How To Stop Your Left Brain From Thinking

Neera

You know the feeling when you have something due, and you think there is still plenty of time. That was what I was feeling when I left the article writing to the last minute.

Just an hour was left before the article was meant to go live, and I hadn’t even started it yet. Do you know what happens in situations like these?

Your left brain takes over.

It sounds something like this. Are you crazy? You can’t write an article in less than an hour. It takes you two to three hours to pull one up on good days. On bad days, I have seen you taking seven to eight hours. Are you kidding yourself? Don’t send a half-baked, typo-strewn article to get yourself ridiculed. Give yourself time. Maybe give up writing. You have been writing for years and still struggling with it. Find something else. Something more suitable for your skills.

Sounds familiar?

How about when you were asked to make a speech in front of colleagues? You froze. That was your left brain in control of you again.

Do you remember when you were learning to drive and, for the first time, drove on a busy road? You could feel the taste of your stomach acid in your mouth. It’s your left brain at work.

The left brain is the bully brain. It doesn’t just complicate things with its logic; it goes one step further. It drowns out the free-thinking nature of the right brain.

Let’s figure out how the left brain works.

The left brain is mathematical and logical. It makes sure 6 + 4 is always 10 (not 11). It makes sure we reach a conclusion logically. Remember Mr. Spock of Star Trek movies. It is Mr. Spock of our Enterprise. For it, everything has to be logically evaluated and weighed and analyzed.

My left brain is raising its eyebrow at the moment. It is telling me logically I can’t write an article within an hour if my average is 2 to 3 hours. 

For it, 2 or 3 is not equal to one. 

For the bully brain, everything is black and white.

But thankfully I have another brain the right brain.

The right brain can see many colors. It can see the rainbow and the whole color pallet in between. That is why when we are painting, or drawing, or playing music, we are using the right brain.

This, of course, drives our bully brain totally crazy. It tries desperately to pigeon-hole everything into black and white. And, of course, it fails. And when the two brains are at odds with each other, it sends us into a spiral.

When we are faced with a problem, which brain we should listen to? Well, the logical answer is that we should reach out to the left brain. To Mr. Spock.

But how about if we reach out for the right brain—the crazy brain— instead.

The crazy brain doesn’t give a hoot about being black or white. So if you are to make a speech at work to a gathering of 100 colleagues, it will randomly pull out something it had stored away somewhere, which you don’t even remember, and get you started. It will start putting words in your mouth, and you wonder where is it coming from?

It will make you take action even before the bully brain has the chance to open its mouth. It will get you going even before Mr. Spock has time to lift his eyebrow.

The crazy brain works splendidly for writing.

All I had to do was to start writing. As soon as my fingers started moving on the keyboard, the ideas started coming. First a bit awkwardly but then fluently. I set the timer for fifteen minutes, which kept me more on track. Now there is a race between time and the crazy brain. It has to bring words faster than the timer runs out.

When we do something under strict time limits, the bully brain ping pongs between black and white. When we do something quite radical, it confuses the bully brain so much that it shut down.

If you haven’t done it before, try it. Give yourself 5 minutes to write an email. You have to address all the issues and type out a 200-words email in five minutes. Immediately your bully brain will snarl. Surely you can’t have speed and quality, it hisses. But ignore it. Just go with your crazy brain. And at first, you’ll get resistance, but eventually, the bully, like all bullies, will get fed up and leave.

I found this when I was learning typing in 1996.

I was using typing software to learn to type. When I started using it for the first time, I kept the speed at the slowest. But after some days, when my fingers became aware of where the letters were, I still kept the speed slow so that my accuracy improves. But rather than improving, it was getting worse. Then one day, out of frustration, I increased the speed of words appearing on the screen and started typing without looking at the keyboard. My accuracy was all-time better. I had managed to shut the bully brain.

But does that mean we should always go with the crazy brain?

No, of course not. Both brains have their value. But we have to recognize that the bully brain doesn’t do very well when dealing with fuzzy stuff that doesn’t end up with 6+4=10. So you have to bypass it.

