0829 Payday, good day — added some pictures to my blog!
We perish because we follow other men’s examples: we should be cured of this if we were to disengage ourselves from the herd.
— Seneca
🖱️ First of all, fixed my flyers.
☎️ Took some calls and felt my Japanese listening and speaking skills seem like they’ve leveled up.
🖥️ 11:57 Completed Head First HTML and CSS Chapter 5 and wrote Study Log #4
🐒 13:00 Realized today is Chinese Valentine’s Day, and plan to have dinner with my girl tonight.
📖 13:10 Started reading The First 20 Hours Chapter 5
Notes:
The major barrier to rapid skill acquisition is not physical or intellectual: it’s emotional. Doing something new is always uncomfortable at first, and it’s easy to waste a ton of time and energy thinking about practicing instead of practicing.
pick an idea, take out a blank sheet of paper, then try to explain that idea completely using very simple language, as if you’re teaching a beginner. The gaps in your knowledge will become clear very quickly, which makes it easy to go back to the source material to learn what’s missing. Scott H. Young, a study skills researcher, calls this the “Feynman Technique” (in honor of the renowned physicist Richard Feynman), and it’s quite effective.
📖 14:00 Finished reading The First 20 Hours
👩💼 Continued fixing flyers
RSS is the antidote to algorithm feeds.
📖 15:05 Started reading The Attention Merchants
Notes:
It is all the same, insofar as everything that captures it enters our mind the same way. But there are differences in quality of attention.
The most basic dividing line is likely between transitory and sustained attention, the former quick, superficial, and often involuntarily provoked; the latter, deep, long-lasting, and voluntary. What matters for present purposes is that selling us things relies mainly on the former—on which the attention merchant thrives—but our happiness depends on balancing the two.The purpose of advertising is never merely to inform but existed to “manipulate human motivations and desires and develop a need for goods with which the public has at one time been unfamiliar — perhaps even un-desirous of purchasing.”
Tried to display a photo on my page and succeeded🤩
🖼️ 17:00 Added a picture to my top page — I might change it periodically.
📖 17:15 Finished reading Chapter 10
💭 After reading How to Read a Book, I consciously sped up my reading — already starting another new book, So Good They Cant Ignore You.