Flow is the mental state of complete engagement. It happens when you are fully immersed in an activity that is neither too difficult to be frustrating, but not so easy as to be boring. First described by Dr. Mihály CsÃkszentmihályi, the concept became popular because it was seen as a key to both performance and […]
Archives for January 2013
Rethinking “Learn it Once”
When I wrote Learn More, Study Less in 2008, one of the big pieces of advice was to “learn it once”. The main idea being that, while review is still necessary, you shouldn’t procrastinate on what you’re learning—if you don’t understand something, the pre-exam cram session isn’t the time to learn it. I stand by […]
Could Obsessive Research Be the Cure for Procrastination?
There’s a lot of ways to procrastinate. Extra pushes of the snooze button, the final cram session before an exam, waiting until midlife to pick a career. Maybe you’re procrastinating right now. I used to believe most of this was just inertia. With a push, you could start rolling and finish the work with less […]
What are the Intellectual Ideas Everybody Should Know?
Most academic concepts have fairly narrow usage. You can draw analogies between fields, but these connections usually rest on you understanding both sides of the metaphor sufficiently well. Consider the Fresnel equation in physics. With some effort you might be able to draw an analogy between this equation and another domain. But I’d doubt you […]