In the month of April 2019, I read the following articles.
1. The questions that matter: This is written by Tim Hanson in the medium.com. He says that ‘the probability that you learn something from the answer’ depends on the ‘Nature of question’. The highest probability of learning is by asking basic questions. As you go forward on the continuum of ‘Detailed’, ‘Complicated’ and ‘Nitpicky’, you learn lesser and lesser from the answers. Basic questions are simple one liners. He gives example of a 15 year old Bank of America shareholder asking the question ‘What are you doing to increase the share price?’. This is as simple a question as it can get.
People are afraid of asking basic questions. They fear that they will be judged as stupid questions. There are some stupid simple questions like ‘Don’t you think’ questions where you want the respondent to give the answers you want to hear, ‘Gotcha’ questions, leading questions…
Great questions are open ended, short and precise. Some of the short questions that Hanson asks are ‘How is the business?’, ‘Can you expand on that’, ‘Why’, ‘Is my understanding correct’ etc. We learn more by asking basic questions. They are meant to elicit information.
People are afraid of asking basic questions. They fear that they will be judged as stupid questions. There are some stupid simple questions like ‘Don’t you think’ questions where you want the respondent to give the answers you want to hear, ‘Gotcha’ questions, leading questions…
Great questions are open ended, short and precise. Some of the short questions that Hanson asks are ‘How is the business?’, ‘Can you expand on that’, ‘Why’, ‘Is my understanding correct’ etc. We learn more by asking basic questions. They are meant to elicit information.
2. Smart guide to procrastination: This is written by Zaria Gorvett for BBC Capital. The key concept in this article is ‘Unscheduling’. Instead of scheduling tasks you HAVE to do, you schedule tasks you WANT to do. A model unschedule will never contain words like ‘Write book’, ‘finish Presentation’ etc.
In unscheduling you schedule tasks you enjoy doing and fill the remaining available ti with routine tasks. Do not schedule any work tasks at all. The premise is that since you have scheduled time for enjoyment you will somehow finish your boring / work tasks quickly so that you can ‘go out and play’. Unschedule gives you a week that you can look forward to. Since the time for leisure is clearly scheduled, you become aware how much time you have for work.
I think that premise is a stretch.
Having ‘unscheduled, how do you get work done?
Instead of getting intimidated by huge work, it is better to slice it down to small chunks of 15-20 minutes each. That way you will make progress in your tasks and will encourage you further to continue on the task. It is all about making a start.
Another suggestion is to change the language you use to describe work. Rather than saying ‘I must’ or ‘I have to’, try saying ‘I choose to’. This reframes that tasks as something positive, an idea that ties in with what Adam Grant mentioned in the article that I reviewed a few days ago.
The three key ideas in the article are Unschedule, Reframe task description and uses short 15-20 minutes burst of work.
3. How to improve your memory (even if you can’t find the car keys): The article is written by Adam Grant for NY times. He starts off with aa study on bartenders. They found that great bartenders had incredible memory. One lady named Janice could remember the names and favourite drinks of over 3000 customers!
Grant suggests three approaches to improve the memory and increase retention. The first approach is not to do anything immediately after you learn anything new. These ten minutes of calm and blank mind will help consolidate the learning. This approach was found to have increased retention in normal people from 10 to 30% and in neurologically damaged people from 7 to 70%.
Grant says that making notes and highlighting passages are passive approaches and will not improve retention. Instead of doing that grant suggests to question (quiz) yourself of the content that you just learned. This quizzing is an active approach that will aid the retention.
During my school days I used to do this all the time. As soon as I finished studying something, I will imagine that I was the person setting the question paper and try to identify the questions that I would ask, if I were to set the question paper. It was incredibly effective.
(Another approach I used was to sing what I learnt. I will convert prose to songs. I remember that I could sing my entire class 12 chemistry text book)
The third approach that Grant suggests is to teach someone wheat you just learned. Teaching clarifies the concepts in the mind and aid retention.
