Patagonia – Icefields and Glaciers

The day three of our visit to Patagonia was dedicated to visiting Icefields and glaciers. We had booked a full day tour which took us to Ice fields and glaciers both in Chile and Argentina.

We were picked from hotel Hotel Costaustralis in Puerto Natales by bus at six in the morning. After an hour-long drive, we reached port Puerto Chacabuco and boarded the ferry that sailed through the channels and waterways of Chilean fjords witnessing the spectacular scenery and wildlife before reaching Laguna San Rafael.

Laguna San Rafael is made by the one on of tributary of San Rafael Glacier. It is spectacularly beautiful.

San Rafael Glacier

San Rafael Glacier is one of the largest glaciers in southern Chile and is part of Northern Patagonian Ice fields. But it is not the most accessible glacier. Most tourist companies take you there by the water. You can do kayaking and hiking in the area too but we did the most sensible thing and stayed in the boat.

The glacier itself is about 70 meters tall and about 4 kilometres long. The face of the glacier is about 2 kilometres wide but what we got to see was a very small opening. Due to climate change and global temperatures, scientists believe that San Rafael Glacier has shrunk by 12 km (7.5 miles) in the past 136 years. If it continues at this rate, the estimates are that it will disappear by 2030.

That alone should make to go visit it as soon as possible.

While taking pictures around the place, I noticed one person filling a bucket with the ice. That was unusual. Surely you can’t take back ice as a souvenir. It turned out he was the boat crew and took the ice chill the drinks to serve us on the way back.

Moments later we were all drinking whiskey with millions of years old ice.

Sip a glass of whiskey chilled with millions of years old ice. 

Our next stop was an island in the region where we were served Chile’s famous barbecue. The indoor barbecue was massive and was cooking for more than one hundred guests at a time. We made friends with a local lady show was far too excited about the barbecue.

We went back to port Puerto Chacabuco and then another long bus ride to the Argentinian town of El Calafate to see the Moreno Glacier.

El Calafate

With its trademark multi-colored houses, the tiny town of El Calafate is an hour’s drive from the Moreno Glacier. A town like Puerto Natales seems to depend heavily on tourism dollars. Our bus made a tiny stop to pick up the glacier expert (undoubtedly the rarest profession in the world) or, in other words, the tour guide.

We drove for at least half an hour before a lake became visible. “This is the biggest freshwater lake in Argentina, with a surface area of 1,415 square kilometres. It has an average depth of 150 meters and a maximum depth of 500 meters. It is fed by numerous glaciers, other lakes, and many rivers. Water from this lake flows in the Atlantic Ocean through the Santa Cruz river.”

At a narrow point, we crossed the lake, and soon afterward, the glacier became visible. It was a massive field of ice terminating in the lake as a sixty meters high wall.

Moreno Glacier

When we reached the parking area, we were divided into two groups, one that was going on the boat to the front of the glacier and the other that was going to walk around it.

We opted to walk around the wooden platform about five kilometers long and had viewing galleries at different heights. Each gallery brought us closer to the ice, and the view was awesomely beautiful.

Although we could have gone closer to the ice wall in the boat, we believe the platforms were a better way of appreciating the full extent of the glacier and Southern Patagonian Ice Field.

The ice field is made of three glaciers joined together. It is one of the world’s few glaciers that is not shrinking. It advances at a speed of around 2 meters a day, but it is also melting, so it remains a stable size overall.

We were able to get close to the ice bridge, which once you could walk on. It lay broken. As we stood there, we heard massive thunder. A column of ice crumbled and falls in the lake. So scary and mesmerizing was the phenomenon that we stood there in awe.

Coming back, the wait at the Chilean border crossing was even longer. There were three buses ahead of us. By the time we got back to the hotel, it was ten pm at night.

I couldn’t help taking photos of the souvenirs.

How to be different rather than better

When Steve Jobs said, ‘Don’t do something better, do it differently,’ he changed the corporate world forever. He not only said that but he demonstrated too. When everyone was coming up with several models of personal computers, he brought just one. When everyone was competing on price, he concentrated on design. People queued for miles at every iPhone release even when they were and are the most expensive phone in the market.

