I have been testing a theory that 5-15 minutes of doing something, every day, is more effective than taking one two-hour class a week.
So I’ve taken on learning Hebrew. On a website called Duolingo.com.
I had to learn typing in Hebrew, and I had to learn a bunch of grammar, a bunch of words. Without memorizing. Without really much effort. 1
The secret is to not miss a day. After a missed day it is hard to go back to an activity. The first week I did all my sessions at the end of the day, just before I went to bed. But even then I could put in my 5-10 minutes. It’s been 19 days.
- First off: it’s satisfying. I have an experience of myself that is pleasant. A feeling that I am growing. That I am not living an empty life… hm… interesting.
- Second: I am getting better, I now know, without looking, the key for most of the letters on the keyboard. I can feel that I am going to get good at this.
Why am I doing this? For one: growing feels good.
Small challenges make me grow without much pain. And it also builds character. Sometimes I feel really stupid when I start… and that could hold me back. But promise is promise… and by the end of my short session I feel clear and smart again.
The same feedback I am getting from a student of mine who is doing the same tiny step growth method on the piano. I can “hear” the joy through his words.
Another student of mine did the same thing with reading, and his mind opened up. His comprehension improved. His ability to focus is now double, triple, or more than what it was.
This is the clay sculpture method of growth.
Most people opt to the lottery approach: jump, and miss. Jump and miss again. Never try ever again. Game over… be the walking dead…
There are two ways to make a sculpture:
- 1. get a bunch of clay and start putting small batches on the top of it to conform to a shape you have in mind. The Hebrew learning, the piano lessons are that type of sculpture.
- 2. get a big block of marble, chisel and a hammer… and start removing small chips of stone to reveal the desired shape inside the marble. Spiritual learning is like this. Revealing the “divine” you.
You need both methods. In one you focus on the “yes, that” in the other you focus on the “no, not that”.
You cannot really pick one, or the other. You need both.
One of my missing skills has always been building a path to a destination.
It involves a brain capacity that I was born without. It was part of my particular type of dyslexia. It has something to do with a sense what is called positional or kinesthetic intelligence.
When I am in bed, I can’t tell which way I am facing without opening my eyes. I don’t know my left from my right. And interestingly, this is intimately connected to the ability to build systems, to build step by step systems or processes.
It is almost comical that I opted to become an architect: this is the main skill an architect has to have… ouch.
But it is needed everywhere, making a recipe, cleaning the house, moving, deciding on what order to do your shopping to do it fastest, to build a business, to make anything, to invent something and then sell it or patent it.
Everywhere.
Most people don’t know that this capacity is underdeveloped or missing for them.
You were born with skills, capacities, maybe intellectual abilities missing. But you can fill them in, and become all you were always mean to be. Healthwise too. Everything they say about genetics, or most of it, is b.s. Most conditions are because your mother was undernourished, had nutritional deficiencies… or you have. You can correct your deficiencies and end up not ill.
So you meet no success. It seems that it is near impossible to amount to anything without this capacity developed to a working level.
Like my Hebrew, it needs to be built, little bit at a time.
I have recently noticed that because every client and every student needs guidance from me in this regard, I have had 4-5 instances every single day poking my brain to activate this capacity. Imperceptible… but after a while I am noticing that I can see the next step a client or student needs to take.
The clay-sculpture method is working for me so I can work better for you.
You were born the way you were born.
My mother had scarcely any raw materials to bring a new life to the world: don’t forget it was just after World War Two that she got pregnant with me. No food, no money.
I came out missing some parts.
Without having discovered that I can muscletest what my body needed to get well, I would never have been able to activate a part of the brain that had no gray brain cells in it.
Improving my health hasn’t been a lottery approach either. It’s taken me from depressed, wishing to die, to this new person who can… ultimately a long time, but specifically, when every step was useful, one year.
And I feel I can get even better… just like a skill, your health can get better.
I am enjoying this process. Just like I enjoy learning Hebrew one tiny bit at a time.
Every few days, it seems, I discover something that I can either eliminate, or add to my diet.
For example… it may be too soon to be sure, but I am going to share it anyway.
I have been able to enjoy a cup or two strong tea a day with the addition of hemp seeds. I grind the seeds in a coffee grinder, very find, and add it to the tea.
Hemp seeds are an ancient superfood…
Just like onions, almost every ancestry can eat hemp seeds, except the Orientals… And hemp seeds make great “milk”, taste good, and add the so missing, so difficult to find essential fatty acids, like Omega 3.
I am almost convinced that they make me smarter.
But I am staying alert… And that is one of the secrets.
One of the main reasons your life is the way it is is due to the fact that you are sleepwalking through it.
The alertness, the awareness, the wakefulness, the observation is missing.
These are also skills… you can grow them, practice them, and master them.
And get well, get smarter, get more skilled, get more “winningest”, and a lot happier. Guaranteed.
- I had done the same thing with Hungarian earlier this year… re-learning to type, re-learning to write, re-learning to read Hungarian. But I wasn’t conscious of the self-building aspect of it: I had a “reason” to do the “work” because I was corresponding with the author of the book “Feelings”. This time, with Hebrew, I have no agenda, I am doing it as an experiment, as an intellectual exercise, as a fun project.
yes
So, I’ve been approaching things with I think I am going to get out of it (THE agenda) and therefore, blocking all that I could actually become
The issue is hidden in language. You don’t have an agenda, you have the agenda. The only reason you do something. And that causes you to have a spotlight type cone of vision, and see and hear nothing else.
But… when you read, study, do things like that, you are going down the wrong path, potentially, and you are not able to bring any power, any real knowledge to the process, because you cannot while your cone of vision is so narrow.
So you end up with book knowledge that you cannot take to the level of instinctive and therefore useful.
It is like a quarterback trying to play football with the coach’s instruction book in their hand, reading what to do next there… You get creamed.
Even your question comes from a narrow cone of vision. Where unless something is a perfect match to what you know, you are not interested.
I don’t think I can hide my stupidity, although, I apologize if these questions are frustrating: If I have identified something as worth having/knowing, when I set out to read a book or take a class, if there is an agenda there, what do I do with that agenda? How, if I could, would I abandon what I think I should be going after to pursue life as more of an experiment? Does the courage to walk away from what I think is the path, the missing piece? It feels like the sculpture method of a little bit at a time consistently is some of the answer, but as usual, I’m confused.