Building Brain Tissues – Preparing to Engage Significant Opportunities
When you learn, you are building brain tissues. Whether you are learning logical relationships like math, memorization of history, relational information regarding psychology or philosophy … In all cases of learning you are building associative links of brain tissue. Anything that harms building brain tissues, to include too much of anything, obstructs learning. Nutrition, sleep, exercise are all requirements for building brain tissue.
How about accelerating the rate of learning. Many studies have been done to find methods of learning easier, and faster. Here is a YouTube video about a few of those methods that are easy to do. Take notes, and keep it as a checklist where you can remind yourself about techniques to learn easier and faster.
Techniques for Learning Easier
To reiterate, do NOT participate in self-deception. Often, inexperienced people will choose emotional “wants” over realistic “needs” and harm their long term career goals. For instance, choosing to avoid difficult homework to instead watch television; where avoiding work gets a person fired, causing low grades can prevent a student from being able to get into college, and in-general makes a person less desirable in which to associate in the long term.
A person who has not developed the skills to maintain an excess of resources, does not have the skills to help others when needed without harming themselves and their family. This is largely why successful people are more desirable socially; they have the capacity to help others without harming themselves or their family.
Similarly, choosing easy classes instead of classes that provide practice in problem solving; this action avoids building brain tissues needed to solve diverse types of problems. The result being the brain NOT being built to solve difficult problems. Every employer then observes that person demonstrating this lack of persistence, which leads to not being offered career opportunities to achieve significant long term goals; the person that chooses not to apply themselves mentally is trapped behind self created road blocks.
Human Resources tracks the productivity and leadership qualities of every employee, and then uses a form to rate their effectiveness. Employees are expected to rate high in every area related to their job expectations. Laborers are not expected to show leadership qualities if they don’t have the training, or motivation to teach themselves. Sub-standard employees are provided corrective counseling, training, demotion to a useful level, or are replaced. High rating employees are provided advancement to better serve the needs of the company.
Notice that by actively setting priorities it allows a person to “decide for themselves” and choose to use time productively so that it is possible for them to achieve their long term goals.
Not setting priorities allows less significant opportunities to gain attention and waste time and resources. Or, forces other people to make decisions for you for the good if the overall group mission.
Most often, not logically setting priorities excludes a person from the beneficial outcomes otherwise provided by setting priorities.
Setting Priorities often provides opportunities to leverage other peoples skills and resources to help achieve those goals. Creating a cohort (team that shares mutual goals) and setting priorities in developing and providing useful information by all members of the Cohort, each person no longer needs to develop all of the related information/skills themselves.
Through the sharing of information and skills related to tasking, each Cohort member more efficiently achieves mutual intermediate goals with less total effort and in less time.
Each member can take more time to learn perspectives (systems of relationships) and relationships (how to manipulate the inputs/outputs/variables of high priority related relationships) to mutually share with Cohort members, before a deadline is reached.
Periodic communications (shared online files, email, texting, occasional meetings to update emotional relationships needed to maintain passion …) are needed to make sure that each persins efforts are together filling all the gaps to achieve the desired final outcomes.
Recognizing other team member skills is important, but equally important is continuously developing ones own skills based on priorities.
Common Efforts in Brain Building
- Examples of a Cohort include, but are not limited to: after school study group, rotating among in-class study teams, business administration, political office organization, lobby group, research group, classroom laboratory team, student clubs (robotics and rocketry, activities support, career planning, internships, community service, Junior Achievement, American Indian Science & Engineering Society,…actively look and you will find).
- Attain the ability to see how you hurt yourself related to long term goals, and actively set priorities and even write out a strategic plan so your long term goals are attainable: especially career planning. Career Planning requires thinking about consequences many years in advance, so that the education and mentor support is developed to assure success.
- Breeze through online tutorials of what you have an interest in and build a foundation to understand the jargon and how jargon “relates” to other jargon. Build a mental picture of the “relationships” because they form logical patterns with concepts you already developed in your mind. This stage is like throwing a bunch of puzzle pieces on the floor that came from different boxes of puzzles. You look for commonly connected relationships.
