Book Review #1

Published: 2023-10-17

edits:

2024-02-11: added section about speaking to Quinn.

*Capitan Disillusion voice

“Greetings, children!”

Welcome back to another essay from Jayden’s social media page that he had to build himself and pay to put on the internet!

What am I talking about today? Well I’ve been wanting to review books, among other things, but there have been a lot of books that have had profound impacts on how I work, think, and live my life. And I’d like to share some recommendations and anecdotes about them.

Books are good because they take a while to make. In an information economy where a reply to a tweet can be thought up in less than a minute, being able to listen to the distilled and crystallized thoughts, knowledge, and opinions of authors allows you to get a nuanced, information dense, and holistic understanding of what they’re thinking. In a way you’re getting a piece of themselves, transferring a version of their lived experience onto you.

Books are good!

For this first book review I’ll be reviewing 2 books. Both of them I read a little while and but served as very important in my future development. I wouldn’t be the Jayden you know now if it wasn’t for these books.

A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)

Prof Barbara Oakley, 2014

This book (despite the ugly cover) is great!

I had stumbled upon it from someone in a reddit post recommending the coursera course adaptation of the book, which fundamentally changed the way I approached studying, being “smart” and doing well in school. I was so interested I got the book to get the full-fat, unabridged version.

I never did bad in school, but I never considered myself an overachiever. I did fine, enough to get into university, but I didn’t really put much pride into my work ethic or considered myself someone who studied well. We aren’t ever taught how to study. At least I wasn’t. None of the lessons in this book were given to me by anyone before. The book lays out the core concepts of learning complicated topics with actionable and approachable steps. It helped teach me to study, showed me that there wasn’t anything fundamentally different between me and the “smart” kids, and it taught me how to learn.

Prof Barbara Oakley had a history of working in Language and Culture, with a significant career shift in Engineering. She had a childhood of resenting math and science, labeling herself as being unfit for it. Her time in the military helped her see all the opportunities STEM knowledge can provide, and decided to look inward and try to shift her thinking towards topics that she had already written herself off from ever knowing well. This change brought about her studying engineering, as well as neuroscience, to understand how exactly the brain goes about learning.

I read this book around 3 years ago? I think the lessons that have stuck with me and I continuate to actively apply from then to now are:

Focused and Diffused Modes of thinking.

Your brain has two general modes of thinking, Focused thinking and Diffused thinking. Focused thinking is generally what what we think of when we study, you’re focused on trying to do a single task as well as possible. Diffused thinking is the thinking that happens in the background when we aren’t actively working on anything, it’s subconscious and allows your brain to process the things you’ve put into it and reach new creative conclusions. The goal is to switch between diffused and focused modes of thinking to leverage the power of both types, using study setups like the Pomodoro method.

Chunking

We don’t think about habitual tasks like walking or speaking our native language anymore. Someone who’s learned a song on a instrument doesn’t think about every individual note. we “chunk” these things, and they’re placed in our long term memory. It’s like zipping a file in a computer folder, we don’t think about grammar or sentence structure or which foot goes in front of the other anymore, we just know it well enough to do it without thinking about it. Chunking allows you to focus our very limited working memory on other things while the neural pathways that are fluent at whatever task they do can fire away in the background.

Chunking requires spaced repetition to allow the focused mode to input the data and the diffused mode to process it when we are no longer thinking about it. Our brains are like muscles in this sense, we need to train them consistently. Just like you wouldn’t try doing all your training for a marathon the night before, cramming for a test the night before gives the information no time to get “chunked” into your memory properly.

Procrastination.

Our brains want to protect us form things we think will be painful. Procrastinating from work is our brain trying to protect us from the pain it perceives. Starting to work on something usually causes the “pain” we anticipate go away quickly, after around around 5-10 minutes of working on it. If I’m ever feeling like I don’t want to work on something, I’ll set a timer for 5 minutes and force myself to do it, after the 5 minutes, if I don’t feel like continuing to work on it, I have no obligation to and can stop. But a lot of the time I continue to work on it, after the “pain” has left.

Todo lists

Like I mentioned earlier, our brains have VERY limited working memory, we have less RAM in our brains then the computers used to guide the Apollo to the Moon (can’t give you a citation on that but it’s how it feels). We can generally hold about 4 “things” in our working memory. It’s important to offload things to other places so we can clear it up. Keep a todo list. Write down all the tasks you anticipate doing that day. Pick the 3 most important ones, and try to get those done at least. Anything after that is a bonus.

I like it when I get to cross the things off. Also it’s nice to just refer to the list instead of having to use brainpower to remember what to do next (especially considering you’re bound to forget things).

