There’s a certain kind of learning mode that I think of as not only really effective, but super fun. When it comes to pure knowledge absorption, I don’t think you can beat it. I love going into this “learner mode” but I seldom see other people really detail their process for doing the same, if they do at all.

Information is different than knowledge. Most people actively learn for information. If something goes wrong with your car and you want to figure out how to fix it yourself, you target your search very directly. You look up that exact problem and how to fix it. Along the way you’ll certainly pick up a few other tidbits, but people frequently forget those if they don’t actively use them very soon after.

A lot of the learning we’re exposed to, especially early in our lives, is rote memorization. We don’t really learn how to process and store information for long-term application. What’s funny is that in the very very early stages, we do! We learn to read and do math not by memorizing specific books or equations, but by learning the tools. Once you know how to read, you can read anything. That’s a good outcome for learning. And that method can be duplicated, but we don’t!

When you’re learning to read, you can do that learning with anything. In fact, that’s best! Just pick up book after book and don’t worry about the subject matter or specific targeted vocabulary words, just read and read and read. That’s the deep end, as elemental as it might seem.

The best way to learn for knowledge, is to ignore information entirely.

Sometimes I will pick a topic (often it will pick me) and I’ll just go. I have no agenda. I have no specific problem I’m trying to learn to solve. I’m not taking notes or worrying about retaining any particular pieces of trivia. I’m just letting the waves crash over me.

I’ll read articles and books and scientific papers on the topic, not understanding more than 10% of it when I begin. Doesn’t matter, I’ll keep reading. Not letting the frustration of ignorance take hold is key, but this is a lot easier when you aren’t learning for a grade, or because you have a deadline, or a project.

A few years ago I became really enamored with the idea of complex math. I’m not a mathematician – I think 10th grade geometry was the last serious look I had given it. And that was why I was interested! So I looked up famous mathematicians who were working on awesome stuff and had published books, and I bought them. They were astronomically above my level, but who cares? No one knew I was learning it, no one was grading me. I just absorbed.

I’m still not a brilliant mathematician, but I know a ton more about set theory and concepts of infinity and even the landscape of current mathematical thought than I did before. It was fun!

The brain is a wonderful sponge, but we usually apply learning to it with an eye dropper. Just throw it in the river and see what happens! When you pick the sponge up a huge amount of knowledge will just run out, but what you retain will be tremendous – and fun.

Every time an unexpected problem, hardship or dilemma arrives, a race begins. The starting gun fires, and you’re now in a race against your own negative reaction.

All the bad emotions, the panic response, the anger, the fear – they all coalesce into an entity that takes off like a shot. The finish line is the machine that controls your actions, and that entity is trying to get there before you do.

That entity is fast.

People lose this race all the time. On the outside, other people see you reacting poorly, lashing out, yelling, or making foolish decisions. Then, usually a few hours to a few days later, you “catch up” to the finish line and take over the controls, but you often then have to do a lot of damage control. Apologies abound, sheepish admissions of overreacting, etc. It’s not the absolute end of the world, but it’s not great. And if you lose that race a lot, you’ll find your credibility – both professionally and personally – eroding along with your social capital.

So how do you win the race? Here are three strategies:

1. Train to be faster. Getting better at getting to the “controls” faster is often a matter of “planning your route.” It means deciding what you would want your reactions to be in a stressful situation, and making them the default. Practice them even if there’s no emergency so you know how to do it when there is. If you want your reaction to be to write in a stress journal instead of yelling at people, then write in that journal on a regular basis, especially when you have very small stresses, so that you know the way. That’s the equivalent of an athlete training to sprint faster.
2. Hamstring your opponent. Not very ethical in a real race, but this is an opponent you can feel good about disrupting. What feeds the Negative Entity? Loud noises? Alcohol? Social media? Take those things away. Make a list of things that empower the Negative Entity and make sure that when the emergency arises you block access to them. If a certain person in your life always fans the flames of stress and panic, don’t talk to that person in an emergency. Don’t give the Negative Entity the best running shoes. Instead, trip them.
3. Start the race early. Like I said, no sportsmanship necessary here – if you can leave before the starting gun, you have a better chance of arriving at the finish line early, too. That means giving some thought to the kinds of emergencies that might happen and mentally preparing for them. If you’re starting your own business, it might fail. Give that some thought and decide in advance how you’d like to feel. Recognize that the Negative Entity will try to make you react poorly, but the Negative Entity is nothing if not predictable. If you say “If my business fails, I’ll feel angry. That anger will make me want to blame my spouse, but that won’t be correct. So I’ll recognize that and immediately go to my very calm friend’s house and let them talk me down for a while, eat dinner, then come home and hug my spouse for supporting me.” If the business does go under, you’ve got a reaction already pre-planned. You’re already at the finish line.

