Key takeaways §
Highlights §
- Alan Kay said it well: “the music isn’t in the piano”. You get better at piano by playing and studying to improve how you play, not by constantly retuning your piano. (View Highlight)
- What does this kind of practice achieve? The broader pattern is this: to be more alert to instances when I’m witnessing a very striking emotional experience. And to attempt to capture something of that experience. Of course, I don’t capture the full richness of the emotion – far from it! It’s rather to build my awareness and to expand the range of my appreciation, an increase in my emotional imagination and empathy. While I cannot recreate the richness of the emotion, I can at least do a little to evoke it. (View Highlight)
- Littlewood, correctly, identifies some sort of drive – what I would call caring, or finding meaning — as the key element to such learning, and comments: “Given the strong drive, it communicates itself in some form to the subconscious, which does all the real work, and would seem to always be on duty. Lacking the drive, one sticks.” (View Highlight)
- Just don’t. It’s a very bad mistake to add cards for things you’re not genuinely interested in. People will tell me: “I used Anki to memorize the state capitals”. Me: “Why did you want to know the state capitals.” Them: [silence]. (View Highlight)
- Note: Add things that resonate