Mastery of the MIND
Mastery of a skill requires mental linkages to be fast and accurate. It’s best to develop systems which facilitate better memory duration, and recall.
Techniques vary and you have almost certainly used some of them, but I bet you haven’t even been using half. Let me name some of my favorites:
Neural training: Like muscle memory but for the brain. You want to be good at something, you just have to do it. Practice makes permanent.
Songs: Better for some than others (practice makes permanent)
Words or queues: PEMDAS…. SohCahToa (math); Every Awesome Dog Goes Beyond Earth (EADGBE guitar strings)
Grouping: One of my favorites for it’s simplicity applicable to many domains
Remapping: Overlap with grouping and adjacent to memory palace. oh 321478965? Easy, that’s the shape of 6 drawn on a num pad! 2, 4, 6, 8…. wait that’s just a sequence! 011235813? now you’re just messing around (Fibonacci)
Memory Palace: Best for memorizing long arbitrary lists like digits of PI
Memory Road: Same idea as above but for outdoorsy folk like me
Study will get you far, introspection will get you further, and a day on the road will take you even further.
I can not teach you in an hour what takes a master years to learn.
Go learn. Start by reading these books and come back here for discussion :)
Moonwalking is about the memory palace. Professional memorizers memory tricks and methods. Lessons on how the memory functions.
Into the magic shop is a story about brains, how they function and how they fail.
Neurological exploration
Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart
Mental stability
While you’re doing this self improvement you may as well get your toes into introspection… and hopefully by the end of the book you are fully submersed in a more open perspective.
If you like this book you may also enjoy:
The Tao of Pooh By Benjamin Hoff: Examine your world and use it. Don’t overthin
The Secret by Rhonda Byrne: It’s basically about a universal truth that should be rather obvious having read the above books, but gives a bit more of a spiritual perspective on the topic.
Memory Palace
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Mastery of the mind is about more than memorizing things and knowing how neurons work, It’s about understanding the nature of the mind and understanding how minds interact.
These next books are about your intuitions. How they are fooled, how to understand them and how to resist the natural shortcuts in our minds when required.
Connectors: brining people together (Milgrim: the original 6 degrees of Kevin bacon)
The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell
This is a book about how we relate to eachother and how ideas are spread
How we conflate success with luck and downplay the importance of failures
Outliers by Malcom Gladwell
Social situational forces have serious power
Phycologist Phillip Zimbardo explores the darker side of social influence with his book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
Compliance: how to use it… and how to avoid it
Influence: Science and Practice 5th Edition by Robert Cialdini
The Book of Why
Maybe considered a math primer. The statistics of causality. How can we determine which correlations are related causally.
The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie
How we deal with our urges and build society
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History
by Howard K. Bloom
This has been my brief recommendation on a foundation for common skills!
Currently I’m not getting anything to recommend these books. I’m not even an affiliate (yet).
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