Sometimes speed works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes we can use a change of method, location, technology to trick the bully brain. Our job is to find out how to stop our bully brain from taking center stage and prancing around like a spoiled two-year-old.

What if the bully brain starts taking over?

If you start freezing or taking too much time or if what you do is driving you crazy, you need to stop the bully brain.

Find a way to access your crazy brain instead to tackle the same job in a totally different way. You get your work done and most importantly that bully brain shuts up. Phew!

Try it.

Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash

What is the purpose of an author’s website (that your publisher hasn’t told you about)

Neera

In 1913, when twenty-three years old Arthur Wynne created the first crossword puzzle to include in the Christmas edition of New York World he had no idea it was going to be so popular. His first puzzle was nothing like today’s crossword puzzles, but it was still very challenging and engrossing.

But the editors of the New York World didn’t like it. After a few months, when they tried to drop it, readers were so hostile that not only the newspaper had to stick with the puzzle but to make it a permanent feature.

For the next ten years, if you wanted to solve a crossword, you had to buy “The New York World” until one day Richard L. Simon’s aunt wanted a book of crossword puzzles for her daughter. Richard was a publisher. He knew no such book existed. But he saw the opportunity. He negotiated a deal with New York World and bought their best puzzles at $25 a pop and published them in a book form. The book sold 300,000 copies by end of the year.

Sometimes those in business can’t see the obvious just like the editors of the New York World. The publishers are advising the writers to create a website and writers are obliging by creating a static site. Both are failing to see the purpose and potential of an author’s website.

Authors need to have an online presence, full stop.

In today’s world, an author exists because he has a website. But an author’s website is not just a static page with his picture, bio, and the list of his books. An author’s website is a marketing machine. It is the engine room where all the action happens. It is his portfolio, a live resume, a bookstore, a signing venue, a classroom, a sketchbook, and an online diary all put together.

Writers have traditionally stayed away from the publishing and marketing side of things. Many writers are willing to collect hundreds of rejection slips from traditional publishers rather than learn the marketing skills and sell their work.

For some reason there, even in this age of self-publishing and online marketing, the thought of going indie is inconceivable for many. On the flip side, many marketers are writing books and successfully selling thousands of copies. They know something that writers don’t and traditional publishers are failing to see the potential.

Why traditional publishers are failing to see the potential of the author’s websites.

At first, the traditional publishers were too big to care. Their whole focus was to find a few best-sellers a year which gave them enough cashflow. They would take some risk on new writers but never invest enough time to build them into good writers. The new writers were left to their own devices to keep learning, trying, and if they were persistent enough to come up with something decent to be published.

Then came the internet and along with it the ability to self-publish.

Some authors took risks, learned the ropes, and became successful. But not in enough numbers to be a threat to traditional publishing. The printed books were still the main game and winning awards was the only way the writers got any recognition.

Amazon changed the game completely. Introduction of Kindle, followed by Apple’s iBooks (now called Apple Books) and later on Audiobooks set the stage for a complete change-over to happen within a few years.

In all this chaos publishers didn’t get a chance to understand what was happening around them.

Like the editors of New York World they couldn’t see the potential online marketing. They were still at a point where they were advising their authors to have a website while the self-publishers had a readership in thousands and were selling their books directly to them.

Then the publisher started demanding that authors got to have email lists.

The publishers figured out that if an author has a pre-existing mailing list, a percentage of them will buy the book. But they had no strategy in place on how to help or guide the thousands of writers who were still sending their manuscripts to them and had no websites or mailing lists.

A smart business move for the publisher would to work with the budding writers and help them build an online presence and readership. It takes years for a writer to get good at her craft, and it takes years to build a readership. Both can happen in parallel.

If publishers and writers figure out a way to work with each other, in the long run they both will be able to benefit from each other’s efforts.

An author will benefit from a publisher’s backing in creating an author’s website and know-how on how to build an email list.