These aren’t perfect or flawless strategies. The Negative Entity is predictable, but it’s also strong and fast. Sometimes it gets the better of you. But the more races against it you can win, the better your life will be overall, so it’s absolutely worth trying.

Before I had kids, I used to lament the various subjects that I felt should be taught in schools, but aren’t. Now that I have kids, I don’t lament – I just figure out how I’ll teach those things myself.

I’ve thought of an exercise I’m going to start doing with my kids (for now, only my oldest can read, but they’ll all eventually do it) in order to teach them a few things about the importance of skepticism.

Here’s the exercise. I’ll write out three paragraphs, one on each of three different topics. Two of them will contain true information about say, the weight of certain metals or the life cycle of a kind of frog or whatever. One will be total made-up hogwash, but I’ll make it sound as good as the other two. I won’t use information that is obviously untrue; it will be stuff that you’d have to actually know about to disprove. (A good start for examples would be the List of Common Misconceptions.)

Then, I’ll tell her that one of the paragraphs is baloney, and she has to independently figure out which. When she thinks she knows, I’ll make her put $1 to $5 of her own money on her guess (her choice) as a bet with 50/50 odds. If she’s right, she’ll get paid. If she’s wrong, she’ll lose out.

One of the best ways to be a good critical thinker is to bet on your thinking. I want my kids to be able to someday say “Daddy didn’t raise no sucker,” and so I want to set them down the path early of recognizing that not all information presented to them will necessarily be true, and that being able to discover which is which can be a vital skill for independence.

I can’t wait to see how she does!

When I was in middle school, one day we were learning about bees and I expressed amazement at how bees could know how to make honeycomb in the shape of perfect little hexagons like that. A hexagon seemed like a pretty complex shape for a bug to know how to make, as far as I was concerned.

My teacher laughed and took out a stack of cardboard tubes (the kind from inside paper towel rolls) for just this demonstration. Bees don’t make hexagons, you see. They just make circles. But if you stack a bunch of circles on top of each other and apply pressure, they shape each other into hexagons.

It’s amazing how all of the things in a group can affect each other and change the shape of the pattern. You think you’re just making circles and then bam, you step back and you’ve got a bunch of hexagons. Or you think you’re learning a bunch of neat trivia about baseball and then bam, you’re a professional sportscaster. Or you think you’re just collecting a bunch of junk in the woods behind your house and then bam, you’ve got one of the best World War II museums in all of Italy.

(That’s a real one – I have a friend in Italy who grew up collecting odds and ends that he would find in the mountains near his home, until his mom made him rent a separate space to keep them in because, you know, she didn’t want un-detonated grenades in her house. So he put them in a warehouse and then people wanted to pay him to look at the stuff and now he has a museum.)

While you’re collecting your individual things, whether they be pieces of knowledge or people you know in an industry or tools or whatever, every once in a while step back and see how they might be changing the shape of one another into something even more interesting. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Sometimes when you have a task in front of you that you don’t really want to do, you put it off by watching TV, playing video games, taking a walk, or some other leisure activity. You get lazy and you procrastinate.

But sometimes people do what I like to call “positive procrastination,” where they avoid the task at hand by doing something else valuable. They don’t want to draft that report, so they clean their home. They don’t want to fix the front door, so they clear out work emails. The guilt competes with the laziness, and you justify putting off the main task by saying that at least you’re doing something.

Here’s the thing – I love this!

There are a few reasons I love this. First, when you have more than one thing to do, doing literally anything is good. It’s all got to get done eventually, so at least you’re making progress instead of wasting time.

But perhaps more importantly, there’s a second reason I love this: positive procrastination can be very directional for us. If you’re constantly avoiding a certain task by engaging in a different one, then the chances are very high that you would be much happier if you restructured your life around the task you want to do.

If every time you should be working on a new logo design you instead go tune your car’s engine, then maybe you should consider switching from a graphic designer to a mechanic. Listen to your brain!

A long time ago, I was sitting in the lobby of a company, waiting for my interview there. A man younger than I was, early 20’s at the oldest, was also there waiting for a different person to interview him for a different position within the company.

He looked like he was about to pass out from stress and nervousness, so I chatted with him a little. He was a good lad, but he was woefully unprepared for the interview. He wasn’t wearing appropriate interview clothes, he hadn’t brought anything like a notebook or copies of his resume, etc. The thing was, none of this seemed due to lack of care – just lack of knowledge.

He was called into his interview and it was over so quickly I was still in the lobby (as was my habit, I was pretty early for my interview) when he came out. The outcome was clear, and he dejectedly called who I overheard to be his grandmother to pick him up. He then sat to wait, and I chatted with him again.

