How to Learn Anything... Fast [ RSA Talk : Josh Kaufman ]

Visual book review: The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast (Josh Kaufman) – The idea of learning a new skill can be overwhelming. If you break the skill down into specific things you can learn, it becomes much more manageable. Tim Ferris used this to hack cooking (video) by dissociating it from shopping for groceries or cleaning up. Josh Kaufman’s new book The First 20 Hours fleshes out how to rapidly learn, illustrating it with stories, examples, and practical tips for a wide range of skills. A key insight? Feel free to share this visual book review! The biggest new thing that I don’t yet intrinsically enjoy is strength training, which (as the name indicates) is probably more about training – my body has to adapt to it, and that takes time. So, let’s pick another skill. Creating animated videos (and not cheesy fake-written ones, either)Programming speech recognition macros (NatLink)Visualizing data with D3.js or other visualization libraries Of the three, I think visualizing data with D3.js will be the most fun for me.

Bruce Lee’s Never Before Revealed Letters to Himself About Authenticity, Personal Development, and the Measure of Success “This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?” So wrote young Leo Tolstoy in his diary of moral development. Bruce Lee (November 27, 1940–July 20, 1973) was around Tolstoy’s age when he turned to this central question of existence more than a century later and approached it with the same subtleness of insight and sincerity of spirit with which he approached all of life. Revered by generations as the greatest martial artist in popular culture, Lee is increasingly being recognized as the unheralded philosopher that he was, from his famous metaphor for resilience to his recently revealed unpublished writings on willpower, imagination, and confidence. But his most intently philosophical work was the personal credo statement he wrote in the final year of his life, at the age of thirty-one, as a series of letters to himself under the heading “In My Own Process.” The timing of “In My Own Process” is also significant, for Lee began writing it at a pivotal point in his life.

The Ultimate Guide to Learning Anything Faster “If only I learned about investing when I was still in my early twenties…” If only. For many of us, there are more things we want to learn than we have time for. And as information becomes more readily accessible online, the number of things we want to learn has only increased. That means that the only variable we can actually control is the time we spend learning them. Related: 6 Practical Steps to Learning How to Build a Startup Shortening the learning curve is a topic that’s been studied for many years, and this guide will cover the fundamental core principles of learning faster. So, here are those principles: 1. Why reinvent a wheel that’s already been created? Think back to a time when you first learned how to speak a new language or obtain a new skill. In order to achieve mastery faster, our first step should be to consult the top players in the field, and model the path they have already carved out for us. 2. Related: Here Are 3 Unorthodox Techniques for Learning Leadership Skill 3.

Global Warming and Violent Behavior – Association for Psychological Science – APS Environmental scientists from multiple disciplines have overwhelmingly acknowledged human-driven climate change as fact. Similarly indisputable is the fact that the effects of rising temperatures will be global in scope and resoundingly negative: droughts, coastal city flooding, decreased food production, and extreme weather, to name just a few. What you may not have considered, however, are some of the subtler psychological and social consequences of rapid climate change — including aggression and violent conflict. A growing body of evidence shows that rapid global warming can (and is) increasing violent behavior in three different ways. When people get uncomfortably hot, their tempers, irritability, and likelihood of physical aggression and violence increase. This is perhaps best demonstrated in a series of laboratory studies conducted by APS Fellow Craig A. Although laboratory forms of aggression may seem trivial, other studies illustrate the deadly implications of these findings.

Debunking the Myth of the 10,000-Hours Rule: What It Actually Takes to Reach Genius-Level Excellence by Maria Popova How top-down attention, feedback loops, and daydreaming play into the science of success. The question of what it takes to excel — to reach genius-level acumen at a chosen endeavor — has occupied psychologists for decades and philosophers for centuries. Groundbreaking research has pointed to “grit” as a better predictor of success than IQ, while psychologists have admonished against the dangers of slipping into autopilot in the quest for skill improvement. In recent years, one of the most persistent pop-psychology claims has been the myth of the “10,000-hour rule” — the idea that this is the amount of time one must invest in practice in order to reach meaningful success in any field. The “10,000-hour rule” — that this level of practice holds the secret to great success in any field — has become sacrosanct gospel, echoed on websites and recited as litany in high-performance workshops. Illustration by Vladimir Radunsky from Mark Twain's 'Advice to Little Girls.'