He changed the rules.

He didn’t try to be better than his competition; instead, he concentrated on being different by focusing on different things.

I wondered if the same rule can be used in the ‘creative sector.’ Can a writer write differently? Can a painter paint in a different way? Can a singer sing in a completely different way.

As soon as I started asking these questions the answer stared at my face.

Of course, they can.

That is the only way the creative people thrive, by doing things differently.

The creativity doesn’t come with competition, but with imagination.

There is always going to be someone smarter than you, but there may not be someone who is more imaginative.” -Byron Wien

Yet we spend our lives in order to become better than others. We berate ourselves for not being able to write like the writers we admire. We scold our efforts, criticize our own work, and give up in desperation because we think we are not good enough.

Frank Kafka was an exceptional writer, his work expressed the absurdity of modern society in a unique way, yet plagued by self-doubt he asked his friend, Max Brod, to destroy all of his manuscripts after his death. Thanks to his friend’s foresight, who preserved his work by publishing it, there is a whole cult of admirers appropriately named “Kafkaesque.”

Kafka didn’t realize in his life that he had the advantage of being different. Something he instinctively had by being himself. He was a physically week child of a dominating father. He suffered the impersonal nature of bureaucracy and capitalism first hand to win the admiration of his father but ended up mocking the world devoid of meaning or purpose. There lied his uniqueness.

What Kafka had defiantly, Malcolm Gladwell cultivated. He wrote sociology, psychology, and social psychology books like thrillers. No doubt he is a great writer but he knows the advantage of being different.

Now the question is how to be different.

The answer is not what you expect.

Here is a story that illustrates it best.

Mohamed Ali, was a great athlete. A heavyweight champion, holder of several records for close to four decades and topper of many rankings by Sports Illustrated and the BBC. But the real reason Ali occupies such a unique place in people’s hearts and minds is that he created his own category — he was the original social-activist athlete.

Ali wasn’t afraid to use his voice at a time when others in his position usually deferred to their managers.

Ali was the first athlete to take a very public stand for civil rights and social justice — refusing to be drafted into the U.S. military in the mid-1960s, citing both his religion (he converted to Islam) and his objection to the Vietnam War.

Ali’s status as champion kept him — and these issues — in the spotlight during the five years he fought his draft conviction, eventually winning an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971.

Even though he was stripped of his titles and banned from the sport he loved during the prolonged legal battle, Ali was often dead center in the ring of public opinion, for good and for bad. His return to the ring was relatively seamless as a result. That’s why Ali transcended boxing and became a category king, the person to whom all other “combat athletes” are compared.

by Christopher Lochhead and Heather Clancy

Ali was not only different but a whole league in himself.

And he was able to achieve that status because he was always himself. He never had a shred of doubt of his own talent or believes.

And that is the essence of being different.

Each one is already unique, yet we strive to be like someone else.

All we need is to have the courage to be ourselves and we will discover we stand out anyway.

Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

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Why creating a lot of rubbish is a must for learning

If you have been following me on the intranet you would have noticed that I have been creating a cartoon every day for about eight months.

When I joined the cartoon drawing course I couldn’t even draw a decent circle. The course started with drawing circles. For one whole week, I drew nothing but circles. Lots of circles. Circles for seven days straight. Big circles, medium circles, small circles, tiny circles, circly circles. Most of those circles were no good. But I drew them anyway.

That circle drawing exercise was equivalent to creating rubbish. All that practice led to develop muscle memory. By the end of the week, I was able to draw almost round circle, of any size.

All artists create a lot of rubbish.

Take any photographer, or a painter or a writer. They all generate a lot of rubbish all the time. They do so knowingly.

Stephen King writes 2000 words every day, without fail. Do you think all those words go into his books? Let’s do the maths. At 2000 words a day, he is writing 90,000 words in three months. Which means he should be churning out at least three books a year. Yet he comes up one or at the most two books a year. Which means only a fraction of his daily words makes it to his books.