And a publisher will benefit from having several writers as their protégés who are not only improving their manuscript but also building a readership.

Let’s figure out what is involved with an author’s website?

There is no shortage of advice on what an author’s website should and shouldn’t have. And if you go around looking at what other authors have got, you are bound to get more confused and likely to give up rather than feeling inspired. Starting from highly technical and interactive J K Rowling’s site to very professional sites of Deen Kontz, John Grisham, Gillian Flynn, and Nora Roberts there is so much to leave a new writer bewildered.

Rather than getting bamboozled by all these well-established writers, as a new writer, if you concentrate on three things, you should be able to self-create a site that is interesting, interactive, and professional enough to start your online presence and build your readership.

The three things you should concentrate on are:

1. Information about you
2. Showcasing your work
3. Interacting with your readers

People want to know you before they want to buy your book.

Even quite lately authors were being advised that people don’t come to your site to read about you, they come there to read about your book. That is absolutely wrong advise. Authors were being told, you are important but your books are more important. It is rubbish.

When you go to a library with an array of books to choose from, which one will you pick to borrow? Usually, the one by an author you already know about. Same way, when you are choosing a book to buy, what is the first thing you read after reading the blurb about the book. The author’s bio.

Of course, people are interested to know more about you. They are after all going to spend the next 2 – 4 weeks reading your book. They want to know who you are, what is your background, how did you come to write that book. They are interested as much in your story as they are in the story of your book.

I follow Elizabeth Gilbert, the writer of ‘Eat Pray and Love, on Instagram. Last week she surpassed one million fans. Every feed she puts on Instagram, and she puts 4 to 5 every week, she gets two to three thousand responses. Her fans are not only interested in whatever she shares about her life but engage with her actively.

Your biography doesn’t have to tell your whole life story. But it needs to tell the truth about you. Even if you write under a pen name, whatever you tell in your bio needs to be honest and true.

Another thing you need to be aware of is that your bio not really about you. It is about your readers. When your reader reads it they should be able to relate to it. My own bio which is just four paragraphs long talks about my struggles with becoming a good writer and how a change of mindset from a martyr to a trickster made writing fun for me. Something each struggling writer can relate to.

The purpose of your website is to showcase your work.

Of course, the first purpose of your website is to showcase your books. You got to give enough coverage to your book on your website. Whenever you publish a new book, you can make it the centerpiece of your website. David Sedaris does it well on his site.

You have a book to sell; you need to make sure people know where to buy it. If a reader visits your site and doesn’t realize immediately that you’re an author with a book to sell, you’re probably doing something wrong. The buttons like “Pre-order now” steer readers to order your book even before it is published.

But your website could also be a place to showcase your work. Austin Kleon the writer of the book ‘Show Your Work’ publishes a post each day on his blog where he showcases whatever art he did that day. All his learning, reading, and writing go on his blog first and then go into his books. He has thousands of fans who are hungry to consume whatever he puts on his website. His is a very simple blog-style site that is easy to maintain but full of great content.

Your blog provides the opportunity to stay in contact with your readers.

It is your interaction with the readers that will get your books sold. A blog is a great medium to be able to do that.

Imagine getting an email from J K Rowlings once a week telling you what she has been up to, how her new book is going, and bits and pieces about her writing process. Maybe she sends you a couple of chapters from her new book. Maybe she wants to enroll a few beta-readers. Wouldn’t you want to be on her mailing list? And when finally her book is ready to be published would you buy it or would you say, Umh…, aah…, I will think about it. Of course, you will buy it. You will even pre-order.

You get the point.

But the biggest problem an author has that they have no clue what to write in their blog each week. And publishers are no help. They are so far behind in this game.

Your blog is a letter you write to your fans each week. There is a number of things you can cover in this letter.

You can tell your readers what are you reading, what intrigued you and what have you learned from it.

You can write reviews and recommend books.

You can teach something. Most of the readers want to become writers themselves.

