Tricking your brain to learn more

Mark Rober suggests we focus learning on the success, and ignore failures. Like a toddler learning to walk, who doesn’t remember the falls, and only focuses on the steady progression toward walking. Since I’m a mountain climber, his diagram reminds me about the camps we establish on mountains. The concept is the same.

Unattributed, and not mine.

Mark did a TEDx talk at my alma mater.

What skills and traits it takes to be James Bond 007

Sean Connery holding pistol as James Bond

James Bond is an MI6 British secret agent codenamed 007 portrayed in books and film. There wasn’t a reasonable skillset list for him online. So I assembled a list of James Bond skills. Turns out, 007 has many skills.

A list of skills and abilities held by James Bond 007:

Did I miss one? Please write me and I’ll add it.

Dropping a falcon feather and hammer on the moon

On the moon in 1971, Commander David Scott dropped a hammer and a falcon feather to validate Galileo’s theory that without air resistance, objects fall at the same rate due to gravity regardless of mass. Given the negligible lunar atmosphere, there was no drag on the feather, both experienced the same acceleration, and both hit the ground at the same time. NASA did this because they wanted a memorable popular science experiment to do on the Moon, for kids. Very cool to watch.

The Feynman Technique

The Feynman Technique is the best way to learn anything quickly. Devised by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, it uses the power of teaching for better learning.

There are four steps to the Feynman Learning Technique:

  1. Pretend to teach a concept you want to learn about to a student in the sixth grade.
  2. Identify gaps in your explanation. Go back to the source material to better understand it.
  3. Organize and simplify.
  4. Transmit (optional).