What about the rest of the words? They were rubbish. They went straight to the bin.

Creating rubbish is part of the deal. Here are three reasons for that.

1. Creating Rubbish gives practice.

Learning a new skill takes a lot of practice. Initially, when we start we know our work is no good. We are learning the craft. We are trying to be good. We have potential but we are not there yet.

Creating rubbish frustrates. We think we have no talent and we want to give up. Many people do. They never get past creating rubbish phase. They quit. They give up because they think they don’t have the special thing that they want.

If you are just starting or you are going through this phase you got to know that it is normal. You need to keep reminding yourself that you must do a lot of practice in order to get to the level you want to be at. It is only by creating a lot of rubbish that you will develop enough muscle memory to become good.

2. In that rubbish, you will find nuggets.

When I started writing for this site, I struggled to come up with ideas to write about. My posts were tiny, just a few paragraphs, and they were not fluent at all. But now an then I would write a post which would stand out. Even now, when I read my old posts I wonder and ask myself, did I write it.

The same thing happens with my diary writing. Most of the stuff is straight rubbish but some of the insights and thoughts I have come up there are priceless.

They are nuggets that justify all those unnecessary words. They helped figure out what I really wanted to say.

Julia Cameron the writer of The Artist’s Way advises to highlight those nuggets and keep them to use in your other writing.

3. Creating rubbish helps learning stick to memory.

Daniel Coyle tells the story of a thirteen-years-old Clarissa(not her real name) in his book The Talent Code. Clarissa is a mediocre music student. Her only reason to learn to play clarinet is “because I’m supposed to.”

Clarissa’s practice is captured in a video for the music psychologists Gary McPherson and James Renwick who were flabbergasted by what they learned from a six-minute clip.

Clarissa is working on a new song, “Golden Wedding.” She listens to the song a few minutes then draws a breath and plays two notes. Then she stops. She pulls the clarinet from her lips and stares at the paper. Her eyes narrow. She plays seven notes, the song’s opening phrase. She misses the last note. She immediately stops. She squints again at the music and sings the phrase softly. She starts over and plays the riff from the beginning makes a few notes further into the song.

She continues to do that, stopping at each mistake, correcting it, starting from the beginning, and moving a bit further into the song. What Clarissa is doing is learning from her mistakes and making the learning stick to memory.

In the beginning, when I was able to draw my first few cartoons, I was ecstatic. I thought they were great. But as I drew more and more I discovered my earlier attempts were not just bad but pathetic.

My brain learned to spot the rubbish.

Now, eight months into the course, I know that most of my work will be no good. But I must continue to create if I want to become good at them. And in there, there will be some nuggets worth saving.

That gives me the reason to keep on creating more rubbish.

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The fun factor in learning

About a year ago Mark Rober (a former NASA engineer) asked his YouTube followers to play a simple computer programming puzzle that he made with his buddy.

He told them that he wanted to prove that anyone from any background could learn to code. Fifty thousand of them took the challenge. But the truth was he didn’t care about proving that everyone could learn to code.

He was trying to figure out the role of fun factor in the learning process.

To be able to do that he added a little bit of stress for half the participants. He randomly served two slightly different versions of puzzles.

The only difference between the two versions was that in one version if they failed they didn’t lose any points but in the other version they lost five points. In both versions, the participants were given 200 points to start with.

When he analyzed the data he discovered that the success rate for those who were penalized for failed attempts was around 52%. But the success rate for those who were not penalized was 68%.

A difference of 16% was too much to believe.

But the answer came to him when he analyzed another piece of data  — the number of attempts to solve the puzzle.

Those who were penalized gave up after 5 tries but those who were not penalized tried 12 times or more. 

In other words, those who didn’t see failure in a negative light tried two and a half times more to solve the puzzle. As a result, they got more success and therefore learned more.

This was an astounding discovery. They had accidentally stumbled upon something significant. The trick to learning more is finding the right way to frame the learning process.

How to frame the learning process to learn more?

