Hi, my name is Oscar, and this is my personal development blog. I like to create stuff, challenge assumptions, and try out new things. I blog about personal development and everything I learn here. Read more.
Personal Development - Freestyle Mind
Productivity and Life Hacks
Mind maps are one of the best tools available for learning new topics and brainstorming ideas. You can learn in a few minutes what would have taken you hours through traditional studying systems. I’ve successfully used mind maps for studying advanced programming topics, getting articles ideas, and everyday things like making the grocery list. Even this article was sketched using a mind map.
I Recently came across a quote from a book. I like great quotes because they are often inspirational and life changing. The book in question is “How to read a book”, and the quote is:
“Whenever you read something you don’t understand, that’s the only chance you’re ever given to recognize the opportunity to learn something new.”That quote completely changed the way I now approach every book.
Brain Rules is a book written by John Medina where he goes through 12 principles called brain rules describing how our brain works and how to improve our life based on those principles. John is a molecular biologist who spent his whole life studying how the brain works, and in the book he shares what scientists know for sure about the human brain.
Editor note: This is a guest post by Josh Hanagarne, World’s Strongest Librarian
“Mrs, Hanagarne, good to see you again,” said the doctor as he lowered a pair of long, sharp scissors into my throat. The blades were especially long, narrow, and bent at a strange angle, although the angle was well-suited for its purpose: extraction.
“You too, Doctor.”
“What was it this time?”
I was four
I’ve always been interested in applying scientific and philosophical concepts to real life. Lately I’ve been reading Zen and the art of motocycle mainteinance, a book by Robert M. Pirsig, and I’ve been fascinated by the way he express his ideas. The book has very little to do with Zen or motocycles, instead it’s full of interesting thoughts about life, science and philosophy. One thing I’ve found
In this post I want to share my thoughts about how to dramatically increase the amount of information you can get from reading a book. The process I’m going to describe only applies to nonfiction books, and in particular to physical books rather than e-books, as it involves a bit of management. Having said that, you can apply the foundamental principle to your ebook if you want to.
This has been one of my main issues related to learning in the past. The problem that I wanted to solve is: Now that I know that I should act in a certain way, how do I actually remember and do it? Let’s be honest, how many times you’ve read a top ten list about how to be exceptional at something? Nice stuff, but what happened after you read it? Nothing, in most cases. I’ve already talked about how
It’s strange to be talking about programming in a personal development blog, but I think it useful for you to know what are the advantages of learning how to program and what you can get from it for your day to day life. I have been programming since I was 16 and I’ve been doing it professionally since I was 19. The benefits I gained by learning how to program are enormous and they help me in almost
This is a followup to my last post about how to keep track of what you’ve learnt. There has been a lot of discussion on various social networks about it and I’m glad many people liked it. Unfortunately keeping track of what you’ve learnt is only half of the story. If you really want to master what you’ve learnt then you must be doing something about it.
Most people forget what they’ve just learnt within 12 and 24 hours. If you are reading this post now, chances are that tomorrow you’ll not even remember it. Our brain works like a big search engine, when you insert a new piece of information, it goes on a big stack called short term memory. When you want to remember that information, your brain will try to search inside that stack for the information
