Saturday, September 28, 2024

book: Ikigai

 Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life - Kindle edition by García, Héctor, Miralles, Francesc. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

"According to the Japanese, everyone has an ikigai—a reason for living.

And according to the residents of the Japanese village with the world’s longest-living people, finding it is the key to a happier and longer life.

Having a strong sense of ikigai—where
  • what you love, 
  • what you’re good at, 
  • what you can get paid forand 
  • what the world needs 
all overlap —means that each day is infused with meaning.

It’s the reason we get up in the morning.

It’s also the reason many Japanese never really retire (in fact there’s no word in Japanese that means retire in the sense it does in English): They remain active and work at what they enjoy, because they’ve found a real purpose in life—the happiness of always being busy.

Ikigai - Wikipedia

The term compounds two Japanese words: iki (生き, meaning 'life; alive') and kai (甲斐, meaning '(an) effect; (a) result; (a) fruit; (a) worth; (a) use; (a) benefit; (no, little) avail') (sequentially voiced as gai), to arrive at 'a reason for living [being alive]; a meaning for [to] life; what [something that] makes life worth living; a 'raison d'être'.




Saturday, September 7, 2024

Optimal Studying & Learning, by Andrew Huberman Ph.D.

Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning - YouTube

In a "nutshell": 
- study (read, listen, watch) once
- self-test immediately after study
- repeat testing multiple times, instead of re-reading/watch/listen

Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning - Huberman Lab

00:00:00 Improve Studying & Learning
00:06:45 Offsetting Forgetting
00:08:22 Learning & Neuroplasticity
00:13:06 Periodic Testing
00:16:09 Focus & Alertness, Sleep, Tool: Active Engagement
00:21:37 Tool: Improve Focus, Mindfulness Meditation, Perception Exercise
00:24:38 Sleep & Neuroplasticity, Tool: Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR)
00:28:29 Tools: Study Habits of Successful Students
00:37:33 Studying & Aspiration Goals; Challenging Material
00:42:54 Tool: Testing as a Learning Tool
00:48:23 Self-Testing, Repeated Testing
00:55:29 Testing Yourself & Knowledge Gaps
01:02:23 New Material & Self-Test Timing
01:07:21 Familiarity vs Mastery
01:10:55 Self-Testing & Offsetting Forgetting
01:15:53 Best Type of Self-Tests; Phone & Post-Learning Distractions
01:22:03 Tool: Gap Effects; Testing as Studying vs. Evaluation
01:25:40 Tool: Emotion & Learning, PTSD, Deliberate Cold Exposure, Caffeine
01:33:28 Tool: Interleaving Information; Unskilled, Mastery & Virtuosity





Saturday, August 31, 2024

Motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose

Autonomy, mastery, purpose: three forces that motivate us all




Your images are a virus. They are EVERYWHERE on the Internet - Scott Hanselman's Blog




"a great place to work" is where a person can 
  • do useful things, for organization (purpose)
  • that she or he can do really well (mastery)
  • that she or he also likes to do on its own (autonomy)
a sustainable "good feeling" comes from (personal) growth,
meaning learning new useful skills, 
and then being able to use them for creating value




“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”

Be the best of whatever you are.

Sunday, August 25, 2024

First Principles: scientific thinking

 First Principles: Elon Musk on the Power of Thinking for Yourself by James Clear, author of 

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones: Clear, James: 9780735211292: Amazon.com: Books

reasoning from first principles,
is one of the most effective strategies you can employ for
  • breaking down complicated problems and
  • generating original solutions.
It also might be the single best approach
to learn how to think for yourself.


example: rockets for SpaceX, and batteries for Tesla electric cars:
the cost of materials was much smaller than the cost of final components;
this means that if production process was re-organizes, it is possible to make them much cheaper.

“Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy."
Musk said in an interview.

What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.”


A first principle is a basic assumption that cannot be deduced any further.
Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle defined a first principle as
“the first basis from which a thing is known.”

First principles thinking is a fancy way of saying “think like a scientist.”
Scientists don’t assume anything. They start with questions like,
What are we absolutely sure is true? What has been proven?


Rene Descartes, the French philosopher and scientist, embraced this approach
with a method now called Cartesian Doubt in which he would
“systematically doubt everything he could possibly doubt
until he was left with what he saw as purely indubitable truths.”

First principle - Wikipedia
In philosophy and science, a first principle
is a basic proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced
from any other proposition or assumption.


Scientific inquiry includes creating a hypothesis through inductive reasoning,
testing it through experiments and statistical analysis,
and adjusting or discarding the hypothesis based on the results.