There are three things you can do:

1. Make failure a part of the learning process.

2. Shift the focus to fun.

3. Make the environment conducive to learning.

1. Make failure a part of the learning process. 

If you canframe the learning processin such a way where failure doesn’t bother you can learn much more and have a lot of fun in the process.

There is real evidence of that in real life. Toddlers are constantly trying new things. When they learn to walk they don’t think about how dumb they might look if they fall. They fall, again and again, and they don’t get scolded by their parents either. Instead, the parents encourage them to try again and again.

Toddlers’ focus is on learning to walk. By constantly trying, failing, and retrying they learn to walk.

2. Shift the focus to fun

When Super Mario Bros. came out, people were obsessed with it. They wanted to get to the castle and rescue the beautiful Princess Peach from the evil Bowser. Kids will get to school and ask each other, “What level did you make it to? Did you pass the game?”

They never asked each other about the different ways they might have died.

When playing these games, after jumping into a pit, no one thinks, “I am so ashamed; that was such a failure, I am never going to try again.”

What really happens is that they make a mental note, “I’ve got to remember there’s a pit there; next time, I’m going to come out with a little more speed and jump a bit later.”

By shifting our focus on the fun we can trick our brain and learn more. Science supports it too.

Brain research tells us that when the fun stops, learning often stops too.

Judy Will calls it the RAD effect in her paper The Neuroscience of Joyful Education. RAD is the acronym that explains the science behind the fun factor.

R stands for Reticular Activating System, A for Amygdala,and D for Dopamine. It happens in three steps.

Novelty promotes information transmission through the Reticular activating system.
Stress-free learning propels data through the Amygdala’s effective filter.
Pleasurable associations linked with learning are more likely to release more dopamine, a neurotransmitter that stimulates the memory centers and promotes the release of acetylcholine, which increases focused attention.

You can add novelty by creating a stress-free environment for learning. 

3. Make the environment conducive to learning.

For some reason, most of the learning environments are designed like classrooms. Whether they are workshops, seminars, or group learning sessions; they are set up is like a school, demanding conformity and rigidity. Something that language teacher Michel Thomas renowned for his unconventional but successful ways of teaching is trying to break. 

If you look at Michel Thomas’s video on YouTube, you’ll notice something quite odd. He has been given a bunch of very challenging students (a mixed bag in other words) and his job is to get them started speaking French. The video starts with students in the classroom but they are not learning the language. 

Instead, Thomas gets them to do something entirely unexpected.

He gets then to move furniture. The students move sofas, tables, chairs and screens to create an atmosphere that is more like a lounge room rather than a classroom. Once the barrier between the teacher and student is broken, the conversation starts. Add food and coffee to the mix and students will be using French words and remember them much more easily. There will be no shame in incorrect pronunciation or not remembering the new words. The mistakes will be laughed off real learning will happen.

Thomas says, “learning should never be work. Instead, it should be a pleasure”.

You can change the environment for self-learning too. Rather than sitting in a library (or classroom) go to a park or cafe. Rather than reading alone, take along a friend. Explain to your friend what you have just read. You will read with more concentration and you will never forget what you have explained to someone in your own words.

I have covered a lot, lets recap.

The trick to learning more is finding the right way to frame the learning process.

If you can change your learning process in such a way that the failure is part of the learning process (a child learning to walk), your focus is on having fun (like saving the princess in a game) and your environment stress-free and novel (from a classroom or a library to a loungeroom or a cafe) you can enhance your learning many folds.

There you go. 

Add some fun to your learning process and you will learn much more.

Photo by John Moeses Bauan on Unsplash

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Why tiny increments beat bulk learning?

And why gobble-gobble learning is not such a good idea.

In 1954, Toru Kumon, a high school maths teacher in Japan, found his son struggling with math in elementary school. To help him practice, he started giving him simple maths problems to solve every day.

He discovered that when the degree of difficulty was only slightly high, his son did well. But when the degree of difficulty was high by several notches, not only that his son couldn’t solve the problems but he didn’t want to do the practice work anymore.

