions they react to, cause them to lose focus. This is especially the case, when they need to do something creative, like writing a blog post or writing some marketing material, etc.

Here’s the thing: It’s extremely hard to focus on something that requires your creativity, when you allow yourself to be distracted and your focus to be scattered.

For example, if you want to write a newsletter article first thing tomorrow morning, but you decide to read your emails first, instead of focusing on your article, you will find your focus scattered between the article and all the questions and demands from your inbox. By writing the article and then dealing with your emails, you can focus 100% on the article. You end up with a better article and then get to invest all your focus, on dealing with your emails


Getting through the day or from the day?
Most small business owners are happy to just get through the day. However, the most successful business owners take a different approach. They get from the day. They start their day with a list of important objectives and then determine to master their time and their focus, so the important things are always taken care of, with their full attention, in reasonable time.

How To Win Friends & Influence People : DO THIS AND YOU’LL BE WELCOME ANYWHERE

How To Win Friends & Influence People is a book authored by Dale Carnegie. This blog provides the book summary and encourage to read it.

Chapter 4: DO THIS AND YOU’LL BE WELCOME ANYWHERE.”

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

People are not interested in you. They are not interested in me. They are interested in themselves—morning, noon and after dinner.

The New York Telephone Company made a detailed study of telephone conversations to find out which word is the most frequently used. You have guessed it: it is the personal pronoun “I.” “I.” “I.” It was used 3,900 times in 500 telephone conversations. “I.” “I.” “I.” “I.” When you see a group photograph that you are in, whose picture do you look for first?

“It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.”

You have to be interested in people if you want to be a successful writer of stories.

Howard Thurston was the acknowledged dean of magicians. he had two things that the others didn’t have. First, he had the ability to put his personality across the footlights. He was a master showman. He knew human nature. Everything he did, every gesture, every intonation of his voice, every lifting of an eyebrow had been carefully rehearsed in advance, and his actions were timed to split seconds. But, in addition to that, Thurston had a genuine interest in people. He told me that many magicians would look at the audience and say to themselves, “Well, there is a bunch of suckers out there, a bunch of hicks; I’ll fool them all right.” But Thurston’s method was totally different. He told me that every time he went on stage he said to himself, “I am grateful because these people come to see me. They make it possible for me to make my living in a very agreeable way. I’m going to give them the very best I possibly can.”

When we heard Uncle George, he was seventy-two and enjoying every minute of his life. By having a sustained interest in other people, he created a new life for himself at a time when most people consider their productive years over.

Roosevelt called at the White House one day when the President and Mrs. Taft were away. His honest liking for humble people was shown by the fact that he greeted all the old White House servants by name, even the scullery maids.

To be genuinely interested in other people is a most important quality for a sales-person to possess—for any person, for that matter.

I have discovered from personal experience that one can win the attention and time and cooperation of even the most sought-after people by becoming genuinely interested in them.

All of us, be we workers in a factory, clerks in an office or even a king upon his throne—all of us like people who admire us.

If we want to make friends, let’s put ourselves out to do things for other people—things that require time, energy, unselfishness and thoughtfulness.

When the Duke of Windsor was Prince of Wales, he was scheduled to tour South America, and before he started out on that tour he spent months studying Spanish so that he could make public talks in the language of the country; and the South Americans loved him for it.

For years I made it a point to find out the birthdays of my friends. When the natal day arrived, there was my letter or telegram. What a hit it made! I was frequently the only person on earth who remembered.

If we want to make friends, let’s greet people with animation and enthusiasm. When somebody calls you on the telephone use the same psychology. Say “Hello” in tones that bespeak how pleased YOU are to have the person call. Many companies train their telephone operators to greet all callers in a tone of voice that radiates interest and enthusiasm. The caller feels the company is concerned about them. Let’s remember that when we answer the telephone tomorrow.

Showing a genuine interest in others not only wins friends for you, but may develop in its customers a loyalty to your company.

I had made more headway in two hours by becoming genuinely interested in him and his problems than I could have made in ten years trying to get him interested in me and my product.

A show of interest, as with every other principle of human relations, must be sincere. It must pay off not only for the person showing the interest, but for the person receiving the attention.

If you want others to like you, if you want to develop real friendships, if you want to help others at the same time as you help yourself, keep this principle in mind:

PRINCIPLE 1:  Become genuinely interested in other people.

How To Win Friends & Influence People :HE WHO CAN DO THIS HAS THE WHOLE WORLD WITH HIM.

How To Win Friends & Influence People is a book authored by Dale Carnegie. This blog provides the book summary and encourage to read it.

Chapter 3: HE WHO CAN DO THIS HAS THE WHOLE WORLD WITH HIM. HE WHO CANNOT WALKS A LONELY WAY.

