The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
16th June 2017
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!
Book of the Week
We’re just finishing Marie Kondo’s intriguing The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, (Audible book here). Before reading this book, we hadn’t made the connection between tidying and, for example, doing well on examinations. Some of Marie’s observations seem spot on for both improving productivity and improving the ability to learn well under stress. Marie’s book has sold over two million copies worldwide and has over 12,000 reviews on Amazon with a 4.5-star average rating. We can all clearly learn something of value from Marie’s lifelong compulsion to tidy. At first, her recommendations may seem implausible. But just keep reading—you’ll see that Marie has great insight not only about tidying, but about life.
We have to laugh at our recommendation of Tidying Up, given that we recently also recommended Tim Harford’s Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives. As Ralph Waldo Emerson has observed, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Barb in Tokyo
The venue is full for Barb’s talk at the University of Tokyo, but a few additional seats have just been added in an effort to accommodate the crowd. If you’d like to take a chance that a seat might come available, please stop by the venue before the talk begins—at the very least, Barb would love to say hi!
How To Read Effectively In A Foreign Language
Here’s an excellent article by linguist Olly Richards on how to read effectively in a foreign language. This one’s well worth your time.
The Science of Learning: How to Harness Your Brain’s Neural Networks
“Cramming for a test and having a hard time understanding something? As Barb notes in this Big Think interview, it might be best to go away and come back after a while. (Also on YouTube or Facebook).
A Guide on How to Sign up for Coursera Courses for Free
Mostly, you’ll want to get a certificate from a Coursera course—purchasing a certificate is a good motivator for you to finish the course. Even better, it feels terrific to add the certificate to your LinkedIn page to signal potential employers that you are a self-motivated learner. But occasionally you just want to check out a course without paying. Here’s a step-by-step guide from Class Central about how to do this.
A Terrific Video on Learning and Life from Metalearn
As you may remember, we’re keen fans of Nasos Papadopoulos of MetaLearn. This wonderful brief video by Nasos extracts the best ideas from Nasos’s conversation with Barb, and retells them in a way that’s better than Barb originally told them. (Sorry, Barb. 😉 )
That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!
Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team
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