Weekly emails with bite-size learnings make very welcoming blog posts.

But most importantly you can share your process of creation. People have an insatiable desire to know how real authors work.

But I can’t create and maintain a website. I am not technical.

If you can learn to use a computer, learn to do research on the internet, you can also learn to create and maintain a website and a blog. It is just a piece of software, that is interactive and user friendly like any other. Besides, there is a lot of help available online.

YouTube has thousands of videos that can teach you how to build a website and start a blog. You just need to spend fifteen minutes a day and within a week you will be able to create a decent website using a free template.

Too much to absorb, let me explain it in short.

An author’s website is to an author what a printing press is to a publisher. You ought to have one. But you do not have to be bamboozled by the professional sites of established authors. You can start small. And if you can concentrate on three things initially, you can have a firm mechanism not only to sell your books but build a loyal readership while you are writing them. Those three things are:

1. Your bio
2. Your work
3. Your blog

You have a choice, you can either wait for a publisher to find you or you can make yourself findable.

Publishers are fast becoming a dying breed. Now it is up to each individual author to sell their work. And the starting point for that is a website. Don’t delay it any longer. Sooner you will start, the quicker you will get better.

Still have a lot of questions?

Should I have my name as the domain name or should I create a site based on my book title?

If I hire someone to create a website how much it will cost?

How long it will take me to attract the first 100 readers?

How much time I will need to spend each week to write the blog?

How many articles I need to write a week?

Send me your questions and I will create a Frequently Asked Questions guide for you.

Also, I am working on a step by step guide to build your website for yourself. Stay tuned for that.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

Today marks two years of blogging

Neera 3 Comments

I wake up, from a fretful sleep. It is a wet, windy and depressing morning. I settle down in the bed as usual and start writing. For the next two hours, it is just me and my words. My husband is not allowed to interrupt me. He gets ready and leaves for work.

I sit in the folds of doona – laptop notebooks, and books scattered around me – I am in heaven. Today is 27 July. I am feeling nostalgic and make a deliberate trip to memory lane. Two years ago, on this day, I was miserable. I had no clue where my life was going. Although I was in a well-paying job earning a high six-figure income, I wasn’t happy. Something was missing. I didn’t know what it was.

On a whim, at lunchtime, I bought a domain under my real name. I had been writing for some time but didn’t publish anything. I was too scared to put my name on what I wrote and severely doubted my ability to become a writer. Yet that is all I wanted to be. I thought blogging would ease me into a writing career. I had started a couple of blogs before, but they didn’t last long. My self-doubt and lack-of-time to devote to my passion were tearing me apart.

The same evening, as usual, I visited my father in the nursing home. He was a bit unwell. His infection was back. He should have been put on antibiotics, which my brother had bought and left with the staff since morning, but they hadn’t started the medication due to a discrepancy in paperwork. As my brother and I were still sorting that, he took his last breath. One minute he was there, next he was gone. Forever.

A few days later, when the shock of his departure subsided, I wrote my first post Why I started this blog. It was more of a tribute to him. Writing it comforted me more than anything else. I couldn’t express everything I was feeling but I felt I had finally found a place to express myself.

My own words comforted me then. Even after two years, they are still able to comfort me. For some reason, writing seems to be the right way to remember my father.

This blog started on the same day my father passed away. In a strange way, they both got connected. As if he had reincarnated in the form of a blog. In my eulogy, I wrote that my father had big hands, the kind of hands a father should have. It feels like he has put his hand over me through this blog. Could something technical and virtual be someone’s solace?

This blog is the place where I could be myself. This is where I pour my heart, talk about my fears, share my lessons, and inspire others. This blog taught me a lot, not only about writing but life itself. Last year, on this day, I wrote an article listing 10 learning from the first year of blogging to mark the day.

This year I have created a book of inspirations – 31 Tips to Unleash Your Creativity. It holds the words that inspired me and kept me going through this journey. Click the link and download it.