I often went fishing up in Maine during the summer. Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn't think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn't bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or a grasshopper in front of the fish and said, “ Wouldn't you like to have that?”

Why not use the same common sense when fishing for people?


Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course, you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want.
So the only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.


Remember that tomorrow when you are trying to get somebody to do something. If, for example, you don’t want your children to smoke, don’t preach at them, and don’t talk about what you want; but show them that cigarettes may keep them from making the basketball team or winning the hundred-yard dash.

Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.

“Action springs out of what we fundamentally desire, and the best piece of advice which can be given to would-be persuaders, whether in business, in the home, in the school, in politics, is: First, arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.”

Andrew Carnegie, the poverty-stricken Scotch lad who started to work at two cents an hour and finally gave away $365 million, learned early in life that the only way to influence people is to talk in terms of what the other person wants. He attended school only four years; yet he learned how to handle people

Tomorrow you may want to persuade somebody to do something. Before you speak, pause and ask yourself: “How can I make this person want to do it?”. That question will stop us from rushing into a situation heedlessly, with futile chatter about our desires.

“If there is any one secret of success,” said Henry Ford, “it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”

The rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage. He has little competition.

“People who can put themselves in the place of other people who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for them.”

If out of reading this book you get just one thing—an increased tendency to think always in terms of other people’s point of view, and see things from their angle—if you get that one thing out of this book, it may easily prove to be one of the building blocks of your career.

Looking at the other person’s point of view and arousing in him an eager want for something is not to be construed as manipulating that person so that he will do something that is only for your benefit and his detriment. Each party should gain from the negotiation.


PRINCIPLE 3:   Arouse in the other person an eager want.

How To Win Friends & Influence People : THE BIG SECRET OF DEALING WITH PEOPLE

How To Win Friends & Influence People is a book authored by Dale Carnegie. This blog provides the book summary and encourage to read it.

Chapter 2: THE BIG SECRET OF DEALING WITH PEOPLE.

There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes, just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it.

You can make your employees give you cooperation—until your back is turned—by threatening to fire them. You can make a child do what you want it to do by a whip or a threat. But these crude methods have sharply undesirable repercussions.

The only way I can get you to do anything is by giving you what you want.

Everything you and I do springs from two motives: the sex urge and the desire to be great.

The deepest urge in human nature is “the desire to be important".

Everybody likes a compliment.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents. You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name was Lincoln.

This desire made Rockefeller amass millions that he never spent! And this same desire made the richest family in your town build a house far too large for its requirements.

This desire makes you want to wear the latest styles, drive the latest cars, and talk about your brilliant children. It is this desire that lures many boys and girls into joining gangs and engaging in criminal activities.

If you tell me how you get your feeling of importance, I’ll tell you what you are. That determines your character.


One of the first people in American business to be paid a salary of over a million dollars a year was Charles Schwab, who had been picked by Andrew Carnegie to become the first president of the newly formed United States Steel Company in 1921, when he was only thirty-eight years old.

Why did Andrew Carnegie pay more than three thousand dollars a day, to Charles Schwab? Why? Because Schwab was a genius? No. Because he knew more about the manufacture of steel than other people? Nonsense. Charles Schwab told me himself that he had many men working for him who knew more about the manufacture of steel than he did.

Schwab says that he was paid this salary largely because of his ability to deal with people. I asked him how he did it. Here is his secret set down in his own words

“I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people, the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement."

“There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticize anyone. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise.”
That is what Schwab did.

But what do average people do? The exact opposite. If they don’t like a thing, they bawl out their subordinates; if they do like it, they say nothing. As the old couplet says: “Once I did bad and that I heard ever/Twice I did good, but that I heard never.”

Carnegie wanted to praise his assistants even on his tombstone. He wrote an epitaph for himself which read: “Here lies one who knew how to get around him men who were cleverer than himself.”

When a study was made a few years ago on runaway wives, what do you think was discovered to be the main reason wives ran away? It was “lack of appreciation”. And I’d bet that a similar study made of runaway husbands would come out the same way. We often take our spouses so much for granted that we never let them know we appreciate them.

The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned.

Don’t be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.

Flattery is telling the other person precisely what he thinks about himself.One of the most neglected virtues of our daily existence is appreciation, Somehow, we neglect to praise our son or daughter when he or she brings home a good report card, and we fail to encourage our children when they first succeed in baking a cake or building a birdhouse.

Nothing pleases children more than this kind of parental interest and approval.

The next time you enjoy filet mignon at the club, send word to the chef that it was excellently prepared, and when a tired salesperson shows you unusual courtesy, please mention it

Hurting people not only does not change them, it is never called for.

Emerson said: “Every man I meet is my superior in some way, In that, I learn of him.”

