practice
Thinking in situations
Naturally, practice is not preceded but followed by theory.
Such study promotes a more lasting teaching and learning
through experience. Its aim is development of creativeness
realized in discovery and invention – the criteria of creativity,
or flexibility, being imagination and fantasy. Altogether
it promotes “thinking in situations,” a new educational concept
unfortunately little known and less cultivated, so far.Reaching 95
Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.
Note that when I say 95%-ile, I mean 95%-ile among people who participate, not all people (for many activities, just doing it at all makes you 99%-ile or above across all people). I'm also not referring to 95%-ile among people who practice regularly. The "one weird trick" is that, for a lot of activities, being something like 10%-ile among people who practice can make you something like 90%-ile or 99%-ile among people who participate.
Practice before theory
Instead of mechanically applying or merely implying laws and rules
of color harmony, distinct color effects are produced
– through recognition of the interaction of color –
by making, for instance,
2 very different colors look alike, or nearly alike.The aim of such study is to develop – through experience
– by trial and error – an eye for color.
This means, specifically, seeing color action
as well as feeling color relatedness.As a general training it means development of observation and articulation.
This book, therefore, does not follow an academic conception
of “theory and practice.”
It reverses this order and places practice before theory,
which, after all, is the conclusion of practice.Things you didn't know you can be bad at
An Article by David R. MacIverI wonder how many things we're all going around doing badly because the idea of not knowing how to do them well seems too ridiculous to admit to.
...You've probably never been taught to have a conversation. I've had exactly one class on it and it was in the last six months. I know damn well that many people have not self-taught this well... In general there's this entire class of implicit skills that we mostly don't think of as skills, that we're entirely self-taught on, and that we practice sufficiently non-demonstratively that we can't easily watch what other people do. The result is a very personal skill idiolect.
The Helsinki Bus Station Theory
An Article by Arno Rafael MinkkinenStay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus.
Why? Because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference.
The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest.
...It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough.
Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.
Your vision takes off.
Touch the keys
An Article by Rach SmithIn his course Being Productive: Simple Steps to Calm Focus, Kourosh Dini emphasises the importance of taking a moment to “be with” the work every day (or however frequently you need to tackle a project). “Being with” your work is to be fully present and intentional about that activity and doing nothing else.
This idea was inspired by Dini’s piano teacher, who encouraged him to sit at his piano and touch the keys every day. Even on the days that he felt he had no time or inclination to practice. Sometimes touching the keys would lead to a good practice session, even when he didn’t feel like it would before he actually gave it a go.
Just like Dini, I find that once I give the task my full attention and be present, the actual doing of it turns out to be much easier and more enjoyable than my mind had been expecting. As usual, the resistance to getting started is far more uncomfortable than actually doing the thing.
I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine
An Article by Rach SmithWhat I’ve learnt through experience is that the number of languages I’ve learned or the specific frameworks I’ve gained experience with matters very little. What actually matters is my ability to up-skill quickly and effectively.
If you focus on:
- learning how you best learn, and
- practicing effectively communicating the things you've learned
you can't go wrong.
Writing and Speaking
An Essay by Paul GrahamBeing a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction...there's a tradeoff between smoothness and ideas. All the time you spend practicing a talk, you could instead spend making it better.
Long Form Study: Why Photographers Should Repeatedly Revisit a Scene
An Article by Scott ReitherI learned years ago how important it is to shoot the same subject and location over and over again.
The practice teaches a photographer how to form deeper relationships with the subject, and better understand how the primary subject interacts with secondary elements – like the way high tide may introduce a stunning new reflection, or how a blaze of stars in a dark sky might be the missing element that lifts the image to new heights.
Revisiting a subject also serves as valuable “practice.” You cannot develop your skills in anything without a healthy (or obsessive) amount of practice. It always surprises me to find out aspiring photographers think that they can simply photograph their two-week vacations once or twice a year and come home with compelling imagery! It doesn’t work that way.
Every Tool Shapes the Task
Imagine the world like a cake
Imagine the world like a cake. Imagine that you slice it into the customary slices by vertical cuts. Each slice of that cake should signify for us, a constituency. Each is geographically located as one segment of the larger cake. Each slice is more influenced by its immediate neighbors than by what might be in the cake quite far away.
What technology has done in the world increasingly is to put horizontal cuts in that cake. You don't only talk up and down. Now you can talk across barriers.
Power makes knowledge sufficient
Whether it is civil rights' violations in many countries, whether it is the increasing numbers of unemployed people in our own country, whether it is the homeless we see on our way to work, it isn't as though we don't know.
But there is that horrible realization that, while the knowledge of facts may be a necessary condition for action, and we talk about democracy in civic action, it is unfortunately not a sufficient one.
While knowledge may be a necessary condition, it may in fact be a less necessary condition that the one that makes that a sufficient condition, and that is access to power.
To do some more pushups on the internet
There may be a lot of things that have to be studied, but there is also what I call "occupational therapy for the opposition" that says, send them off to do some more pushups on the internet. You need to be mindful that it is possible to use information, and the need for information, as a delay for the call for action.
Adding up to hair-brained
I have for myself come to the point where I say that people or groups or governments make the decisions that make sense to them, even if they look totally hair-brained to me.
My task then is to figure out the constellation of forces, the pushes and pulls, that in fact do add up to that hair-brained decision-making. Then we can go into the next iteration and say, "What can we do about the balance of the push and the pull that seems to result in totally non-constructive decisions?"
Who the problems are
Recently my attention was drawn to a quote from Peter Drucker who said, "If there isn't dissent, we would not know where the problems are."
I said to my husband, "Look, if there isn't dissent, we wouldn't know who the problems are." I think one has to keep that in mind.
Your new electronic microscope
Learn what is in this Internet. But then keep your head clear and go back to your goals. What in fact, in the best of all worlds, do you want to do? Do any of the activities with your new electronic microscope bring you closer to that?
Cyberspace as a global dump
If we think that cyberspace is a public space, then let's think of the oceans. They used to be as much of a world resource as anybody could think of but didn't belong to anybody. So everybody put their garbage into them. The potential of cyberspace as a global dump is quite substantial.