I want to take this opportunity to thank you, my dear readers. You stood by me all this time and witnessed my progress from an unsure scribbler to someone who is living the life she wants to live. I will continue to write for you and for myself, sharing my learnings and solving the mysteries of life.

Thank you for your support. I love you all.

Photo by Zach Kadolph on Unsplash

Why everyone around me is so irrational and how can I fix them

Neera 1 Comment

Imagine if you were a woman who was cat-called — and you decided to interview your cat-caller. 

This is exactly what Eleanor Gordon-Smith, an Australian journalist, did.

Cat-calling or eve-teasing is nothing new to women. Every one of us has so many stories tucked away in our memory vaults. 

Why men cat-call? What they hope to get from it? Eleanor decided to confront her cat-callers to find out. What she discovered left her dumbfounded.

Most of them didn’t mind being interviewed. When she thrust her mean-looking tape recorder under their faces, they gave her inconsistent reasons behind their motivation. 

“A guy just does it for attention,” said one. “I am looking for a reaction, any reaction,” admitted the other. “I am looking to meet someone, start a conversation, try to see if she is into it.” claimed the other. 

Then she came across the most bizarre one, “They love it. They have to love it.” His conviction was absolute so was his irrationality.

But was he any more irrational than anyone of us? 

We like to think that we are reasonable, while others are unreasonable. But is that the truth? Is it in itself an unreasonable belief in itself?  

Much that we like to think we are rational beings; we are all irrational.

Take the process of decision making, for instance.

We like to think we make our decisions rationally. But we don’t.

 A rational way of decision-making is to assess a problem from all its angles, weigh pros and cons, and then decide. 

How many of us do that? And even if we do, how many we have followed the logical conclusion?

I have often drawn a line in the middle of a sheet of paper, written down the pro and cons but rarely I have made the decision in favor of most ‘pros’ on the table. My mind had already reached the decision. All I was doing was discovering what it was. I was justifying myself to myself. 

Is that rational?

Rational persuasion is the right way of changing our minds, but do we actually do that?

No, we don’t. 

The reasoned argument is the currency of persuasion sounds good in theory. The fact is we hate being persuaded. Right or wrong, we like to hold on to our beliefs. Changing our beliefs means putting aside ego and admitting that it is time to change our ill-informed beliefs. How many of us do that?

I have been trying to get my husband to do flexibility training for years now. He walks each morning, at least five kilometers, sometimes even more. He is doing enough cardio-vascular workout but nothing to keep his muscles flexible. He can’t squat, can’t sit on the floor, and have trouble picking up things he drops. But he refuses to do any flexibility training. He believes a walk is all he needs to stay fit. All the rational persuasion (and the evidence that he is losing flexibility) is not enough to change his mind.

Very few of our life decisions are based on rationality.

When we base our decision on rationality, our mind is calm. We know we have made the right decision when we have listened to reasoned arguments, considered all the facts, and didn’t get dissuaded by the people around us. We have been able to set aside our ego and emotion to make a choice. That is why we feel at peace with ourselves. But that happens only a few times.

When I decided to take early retirement to devote my time to writing, it was one of those decisions when my mind was totally at rest. It took six months of planning, considering all the options, fulfilling financial obligations, and choosing the right time to resign. Not even once, I regretted it.

But soon after, I made a series of decisions that left me frustrated, angry, and led to so much mental turmoil, that I wondered if I was the same woman who so calculatedly embarked on a new career.

If we don’t make decisions rationally, then how do we make decisions.

The fact is our decision-making process is as unpredictable as our beliefs are. Both happen somewhere deep in our minds.

We make decisions subconsciously. 

A common agate in marketing is that we buy with our hearts and justify with our minds. It is true with our decision making too.

We make decisions based on our belief system. 

The more aligned our decisions are with our belief system calmer, we feel. When a decision is in alignment with one belief but conflict with another, we enter the world of turmoil.

Sometimes we make decisions in a split second, and it just feels right. 