4. Old school writing tools that will boost your creativity, concentration and speed: This article is written by Ephrat Livni for Quartz Magazine. This is a short article that discusses the benefits of writing long hand on the paper or typing using an old type of typewriter before transferring to the computer. The biggest drawback of using a computer to writer you first draft is that you will be writing and editing at the same time. This interferes with thou flow of thoughts and interrupts the buildup of your story. Many famous writers including J K Rowling write their first draft of theri books on a paper before transferring the same to the computer.
Another drawback of typing in a computer it allows you to modify your story as it is evolving. It does not allow you to explore your story idea to the fullest.
Writing by hand allows writer to write in a linear fashion allowing them to know precisely where the story is going.
The advantage of long hand writing are:
- It improves thinking
- Writing words lead to increased cognitive activity
- Writing improves long-term information retention, better though organization and increased ability to generate ideas.
5. An Astrophysicist Who Maps the Universe’s Terra Incognita: I also read an interview with an Indian scientist Priyamvada Natarajan for Quanta Magazine. She is an Astrophysicist researching on the outer dimensions of the universe into ideas like black holes, quasars etc. For me the most fascinating part was her evolution. Both her parents are academics and at the age of 15 she got her computer. She was fascinated by space and Astrophysics at that young age. She met the head of Nehru Planetarium in Delhi and explained here interest in space. She was asked to writer a computer program, the details are not important for his article. She worked hard for six months and created a program that can analyze any part of the earthy by entering latitude and longitude.
She has not looked back since.
Ten years ago she wrote a book predicting some factors about black holes which were later shown to be correct. With the first ever picture of a black hole being released now, her life story acquires new significance.
She was an accepted member of Indian scientific community at the age of fifteen.
Throughout her life, she has allowed her intellect to guide her decision making. It has acted as her beacon, her guiding light in her life journey.
That article made me wonder. Why do many intelligent people work well below their potential? The reason is while we have intellect, we don’t know how to use it. An intellect should have a worthy goal to pursue. Priyamvada was set on being an astrophysicist from the age of 15. But many of us?
One day we want to be writers, another day we want to start our company, third day we want to get a salaried job. Our intellect do not have a goal to focus on. It doesn’t get up in the morning with a clarity of purpose.
All of us have this pent up intellectual energy that we release through instant gratification. We use our intellect in an ad hoc and shoddy manner.
You have to backup your your intellect with worthy goals and dreams. That catalyzes the intellect. I am sure that all of us reading this post will have a list of worthy goals that we want to pursue 'when we have time'. That time is now. Ideally we should be getting up every morning raring to go. We don't do that.
Priyamvada would have !
Not having goals to focus on is one reason why we do not make full use of our intellect. Another reason is that we allow peripheral and irrelevant issues to cloud our intellect. So we devote much of our time on fruitless thoughts and emotions and regrets that we do not have any control on. Instead of being a focused acetylene torch that can cut through metal, our intellect becomes like a wild forest fire that destroy everything in its wake, our future, career, relationships and friendships finally subsiding on its own, having spent so much of energy and having only general destruction to show for.
It is not that we don’t know the problem. It is not that we don’t know what to do. It is that we are just procrastinating. We don’t want to commit energy and time towards worthy goals. We are content to get up in the morning and let time slip by.
Most of us are plain lazy, both physically and intellectually. We may use fancy terms like 'I am waiting to find my passion', but that is the simple fact. Due to the former we are hardly doing anything and due to the latter we are hardly creating excellence. Even when we do an intellectual work, we are ok to do a shoddy work.
Every work of ours should be a masterpiece. But they are not. We are just ‘75 percenters’, comfortable doing a 75% quality work.
What the story of Priyamvada tells you is that it is not just enough to be intellectual, you have to convert your time and thoughts and efforts to your intellectual goals
The solution is simple. You should know what you want and should have a dogged persistence till
you complete whatever you have to do. We need to have the self discipline to focus on the intellectual effort. Creating intellectual content needs effort, lots of effort.
That is how greatness is made.
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