I tried to offer some words of both support and encouragement, but mostly what I did was listen. In times of pain some people get very open, and this young man was one such. He told me he’d been striking out a lot on the job front, and while he really appreciated my advice, he also just felt even more lost. He said there was so much he didn’t know. Neither of his parents were in the picture; he was raised by his grandmother, who was already a widow when she took him in at a young age and had grown up in an era where she didn’t work a full time job at any point in her life. As a result, he didn’t grow up around any role models that had jobs, let alone went on interviews.

He was a good guy, but he had no pattern to emulate.

Learning by instruction works a little. Learning by experience works a little better, in my opinion. But both are absolutely dwarfed by how most of us learn most things – by observation. We are blank slates, and from the second our eyes open the world pours information into them. The moments of your life that contain deliberate instruction by well-meaning and intelligent mentors will be the tiniest fraction of the overall time your sponge-like brain is absorbing the sequences of the world around you.

A really fantastic manager once told me, “Your people will have 80% of your good habits, 120% of your bad habits, and retain roughly 5% of what you actually tell them. You have to just always be the kind of person you want to employ.”

It’s true with my kids, too. I often tell my oldest: “You’re always going to have it a little different than your younger brother and sister. You’ll get more freedoms earlier, you’ll get to set a lot of the rules, you’ll get to be the commanding officer a lot of the time. But you also have more responsibility, because they idolize you, and they will emulate you. You have to be a good person, because you’re being good or bad for three people.”

Of course, that lesson applies to me even more.

And there’s the heart of the lesson – “be the change you want to see in the world” is really fantastic advice, because in conducting your affairs according to honor and principle you do more to teach others than you ever will by instruction. I’m reminded of the time earlier this year when I saw a man show kindness and support to a young child he didn’t know, and even though that man had no intention of teaching anyone anything, what he really did was scream at the top of his lungs “be kind, be kind, be kind.”

Live well, and live out loud. Be kind, be good. Show the evils and despairs of the world that they are no match for honor and principle. If someone else isn’t living that way, don’t admonish them – just live your life even better, even harder, even louder. Drown out the bad in a chorus of excellence.

They will see. And they will do.

Holy cow, 500 posts on this blog.

Somewhere around post number 200, I started to worry that I’d run out of things to talk about at some point. But now I’ve realized that I probably never will.

The blog itself generates ideas. Every time I write, in order to stay focused on a topic I end up cutting ideas – they become new posts, and the cycle repeats.

People interact with the blog and give me new ideas. The more ideas, the more readers, and the more readers, the more ideas.

The blog changes my focus – I look for ideas more diligently than I have before. I’m more aware of the flow of my life.

If you read any of those 500 posts, thank you. I hope you gained some value. Here’s to five thousand more.

Here’s the idea: a think-tank dedicated to looking back at major decisions, moral panics, and policy choices that affect society years after the fact.

In my head, they would cover a few different things: major federal policy decisions, “trending” news stories with a lot of panic attached (remember “kids eating Tide Pods?”), and big industry predictions, specifically around the idea of corporate influence (remember the Microsoft anti-trust case?).

In all instances, the Institute would collect data, interview primary sources, and chronicle predictions. As much as possible, they’d get people to commit to a specific prediction or admit they didn’t have one. And over time, they’d circle back to each prediction and compare it to how things actually shake out.

I would also imagine a great project of the Institute could be a betting market for such predictions. Nothing holds people to making concrete claims like putting money on them!

Over time, the goal of the institute would be to illustrate several things:

1. Most people are full of baloney.
2. Conviction regarding a claim has zero correlation to ability to predict accurately.
3. Most things don’t turn out as bad as you think they will – the future is generally better than the present.
4. Multiple claims about the future from a single source are more likely to follow a pattern related to that source’s views about the present, rather than their ability to forecast accurately. (Shocking!)

The problem isn’t just that most people can’t predict the future. The problem is that most people aren’t trying – they’re using “predictions” about the future to push a present agenda – and won’t be held accountable for mistakes. Bad news headlines run on the first page – the retraction runs on page 16 three weeks later and no one reads it. No one ever lost a re-election because they didn’t fulfill the promises from their first election. Laws don’t get repealed just because they didn’t do anything close to what it was promised they would do.

I think it would be neat to have a central location to point this stuff out, categorize who actually is good at predictions (hence the Superforecasting-style betting market), and chronicle just how little you should put stock in promises about the future.

Would it help? How should I know – I can’t predict the future, either.