Although the reasoning is not clear to us, there are thousands of subtle clues that our mind picks up and uses them to reach a decision.

Why do we find our own decisions rational but other people’s decisions irrational?

Other people make their decisions the same way as we do. 

Their belief system is different than ours, so what is rational to them is irrational to us. 

We can justify our own decisions to ourselves, but we can’t do that with others. So we start thinking they are irrational.

I find it hard to believe that my brother has spent so much money to buy a second-hand car for which he could have bought a new car. For me, a new car is a new car. It is less hassle and has a manufacturer’s warranty. But my brother finds it hard to believe that I would go for a new car that depreciates as soon as it comes out of the showroom. We both think of each other being irrational.

Can we make other people act rationally?

Only as much as they can make us act rationally.

Irrationality is the space between what is expected of us and how we respond.

If the two align, we are considered rational. If they don’t, our behavior is considered irrational. But alignment happens less often than more. And it frustrates us.

I used to spend my weekends helping friends make up their minds. And my weapon of choice was — reasoning. It used to frustrate me how they would come back to the same position the day after. The reasoning is not enough to make us act rationally. What makes us think it will be enough for others? I now keep my weekends free to read a good book or go for a walk.

Telling the cat-callers that women don’t enjoy indecent remarks and providing them ample evidence with not make them act rationally. Not encouraging them and leaving clues to leave you alone will surely discourage them.

Summary

Let me recap the points I made. 

  1. We think we are rational while the people around us are irrational.
  2. Even though we like to think that we are rational, we make decisions irrationally.
  3. Rational decision-making at the conscious level might sound good in theory, but our subconscious mind picks up many more clues and reach a conclusion on its own, which is better than the conclusion we can reach consciously.
  4. Other people’s decisions feel more irrational than our own because their belief system is different than ours.
  5. It is hard enough to change ourselves, let alone the others.

Let’s not try and change others when it is so hard to change ourselves.

Photo by heyerlein on Unsplash

How one habit has made me a better writer than any other

Neera

Imagine you board a plane, take your seat and find that next to you is sitting your favorite writer. This is your opportunity to have a conversation with him and to learn from him firsthand. You are hoping to get a tip or two from him to improve your own writing. But he is so engrossed in the book he is reading that you dare not interrupt him.

He finishes a chapter, closes the book, and you half-open your mouth to introduce yourself when he pulls out a sheet of paper and starts scribbling on it. You narrow your eyes to read his scribble but stop before it begins to look too intrusive. After about twenty minutes, he places the paper in a folder, looks at you, and smiles. He knew you were watching. You feel embarrassed but couldn’t resist commenting, “Capturing the idea you just got?”

“No,” he responds, “I was summarizing what I just read.”

“You mean from the book you were just reading?” you ask incredulously.

“Yes,” he replies, half-smiling, “Always. It is the only way to get my learning deeper and also have something to refer to when I need it in the future.”

This incident didn’t happen to me, but it did happen to one of the Farnam Street blog readers. While sitting next to Rober Cialdini on a flight, he watched the famous author pull out a sheet of paper and write a full-page summary of what he had just read.

While both reading and writing are the bread and butter for writers, I have found there is one habit that outweighs both, and that is — taking notes.

I stopped taking notes after university.

I was a ferocious notes taker. Then I stopped. There was no need for taking notes for anything other than scribbling a few details at work meetings. All the reading was for pleasure. I wasn’t going to take an exam on the books I read, so why bother.

But then I didn’t remember what I read in a book any more than what I had for lunch two days ago. If I wanted to repeat something interesting I read in a conversation, I fumbled. The idea that was so clear at the time of reading was not clear at all at explaining.

Internet spoiled me further.

Everything was just a click away. I was using Google instead of my brain to retrieve information. On top of that, I copied stuff from the internet and saved it on my computer, never to reread it. To date, I have thousands of articles stored on the hard drive and extra storage I have bought for this very purpose.

