I appreciate Tim Ferriss’s advice on reading non-fiction: only read how-to type books if you intend to implement their instructions right away. Otherwise it’s just entertainment.
His reasoning is that information is only useful if you use it, and you won’t remember to use it later if you don’t use it now. If any new neural connections are to be made, they’ll be made in the doing.
My dad taught math. His most helpful lesson was that math skill is all about practicing the operations — no different than shooting a basketball. Comprehending long division, for example, isn’t so much a matter of memorizing the method, as it’s about a physical familiarity with making the right markings with a pencil on the paper: drawing the division symbol, plugging in your numbers, getting a new number and writing it below, digit beneath digit. By the time you’re exam-ready, the know-how resides in your bones and reflexes, not in your thoughts. Knowing is doing, not remembering.
Learning to drive is the same. Initially, a driving instructor gives you some checklists and mantras to remember: signal, mirror, shoulder-check; brake going into the turn, gas going out. These are only placeholders though. They give way, once you’ve put them into practice, to a kind of embodied, wordless knowing that guides your hands, feet, and eyes together in the operation of the vehicle. If all you have is remembered instructions, you can’t drive a car except in the most lurching and unpleasant way.
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I'm David, and Raptitude is a blog about getting better at being human -- things we can do to improve our lives today.
I find that, for me, the problem is less about staying committed to my goals than it is about deciding which goals are worth pursuing in the first place, and what the best way to pursue them is. I guess what I'm suffering from is some kind of ungodly hybrid...