I believe in long-term note-taking. I think that there are certain kinds of notes that you should always have, and that a habit of logging your thoughts on a regular basis, in an organized way, is essential to personal progress.

Integrating organized note-taking into your daily life (and not just as something you do in response to specific and temporary situations) is the only way you can engage in certain kinds of development that I think are extremely healthy.

One of the development projects that’s only possible if you take notes in this way is The Great Big Lists of Stuff You Like and Stuff You Don’t Like.

All the time, you are presented with ideas. Almost instinctively, you embrace or reject them. These ideas can be small – a suggestion for a movie to watch – or very large, like the opportunity to move to a new city.

Whether you make your decision in an instant or you deliberate for a long time, you almost certainly embrace or reject the whole of the idea. But that misses a vital opportunity for self-development and learning.

You see, these aren’t really ideas or concepts you’re encountering, but bundles. Within those bundles are many discrete elements, and you’ll like some and dislike others. But you usually won’t think about it in that way – you’ll just accept or reject the whole thing.

Want an example? Someone suggests a movie to you. Based on what you’ve heard about it, you say “meh, no thanks.” You probably never give it another thought unless the other person is trying hard to convince you.

But let’s say you really wanted to examine your decision. You took out each discrete element of the movie, from its plot, to its genre, to the individual actors & actresses, to the writing team, to the studio… you get the idea. Make two lists – one of the discrete elements you like, and one of the discrete elements you didn’t.

This doesn’t have to change your decision! In most cases, it won’t. But what it does, is examines the decision. Imagine you did this for every movie that was suggested to you. After twenty suggestions (regardless of whether you said yes or no), you look at each list. Now patterns can emerge. You notice certain performers showing up a LOT on one list or the other, or patterns of plot elements that you never realized you disliked to much – or maybe genres that you did! The end result is that now you can seek out more of what you like, because you know why you like it. And you can spot red flags more easily, because you’ve dissected your gut instinct and can articulate what you truly don’t like.

That’s just for movies! But if you keep a list like this for just ideas in your life in general, you can do the same thing. You can evaluate anything in this way, from career options to romantic interests to hobbies to investments and on and on.

There are virtually no concepts that you will love or hate 100% of. Most things are “bundled.” If you don’t want to move to Austin, that’s fine – but there are probably at least a few things you would like about Austin, and maybe a few things you wouldn’t like but you hadn’t realized exactly. Make those lists, and now you can improve your future search.

The most important thing this does for you is it breaks the pattern of just saying “yes” or “no” to things that life randomly throws at you, and starts giving you the tools to proactively seek out the things you want. Imagine that after 20 movies, you looked at the list of things you liked and Paul Rudd’s name was on that list 20 times. You hadn’t even realized it, but you loved every movie he was in and even the movies you rejected, you put his name down as one of the positive elements. Now realizing this, you can have a delightful evening by just looking up Paul Rudd movies and taking your pick!

That’s a super-simple example, but the elements of this apply to much more complex decisions. We don’t often know why we like a particular city or hate a particular career field because no one ever asked us, not even ourselves.

Get in the habit of asking yourself, and making a list of the answers. You’ll be happy with what you learn.

Here’s how it is:

Sometimes in life, bad things happen. Sometimes they’re our own fault, and sometimes a meteor hits your house, but in any case, we don’t like to accept it. So we blame others, or we get mad at “life being unfair,” etc. The best case scenario is we take responsibility and improve.

The worst case scenario is we become proud of the bad thing.

That’s the last line of psychological defense for people who can’t accept that sometimes we fail or sometimes bad things happen. We take struggles and pain and we say it was a good thing that it happened.

Looking for examples?

“I grew up poor and it made me strong, so parents shouldn’t try to provide for their kids.”

“I had to work my butt off to immigrate to this country, so I don’t want anyone else to be able to do it any easier.”

“My parents hit me and I turned out fine, so I don’t want to go soft on my kids.”

And so on.

In each case, the person suffered in some way, and now they want to inflict that suffering on a new generation of people – not because it would improve their own situation, but because it lets them pretend that what happened to them was fair and just in the first place. That suffering in that way was actually a good thing.

Do you want to live a noble life? Here is an easy way to focus your goal: find every instance you can of “cycles of struggle,” where the struggle of one person led to the struggle of the next, which led to the struggle of the next.

Break that cycle.

If you had the worst parents, be the best parent – and if you don’t want to be a parent, then be a mentor, a Big Brother/Sister, a youth leader, anything. If you grew up in poverty, then don’t try to be rich – try to make your kids rich. If you were the victim of violence, then become a force for peace, not vengeance. Help others do the same. If you meet an illiterate child with illiterate parents, teach the child to read.

Don’t be proud of cycles of struggle. Break them.