Although there is nothing wrong with using technology to aid our memory as our brains can’t hold all that information, I missed out on the side benefits of note-taking. Three side-benefits I can list here are:

1. Idea generation

2. Retention

3. Comprehension

1. Reading not only introduces us to new ideas but it generates them.  

Most of my good ideas come when I am reading. It is as if the passive activity is, in fact, stimulating a part of the brain where the ideas reside. As soon as we relax with a good book, and mind becomes oblivious to the surroundings and goes into another realm.

Reading makes us think. But thoughts are like bubbles; they disappear as quickly as they form. If I don’t capture them as soon as they appear, they are gone.

Reading makes us think on a different level too. The book I am reading at the moment is on memory research. I am no neuroscientist. The theories I am reading in the book have generated so many ideas that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise.

Coming up with ideas is one thing; writing them down so that I can use them when the time comes. That is why I don’t start reading until I have a pen and a notebook in hand. Pencil to underline the interesting passage, pen, and notebook to capture ideas and to summarize what I read in my own words.

2. Summarizing helps retain information.

Most people don’t remember what they read as soon as they finish reading a book. They will recommend the book but can’t tell you why it is a good book. Even if you ask, “Can you tell me one thing that was interesting in the book?” their usual response is, “There is more than one thing. Read the book.”

“Tell me one.” you press.

“I don’t want to spoil it for you. Just read the book.”

But clearly, they don’t remember anything. Or if they do, they can’t express it or explain it in their own words.

As you summarize, you are directing your brain to commit the new information to the long-term memory. Especially if you write by hand. There seems to be a special connection between writing by hand and memory vaults. Notes written in a notebook stick better to memory than the notes typed on a keypad.

The time you will take to summarize will not go wasted on another account.

3. By summarizing you learn the ability to express yourself

There is no point in having the knowledge if you can’t express it. Ideas and concepts need to be expressed in words, spoken or written. A person who says he understood the concept but cannot express it usually hasn’t understood.

Summarising helps you to test your comprehension and give your brain a chance to assimilate the information before you continue reading. In his book, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills, Daniel Coyle writes:

Research shows that people who follow strategy B [read ten pages at once, then close the book and write a one-page summary] remember 50 percent more material over the long term than people who follow strategy A [read ten pages four times in a row and try to memorize them].

We are drowning in the ocean of information.

Too many books, too many videos, and far too many podcasts and audiobooks. And if you’re like me and love to learn, there’s no such thing as too much information. And yet, that information monster does bite. We start to read or listen, and we can’t keep up. Well, I couldn’t keep up at all. Yet notes-taking on top of that, where will we get the time?

You don’t have to make notes about everything. We don’t need to commit everything to memory. Most of the reading has to be for pleasure; otherwise, we will stop enjoying reading and dreading it.

But wouldn’t it slows down my reading.

It definitely does. Today, for some reason, we are in a race to read more and more and to understand and retain less and less. I have started resisting the pressure to read more. Even Henry Miller advocated for reading less. In his book, The Books in My Life:

One of the results of this self-examination — for that is what the writing of this book amounts to — is the confirmed belief that one should read less and less, not more and more…. I have not read nearly as much as the scholar, the bookworm, or even the ‘well-educated’ man — yet I have undoubtedly read a hundred times more than I should have read for my own good. Only one out of five in America, it is said, are readers of ‘books.’ But even this small number read far too much. Scarcely anyone lives wisely or fully.

By reading less and savoring the book I am reading, I am getting much more out of it. The book I am reading at the moment, Diving for Seahorse, is a fantastic account of memory research. It took me weeks to finish it because I have to stop every few pages and take notes. I have already drafted two articles based on what I learned.

How about you? Are you reading too much and retaining too little. How about introducing the habit of note-taking back in your life.

Photo by The Creative Exchange on Unsplash

What does a crockpot have to do with storytelling

Neera 1 Comment

Irving Naxon, the inventor of the crockpot, once revealed the inspiration behind his invention.