Conclusion

If you struggle with studying or don’t think you can study as well as the “smart” students you know, read this book! If you’ve ever asked me about studying I’ve probably mentioned this book to you. It’s a very approachable first exposure to the world of “working effectively”. If you wanna become a “Studying to 8 hour James Scholz pomorodo vod” truck freak like me, we can have conversations about that later, this is about Books! I might talk about Deep Work and how my study methods have evolved past this book another time.

I’m no star student and I don’t really care about my grades (the first time I calculated my GPA is when a job application asked for it). But I do think I can work well, thanks in part to this book.

But been a while since I’ve read this book, and I’ve tweaked some of the lessons and ideas to suit myself and what I find works best for me. “Some advice can be a vice” after all.

Damn, that’s a good quote, and an even better segue…

Steal Like An Artist

Austin Kleon (2012)

This book is short,

like…

29 minutes and 18 seconds to read.

I love it.

I think of the entire trilogy (Steal ike an Artists, Show your work, Keep Going) as one normal sized book about practical information on how to be an artist and make stuff. Sounds extremely vague, but it’s filled with very practical specific advice that can apply to everyone, not just self-identifying artists, but anyone who wants to imbue their life with some creativity.

I’ll take the books one at at time, so I’m able to write more blog posts!! jaydenpb.net/blog fans rejoice!

Steal like an Artists is fun.

It’s filled with quotes, doodles, photos, and his own influences and perspective. It’s clear he applied the advice he gives in the book during the process of making the book. The most fundamental piece of advice the book gives is:

How do Artists get their ideas? They steal them.

Nothing is original.

Everything is based on what’s come before.

We’re the sum of our influences, everything we love and want to be like ends up being what we try to make. The difference between good artists and bad artists is that good ones are better at “stealing” inspirations then bad ones.

Good artist don’t copy, they emulate. They don’t remake the output, they remake the thinking. Try to think like your favorite artists, find their inspirations and try to think about how they thought, and why they inspired them. Once you’ve climbed up your “artistic family tree”, try to make something of your own, using pieces of each of your inspirations as influence.

Good Artists don’t just steal from the things they know they love, they steal from everything. Mundane everyday happenings are ripe with new perspectives and ways of thinking, as long as you’re willing to try and look at them in different ways. The more you do this, the better you’ll get at “stealing” from things nobody is paying attention to.

And that’s the core of the book (it’s short), so I’m gonna list out some extra miscellaneous advice I like in it now:

Other lessons from the book:

Keep some paper on you, something to write down the ideas you get throughout the day, something you can look through later and form new novel connections from.

Don’t write what you know, write what you like. Make the book you’d want to read, the song you’d want to listen to, or the game you’d like to play.

Analog tools aid in immersion and idea generating, digital tools aid in editing and publishing.

The work you do to procrastinate, the stuff you think is fun, is usually is where the “good stuff” can be found. Don’t neglect side projects and hobbies, they make you whole.

Give yourself opportunities to be bored. These days boredom curing is easier than ever, but there is value is sitting idly with your ideas.

Creativity is about subtraction, being able to add or use ANYTHING makes it hard to give your art a focus. Give yourself arbitrary restrictions, as limitations breed creativity. Know what’s important and what to leave out.

Make whatever you’d like. Don’t be concerned about some grand master plan or unifying thread throughout it all. What unifies all of it is that you made it.

Give your secrets away, cite your sources. My site is a horrible rip-off of the design made by Quinn Ha, a student from McMaster who’s site I found on LinkedIn. As far as applying the books lessons about “stealing” I did a pretty bad job, I’ve added a few of my own touches but I’m still looking for ways to break away from the similar mold and make something genuinely mine.

Thanks for making an inspiring site Quinn.

(edit: Additionally, I’ve spoken to Quinn recently through a mutual friend. He’s cool with me plagerizing his site 😳. I’ll make it less Quinn-y with time.)

But back to the advice-

Give public fan mail, Don’t worry about your idols validation or attention, just share openly without any expectations. Validation is for parking after all.

Keep a praise file of people who enjoy what you make, when you find yourself questioning why you chose to keep making your art, it’ll serve as an important motivator.

Try leaving home, being in a uncomfortable and different place around different people makes you think differently.

Keep your day job and live a boring routine life. It’ll let you be consistent in the time you spend with your art.

Keep a logbook, a diary of what you do and what you pay attention to. You can write it at the same time as your todo list!! But ACTUALLY READ IT (something I forget to do a lot).

Marry well. Not just your spouse, but your friends, the people you work with, and the people you make art with. But your spouse is incredibly important, especially if they need to deal with you and all your art making. Please direct all wife applications to the email linked in the footer. 🤓

Okay that’s all cya next time.

Please let me know where all the grammar errors are.