Learning
You can learn more about politics if you really study a few classics and case studies than almost everybody involved in it figures out in a lifetime.
Four basic questions when reading a book: 1) what is the book about as a whole? 2) what is being said in detail? 3) is the book wholly or in part true? 4) what is the significance of its meaning and truth?
From How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren
... See moreYour flashlight is already bright enough to achieve your most ambitious goals, and to my knowledge there aren’t many things you can do to actually increase the intensity of your flashlight’s beam much. This is why most of our energy should be directed towards improving our environment to ensure that our flashlight simply remains fixed on the right
Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own. It may be within some bigger project, but you'll be driving your part of it.
Paul Graham • How to Do Great Work
... See moreEven if you can’t experience the thing directly, try going for information-dense sources with high amounts of detail and facts, and then reason up from those facts. On foreign policy, read books published by university presses -- not The Atlantic or The Economist or whatever. You can read those after you’ve developed a model of the thing yourself,
... See moreMany students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
…the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
The anecdote helped explain the change
... See moreAs our ability to concentrate has collapsed, I’ve become more and more convinced that it is the superpower we should long for. Sustained focus is the engine that connects dots and builds things. To concentrate with the intensity of a chess grandmaster on the object of your choosing is to find out what you are capable of—what you are capable of
People learn by creating their own understanding. But that does not mean they must or even can do it without assistance. Effective teaching facilitates that creation by getting students engaged in thinking deeply about the subject at an appropriate level and then monitoring that thinking and guiding it to be more expert-like.
On reading stories: “You have not grasped the whole story until you can summarize its plot in a brief narration—not a proposition or argument. Therein lies its unity.”
Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book