His grandmother grew up in a small village in Lithuania. Each Friday, her mother would send her to the local bakery with a pot of uncooked “cholent” to be put in the oven. The pot would sit there for the whole day. While the family observed the Sabbath, the dying fire of the oven would cook the stew. At sundown, she will bring back the pot and the family would have the steamy delicious stew for dinner.

That simple story stayed with Naxon for the rest of his life. He wanted to prepare the same kind stew but in the convenience of his home. He figured out a way to create a heating element that surrounded the pot in the same way it would surround an oven in a bakery. His invention was not only easy to use but also consumed less electricity. And it didn’t cost much. He called his invention ‘Naxon Beanery.’

Naxon Beanery later named the crockpot is central to western cooking. A simple story told by his grandmother led to change the western culinary history forever.

Stories have power to inspire.

Before TV, before internet, before mobile phones, stories used to be the medium to pass knowledge from one generation to another.

Religion, society, culture, families all used stories to teach values, develop character, and provide inspiration.

As human beings, we are automatically drawn to stories because we see ourselves reflected in them. Stories illustrate the point much better than facts or explanations can. Through stories, we share passions, fears, sadness, hardships, and joys. Stories are central to our communication.

We engage with others through stories. Storytelling is a lot more than just a recitation of facts and events. Stories convey meaning and purpose that help us understand ourselves better and find commonality with others.

Stories are all around us.

Every event can become a story. The reason we don’t see the story in everyday happening is because we don’t slow down to draw the lessons from our mishaps or admire the beauty of the opportunities that came our way. In today’s fast-paced environment, there is no time to reflect on our experiences and to build a narrative out of them.

There is the reason why children are so well engaged in storytelling. Kids can’t wait to hear a good story because they’re naturally curious and want to learn more about the world.

For centuries, stories have been used to pass on knowledge, and when important teachings are embedded in a story, we embrace that information uniquely because we tend to remember the underlying emotions in a story rather than the actual elements of that story.

As writers, we struggle to figure out what to write.

We start thinking that our job is to constantly bombard our readers with new information. We tend to forget that people don’t need more information. They don’t need to be taught either. They need to be touched in their hearts. They need stories. Stories of people, places and things.

Well-told stories are a gift from a writer to his readers. Here, is one from story from Sidney Sheldon’t memoir The Otherside of Me:

At the age of seventeen, working as a delivery boy at Afremow’s drugstore in Chicago was the perfect job, because it made it possible for me to steal enough sleeping pills to commit suicide. I was not certain exactly how many pills I would need, so I arbitrarily decided on twenty, and I was careful to pocket only a few at a time so as not to arouse the suspicion of our pharmacist. I had read the whiskey and sleeping pills were a deadly combination, and I intended to mix them, to make sure I would die.

It was Saturday – the Saturday I had been waiting for. My parents would be away for the weekend and my brother Richard was staying at a friend’s. Our apartment would be deserted, so there would be no one there to interfere with my plan.

At six o’clock, the pharmacist called out “Closing time.”

He had no idea how right he was. It was time to close out all the things that were wrong with my life. I knew I wasn’t just me. It was the whole country.

I read this story when I was seventeen years old. It has stayed with me for forty years. I can’t say the same about the articles I read both online and in print.

In today’s world with easy access to high-quality content, people don’t want you to give them more things to think about, more stuff to do, more clutter to fill their minds. There is an ocean of self-help articles. YouTube videos are screaming for attention with headlines such as – “You are missing out if you don’t do this routine.”

In such an environment, if you can tell a simple story in your authentic and honest voice, your writing will have much more impact. It will stay with more people, much longer than the screaming YouTube video or a mile-long self-help listicle.

When someone writes something that doesn’t tell me what to do but instead shares their honest perspective and personal story in an authentic voice they touch me.

They inspire me to become the kind of storyteller Naxon’s grandmother was, whose simple ‘stew-making’ story inspired Naxon to invent a simple device but which had a profound impact on the lives of millions.

Photo by Edgar Castrejon on Unsplash