Federico
The authors' point of view is that effective thinking is not an inborn trait and can instead be learned.
It's compact and provides exercises to get you started with the strategies explained in it.
The book presents 5 strategies to trigger effective thinking:
- build a solid foundation
- use mistakes to gain new insight and avoid getting stuck
- build a habit of asking yourself good questions and answering them
- understand how concepts relate to each other, instead of learning isolated facts
- be open to constantly change yourself
The first 3 chapters introduce the method, the remaining 6 showcase how the author used it to learn radically different skills such as developing websites, playing Go, or windsurfing. While it was good to have examples of application of the method, they often went into way too many details (e.g. it was interesting to read about the origins and rules of Go, but ~15 pages? it's not what I'm here for).
The method itself is introduced in a very well structured way and explaining the reasoning behind every step.
All in all, a nice read, it could have been written in a long blog post rather than a book. The TED talk in which the author appears is very nice, by the way!
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”
This book definitely fell into the last category, at least for me: I had to read a few paragraphs, put it down, let it sink, and only then pick it up again... rinse and repeat.
The method described in the book is extremely interesting: trying to sum it up in my own words, it's about creating, over time, a web of notes (thoughts or references) that grows organically according to one's interests, feeding itself in doing so. These notes enable learning and thinking processes, storing thoughts so that they aren't lost, connecting them to other thoughts, and enabling one to review, contrast, or improve them over time.
The book is explicitly targeting “students, academics, and nonfiction book writers”: being none of those, I struggled to relate with some parts of it (which is why I didn't feel like giving it 5 stars).
The training method described in this book starts from a theory stating that fatigue is not the result of glycogen depletion, but a mechanism used by the brain to prevent muscles' overuse: based on this, the brain can be trained to delay the moment fatigue kicks in by letting it experience feedback similar to the one it would get during our target race. Since stride is everything in running, it provides a set of cues to focus on stride improvements while running, as well as some cross-training exercises to improve stability, flexibility, and power
Summing it up with the author's words:
“Financial success is not a hard science. It's a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know”
Short, to the point chapters with lots of insights and, above all, no “This is THE way to do things” narrative.
Merged review:
Summing it up with the author's words:
“Financial success is not a hard science. It's a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know”
Short, to the point chapters with lots of insights and, above all, no “This is THE way to do things” narrative.