Let’s try to figure out the other person’s good points. Then forget flattery. Give honest, sincere appreciation. Be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise,” and people will cherish your words and treasure them and repeat them over a lifetime—repeat them years after you have forgotten them.


PRINCIPLE 2: Give honest and sincere appreciation.

FATHER FORGETS - By W. Livingston Larned

Listen, son: I am saying this as you lie asleep, one little paw crumpled under your cheek and the blond curls stickily wet on your damp forehead. I have stolen into your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside.

There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor.

At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table. You spread butter too thick on your bread. And as you started off to play and I made for my train, you turned and waved a hand and called, “Goodbye, Daddy!” and I frowned, and said in reply, “Hold your shoulders back!”

Then it began all over again in the late afternoon. As I came up the road I spied you, down on your knees, playing marbles. There were holes in your stockings. I humiliated you before your boyfriends by marching you ahead of me to the house. Stockings were expensive, and if you had to buy them you would be more careful! Imagine that, son, from a father!

Do you remember, later, when I was reading in the library, how you came in timidly, with a sort of hurt look in your eyes? When I glanced up over my paper, impatient at the interruption, you hesitated at the door. “What is it you want?” I snapped.

You said nothing, but ran across in one tempestuous plunge, and threw your arms around my neck and kissed me, and your small arms tightened with an affection that God had set blooming in your heart and which even neglect could not wither. And then you were gone, pattering up the stairs.

Well, son, it was shortly afterwards that my paper slipped from my hands and a terrible sickening fear came over me. What has habit been doing to me? The habit of finding fault, of reprimanding—this was my reward to you for being a boy. It was not that I did not love you; it was that I expected too much of youth. I was measuring you by the yardstick of my own years.

And there was so much that was good and fine and true in your character. The little heart of you was as big as the dawn itself over the wide hills. This was shown by your spontaneous impulse to rush in and kiss me goodnight. Nothing else matters tonight, son. I have come to your bedside in the darkness, and I have knelt there, ashamed!

It is a feeble atonement; I know you would not understand these things if I told them to you during your waking hours. But tomorrow I will be a real daddy! I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: “He is nothing but a boy—a little boy!”

I am afraid I have visualized you as a man. Yet as I see you now, son, crumpled and weary in your cot, I see that you are still a baby. Yesterday you were in your mother’s arms, your head on her shoulder. I have asked too much, too much.

How To Win Friends & Influence People : IF YOU WANT TO GATHER HONEY, DON’T KICK OVER THE BEEHIVE.

How To Win Friends & Influence People is a book authored by Dale Carnegie. This blog provides the book summary and encourage to read it.

Chapter 1: IF YOU WANT TO GATHER HONEY, DON’T KICK OVER THE BEEHIVE.

John Wanamaker, founder of the stores that bear his name, once confessed, “I learned thirty years ago that it is foolish to scold. I have enough trouble overcoming my own limitations without fretting over the fact that God has not seen fit to distribute evenly the gift of intelligence.”

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don’t criticize themselves for anything, no matter how wrong it may be.

Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.

B. F. Skinner, the world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behavior will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behavior. Later studies have shown that the same applies to humans. By criticizing, we do not make lasting changes and often incur resentment.

Hans Selye, another great psychologist, said, “As much as we thirst for approval, we dread condemnation.”

The resentment that criticism engenders can demoralize employees, family members and friends, and still not correct the situation that has been condemned.

Human nature in action, wrongdoers, blaming everybody but themselves.


Let’s realize that criticisms are like homing pigeons. They always return home. Let’s realize that the person we are going to correct and condemn will probably justify himself or herself, and condemn us in return.

And when Mrs. Lincoln and others spoke harshly of the southern people, Lincoln replied, “Don’t criticize them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.”

Theodore Roosevelt said that when he, as President, was confronted with a perplexing problem, he used to lean back and look up at a large painting of Lincoln which hung above his desk in the White House and ask himself, “What would Lincoln do if he were in my shoes? How would he solve this problem?”

The next time we are tempted to admonish somebody, let’s pull a five-dollar bill out of our pocket, look at Lincoln’s picture on the bill, and ask. “How would Lincoln handle this problem if he had it?”

“Don’t complain about the snow on your neighbor’s roof,” said Confucius, “when your own doorstep is unclean.”

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

Benjamin Franklin, tactless in his youth, became so diplomatic, so adroit at handling people, that he was made American Ambassador to France. The secret of his success? “I will speak ill of no man,” he said, "and speak all the good I know of everybody.”

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain, and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving

“A great man shows his greatness,” said Carlyle, “by the way he treats little men.”

Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism, and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. “To know all is to forgive all.”

As Dr. Johnson said, “God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days.”

Why should you and I?


PRINCIPLE 1:   Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.