That was the origin of the Kumon system of teaching maths. Toru Kumon went on to create a maths curriculum of daily practice by increasing the difficulty factor by tiny increments. Over the next seven decades, using his system, millions of students have learned maths and excelled at it beyond their own wildest dreams.

My own daughters, who hated the subject in early elementary school started loving it after a couple of years on the system and became top maths students in their respective classes.

What made Kumon such a successful system?

Just two elements — tiny increments and daily practice.

When learning, our tendency is to gobble up as quickly as possible and be a master in no time. Initially, when the material is easy, we progress well, but as soon as the difficulty increases, we start getting frustrated and learning stops.

Learning in tiny increments on a consistent basis beats learning in large chunks over a short period of time. Here are three core reasons why:

1) The sleep factor
2) The tiredness factor
3) The mistake factor

Let’s start with the sleep factor.

Our brain processes each bit of information it receives and decides what to do with it. It literary makes the decision whether to store it or discard it. If the information is important, our brain stores it in short-term memory. If repeated several times, it qualifies to go the long-term memory. Things stored in the short-time memory get deleted constantly if not used. This processing happens mostly while we are sleeping.

Believe it or not, sleep plays a big role in learning.

But then, can’t bulk learning make us smarter? Surely the brain can absorb a lot more information at one go.

Yes, it can, but there’s a problem called tiredness that steps right in.

The tiredness factor

Bulk learning is plainly ineffective when compared with daily learning — and you don’t need a research scientist to tell you that. If you’re learning a new skill, the brain is under tremendous pressure. It’s trying to absorb all the new information and associating it with what you already know. Think about the amount of glucose it is going to need to be able to do that.

Now multiply that with the number of hours you are going to spend learning in a day and you know why you feel like throwing the book out of the window.

When we get tired we start losing the little chunks past the first few minutes of reading. As the tiredness increases, we start losing bigger chunks.

And yet most of us believe in bulk learning.

And this is because we’re in a hurry. Yet, the best way to learn something is to slow things down considerably. Slowing down gives the opportunity to detect more mistakes.

Let’s have a look at what role mistakes play in learning.

The mistake factor

If we do something every day, we learn from new mistakes we make every day. When we are bulk learning the mistakes are all a blur. But daily mistakes get highlighted.

When our learning pace is slow and we learn in tiny increments we have more time and inclination to fix those mistakes. Many mistakes are made due to a gap in our learning as well. The slow pace allows us to fill those gaps.

So we get to learn — and more importantly, revise what we know. And what we don’t know. Bulk learning is not as efficient, because the mistakes are made en masse. Every mistake gets its own spotlight and hence we get the chance to eliminate those mistakes systematically.

That is what talent is, the systematic reduction of errors.

It takes most people years to become extremely proficient at writing. Yet with the right teacher and the right system, this can be shortened.

And the right system is the system that Toru Kumon discovered seventy years ago. The system of tiny increments and daily practice.

Contrary to what people believe, it’s tiny victories that work, not big leaps. The big leap comes from tiny movements.

Next week another factor of learning — the fun factor.

Photo by Sheri Hooley on Unsplash

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How to sharpen a lousy memory and retain everything you read?

Picture this, a teenage boy comes to a grocery store on his bike, parks his bike outside the store, walks in, buys what he needs, and then walks back home completely forgetting about his bike.

Not only that, but it also doesn’t occur to him that he left his bike outside the grocery store until the next day.

Now imagine this, the same boy memorizes a 1944 digit number on TV in front of a large audience and repeats it correctly. He then continues to memorize and recall 7 decks of cards, a 1200 digit binary number and makes a new Guinness world record by memorizing 100 colors shown in random sequence and recalling them without a single mistake.

How did he manage to do that? How did he convert his lousy memory to a memory machine?

Memory has always been my problem. Ever since I was in school I had trouble memorizing ‘stuff’ for exams. Now in middle age, my memory is becoming more of a problem. I struggle with remembering people’s names. While writing I struggle with remembering words. The right words always seem to be on the tip of my tongue but elude me and I give up in frustration. I invariably forget scenes and the storyline from the movies that I have watched on TV, sometimes multiple times.