- Every professional takes notes, laborers don’t. The brain needs to see relationships repeatedly to become significant enough to remember. Statistically, each person reading this will retain less than 10% of the relationships presented. So when complex relationships are critical for your employer, your teacher, or mentor, and you do NOT take notes, they infer that you are being disrespectful (not worthy of trust). Respect is a communication process. The people in a social group share “Useful” information so together they can leverage each other’s skills and resources to accomplish mutual goals.
When complex relationships are presented by an employer/teacher/mentor and notes are not actively taken, the assumption by the employer is that their employee either has a learning disability, or does not care about the goals. The employer can only act on some combination of choices: A) live with the employee shortcoming and demote the employee to their most useful position,B) training by at first just mentioning the employee’s shortcoming and allowing them to actively solve their own problem and if not then escalate to required training,C) for those that catch-on, assign them a mentor to grow into more useful positions, and
D) for those that refuse to share respect with their employer/teacher/mentor they should be replaced by someone who has the capacity to share mutual goals as shared respect. Time is a limited resource for employers/teachers/mentors and wasting it prevents them from helping other people; benefiting the most with the available time.
Politeness is NOT respect, it is an offering of being allowed to EARN respect. An offer to allow you to build self-esteem.
Always have a notepad or index cards and a pen available to take notes. A notepad is compact. Index cards can be taped on a whiteboard to organize a plan of action that includes other assigned efforts and your goals.
- Take a deep breath; get things Wrong. Have fun !!!! But don’t kill an opportunity by giving up; take what was learned and re-approach the problem to include all of your new perspectives and relationships. This promotes Brain Building. Significant opportunities are not offered to people who give up; solving complex problems to create useful outcomes is a required life skill. While discovering what works, pay attention to what does NOT work; and next time choose a slightly different path.
Get excited about the little wins! Complex problems result in many diverse efforts before mentally connecting “broadly considered” relationships to “usefully” model a solution. Recognizing patterns of what does not work is every bit as important as learning what does work; it allows for solving similar problems more efficiently. Pay attention to the potential opportunities that the broad “useful” relationships you have learned provide; great deeds are built by connecting “usefully engaged moments”. - Scrap the exactness of symbolism standardized by others. Do not try to infer meaning from the construction of a symbol or “Syntax”. Symbols are used to represent unique perspectives, but the form of symbols is historically generated by random events. Create a pseudo representation or notation of your own that allows you to associate interactive relationships. Mneumonics, Pseudo-Code (software generalized code), Short-hand, Doodles…are often used for Pattern Matching to learn how to recognize relationships.
Then connect the standard accepted syntax of a particular language with your pseudo code. Through practiced use of Standard Syntax in relating to your Pseudo Code, the Standard Syntax will eventually dominate over your natural expression of the relationships. With your new found exactness of relating to relationships, go back and more carefully review previously viewed tutorials to understand in greater depth the broad usefulness of what was presented. - Find a stickler; someone that encourages trying, but won’t let you get away with mistakes in your details. This is important to become fluent. In most computer language Integrated Development Environments (IDE), the computer will act as your mentor and hold you accountable for your details; unforgivingly noting your mistakes.We need to find other mentors in other areas where we need expertise to help us define the details of other areas of interest; like music, mathematics, business, career planning … where internships, teachers, counselors, clubs, forums… are some ways of acquiring the stickler we need to become fluent.
Without a Stickler within the expertise we need, it is much more difficult to recognize where our system of relationships and perspectives we think we understand, fall short. Appreciate a Stickler, they are difficult to find, and their importance is significant to each of us. - Actively pursue Practiced Experience. If learning a spoken language, you might carry on both sides of a conversation with yourself, or participate in logical debate with others. In a written language, perhaps writing influential logical rhetoric for and against a particular perspective; with authoritative references cited.In computer language, try different coding techniques to explore accomplishing the same tasks.
Play with it. Visualize what the potential outcomes might be before coding. If a person only learns one way of expressing themselves, it is difficult for them to express diverse relationships within a changing environment.However, a person that has a big set of tools and has a feel for what does not work, can more easily relate diversely to provide a solution that fits eloquently within a changing or different environment. When we have a feeling of what does not work then we are much more successful in attempting new efforts. A non-useful outcome rarely exists, unless it is consistently repeated. - Use what you Learn. If your primary language is English and you are learning Spanish, you want to find someone with a different primary language like Chinese who is trying to learn Spanish. In this way the incentive is to share the best language in-common, the one you are trying to learn.Choosing a partner who is Spanish will likely result in their boredom, and someone who speaks English will likely revert to English instead of Spanish. The same is true for computer coding and anything else to be fluently learned.
In what stimulating social environment is your desired level of coding the best skill shared in-common with someone who is not fluent in coding? Someone who is building a different part of the same project; especially when mutually supporting enterprise. - Learn how to learn. Did you take notes to remember how to learn efficiently? Statistically you retained less than 10% of what you read. So what are you going to do so that you can apply how to learn as an employable life skill?Read this material again and this time take notes. Identify the series of major relationships that are critical for you to learn efficiently; and apply them until they are a natural part of everyday discovery.Everyone has Moments of Inspiration everyday, some genius; they only can be remembered for about 3 seconds. Without taking notes to remind you of the perspective and relationships, you are like 99% of everyone else, moments of genius lost.
- Lead the way: where each person needs mentors to more effectively learn important relationships related to their goals, each person also needs to develop themselves to be worthy of becoming a mentor to those that follow in their foot steps. In the process of teaching others, a person practices better expressing themselves using the relationships and perspectives related to their goals.Often time self-declared mentors, intentionally withhold information or are incapable of providing useful information in the area they are mentoring. This results in earning disdain, distrust, and being labeled as arrogant, pompous, unreliable, shallow, insignificant, unimportant, untrustworthy… A person skilled in Self-Respect accurately conveys to others the level of confidence they have in the information and skills they are sharing.
Drama is an active political effort to convey disrespect. No useful information or skill is shared and the attempt by the perpetrator is to emotionally disturb others with no useful outcome. The perpetrator feels more in control because they can inflict destructive influence by wasting time of others, but as a result are destructive to their own reputation and the result is that they are shunned from being allowed to participate in future significant opportunities. Avoid people who create Drama, it is a waste of mental efforts and confuses actual relationships, which distorts Useful priorities and causes self-destructive tendencies.
Cohort members that are non-productive are of two types: Drift Wood contributes minimal effort, or worse, Dead Weight is overtly destructive.
Often non-productive Cohort members try to use politics and personality to participate in a Cohort without actually providing USEFUL effort. Their intent is to subvert resources, gain access to opportunities, or attribute the reputation of the group to themselves.
To be Useful requires each member to independently teach themselves something the Cohort will find useful in achieving their mutual goals.
Drift Wood and Dead Weight intents are to benefit with the least effort of their own by abusing the social relationships of the Cohort. This is destructive because it wastes time and derails useful incremental accomplishment, and makes it more difficult for the Cohort to achieve its USEFUL goals. As a result, the Cohort most often fails to achieve its goals or is significantly delayed.
Productive team members most often exclude Drift Wood and Dead Weight from future Significant Opportunities because of the risks they represent in NOT being able to achieve Cohort goals.
There are a variety of tools to use to discipline Drift Wood, while Dead Weight in-general is not worth the group resources to develop.
However, at times a productive person with good intents takes on a role that has too fast-paced obligations that cannot be met with the available personal resources (experience, needed skill set, social network, emotional skills …), There is no shame for putting in best efforts, and choosing a different pathway to productively meet desired goals. (getting mentoring, education, progressively more challenging positions, thinking out of the box and managing risks).
What is often not seen by the Cohort team members is that there are usually Mentors that observe Cohort activities. Mentor supported Significant and Low-Risk Opportunities will less often be shared with Drift Wood, while Dead Weight is excluded from any significant participation, and the Cohort members that are productive are selected in future efforts. Leadership in a Cohort is demonstrated by developing and sharing information and skills that are USEFUL to the Cohort. Thus the career related importance of efficiently learning to teach one’s self; learning and sharing is the main tool to obtain future career opportunities by persistent application in every effort.
Groups involved with self-destructive activities should be avoided, because they often permanently harm the productive member. For instance: drug abuse permanently damages the brain; at no future time will a person that abuses drugs ever be able to think with the clarity had they not ever used drugs. Continued events of abuse results in more and more brain damage.
In a report of persons in prison related to the use of marijuana, 54% of those in prison used marijuana before they were arrested. No surprise; we all can spot the dead head pot smoker, the one with no common sense, the one that will never achieve much for themselves because they keep their brain corrupted and priorities derailed because their brain is perpetually distracted.