One of my all-time desire is to improve my memory so that I am able to remember whatever I read so that I am able to recall it when I need it. If I can retain only a fraction of the information I consume, I will be ecstatic.

I wanted to learn how memory worked.

If I can retain only a fraction of the information I consume, I will be ecstatic. My quest led me to Nishant Kasibhatla, the boy in the above story.

Nishant Kasibhatia spent his life learning to sharpen his memory. He has come up with a formula which goes like this:

The first thing we need for developing good memory is input.

Luckily Input is easy. We are all very good at it. But there lies our problem.

We go to seminars, we read books, we watch videos, we follow blogs, we listen to podcasts. It is input… input… input…and more input. But it happens to us so many times that we read a book and a few days later we forget what was in it.

By jumping from one book to another, one article to another, one podcast to another, we are only encouraging shallow learning.

The shallow learning is when we can’t even recall what our take away points were. The purpose of reading is to learn and the purpose of learning is to benefit us in some form.

What’s the point of reading something if we can’t implement it and benefit from it.

Learning without implementation is pure intellectual entertainment, nothing else.

Here are 3 things we can do to improve our input.

1. Remove distractions. When we are learning something, we need to make sure that our full attention is towards that learning. If we pick up the phone or take a peek at the emails or go to the internet we kill the momentum of learning.

2. Do Single-tasking. When we are multitasking our brain is dealing with mutiple things at the same time. It then makes the executive decision what to keep in the long time memory and what to discard. Most of the time it discards everything becuase it think it must not be important enough since you are not paying full attention to it.

3. Make sure the quality of input is really really high. Our brain has inbuilt filter to discard the poor quality information. If you don’t believe try remembering rubbish movies you have seen and rubbish books or articles you have read. Your brain has instantly thrown in the rubbish bin.

The quality of input determines the quality of retention. It also determines the quality of recall.

Add to INPUT some REFLECTION and our retention increases many folds.

We all rush to learn new things. Lerning new things is fine, but the problem is we don’t take time to reflect which is extremely important for retention.

When learning something new we need to pause for a while and ask ourselves, what is my takeaway from this. How can I use this information in my life? How can this information benefit my work, my family, my life?

When we pause, reflect, and ask these questions the learning solidifies.

Now add the third ingredient IMPLEMENTATION to the mix and the magic happens.

Unfortunately, many people (myself included), in our haste, miss this step.

What do we do? We go out, learn something new, get excited, feel good, get inspired, and then go on to learn something new.

When we continue to learn without implementation, we get the illusion of competence. We feel we are competent but it is not competence at all.

What we need to do is, stop, write down what are the few things we can take action on, schedule it in our calendar, and take some action.

Even a lousy action is better than no action because it is the implementation that internalise the learning.

Now comes the most important ingredient, SHARING.

The best way to learn something is to teach it. Teaching is a way to OUTPUT. Sharing can also happen when you explain things to others or write an article about it or make notes and share them with a buddy. When you do that you are helping your brain to pay more attention. This is when you are on the path to master the topic.

No one becomes the master of something just by INPUT. They all became master by taking in better quality INPUT and doing more OUTPUT than INPUT.

For true mastery, you need to focus more on the OUTPUT than on the INPUT.

Nishant Kasibhatia

It all depends upon how much time you spend on learning something and how much time you spend on reflecting, implementing, and sharing. Nishant recommends, if you are spending x amount of time on INPUT, you should spend double the amount of time on OUTPUT.

REFLECTION, IMPLEMENTATION, AND SHARING are all ways of output.

In today’s fast-paced information age, maximizing our memory power is not an option but a necessity. We use our memory all the time and the way we use it affects what we achieve in our lives.

No matter what your profession or occupation, mastering information, and memory management skills will prove essential, and will help you to increase your productivity and profitability.

PS: I am not in any way associated or affiliated with him. I found him quite accidentally while researching for a way to improve my memory and retention ability.

I intend to write more articles on the topic in the comings days. Stay tuned.

Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

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