How to bring the fun back in learning?

Neera

Ever wondered why we use “XYZ” and not “HIJ” or “LMN” as a variable in maths.

The obvious answer is that “XYZ” are the last letters in the alphabet. But that is not the reason they are used as variables.

The credit of using “XYZ” goes to French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. The same Rene Descartes who famously said “Cogito ergo sum” meaning “I think. therefore I am.”

But that is not all he is famous for. He has contributed more to maths and philosophy than anyone else outside of Greeks.

As the story goes he was printing his mathematics work when he needed letters to denote ‘unknown’ variables. Since he had lots of variables in his work, he needed lots of spare letters. X, Y, and Z are not that commonly used letters in French, so he used them.

The other speculation is that in those days, printing presses needed all letters arranged by hand. Since X, Y, and Z were stored furthest away, way out of the reach of the printing-man arranging the letters, they were the least used.

Who knows which story is correct but I am sure you had as much fun learning about the stories behind the use of “XYZ” as I did.

Learning itself is fun.

Whenever we start learning something new, we are enthusiastic, excited, and full of energy. Remember the last time you started learning painting, dancing, or singing. How excited you were? You joined a course. You bought new material. You were always the first one to arrive at the class. You started great. You did your homework. Everyone encouraged you and you had so much fun.

Then something happened.

Things started getting harder. You lagged behind. You tried to catch up but that doubled the pressure. You started putting in more hours. You were getting tired but you didn’t want to give up. And suddenly the learning stopped.

The same activity that was so much fun started to stress you.

You left the territory where things were easy and entered the zone where things became harder and harder. Now you were expected to be serious and put in the hard yakka if you really wanted to learn the skill.

In other words, you were not supposed to have fun. Or at least this was what you thought. And that is a mistake.

Learning stops when the fun stops.

Somewhere along the line, we pick up the belief that learning has to be torturous. Whether it was due to the fear of examinations or due to our upbringing which insists on learning at the cost of fun that we start hating the act of learning itself.

So much so that many adults believe that after a certain age they can’t go to college or university because they are too old to learn anything new. The same people will be fine to go to clubs and learn to play bridge or chess, the games requiring memory and strategic thinking.

They are able to learn new games because they are having fun.

Learning becomes easy as soon as you put the fun back into it.

No one knows this better than the language teacher Michel Thomas. Michel has a completely different approach to teaching. In a BBC documentary, he was given what could be considered the most challenging students. And his mission was to teach them French.

Michel starts with something entirely unexpected. Rather than starting with the first lesson, he gets his students to move the desks and replace them with sofas. The blackboard and screens are all abandoned because Michel doesn’t believe in textbooks, or taking notes or homework. He says, “Anything that causes stress must be removed from the experience.” And classroom-like setup causes stress.

Michel has two ground rules for learning.

  1. You have to be relaxed.
  2. You should never worry about remembering anything.

You got to abandon any anxiety usually associated with learning. Michel’s theory is that any form of tension and anxiety inhibits learning.

He also believes that the responsibility of retention lies with the teacher, not with the learner. The method of teaching should incorporate retention.

We associate learning with work, with concentration, and with paying attention. Learning reminds us of homework and of memorizing. It brings back painful memories. Learning becomes hard work rather than a pleasure.

Learning shouldn’t be work but a pleasure.

When we learn we should experience a sense of progression, of excitement. Rather than feel exhausted from it we should want more.

We feel exhausted because we forget the intimidation factors. We are intimidated by the unknown. We are intimidated by the pain it is going to cause us. And we are intimidated by the fact we are not going to retain much of what we are going to learn.

Ease is the opposite of intimidation. The only way we can become enthusiastic about learning if we can make learning easy. Ease brings the fun back to the learning process.

How to make learning easy.

Here are 3 simple things you can do:

1) Break the learning into smaller components and tackle them one by one. Smaller components make it easy to gain and retain information.

2) Remove any expectations from yourself. Expectations cause stress and stress is the enemy of learning.

3) Make the hard components fun somehow. Why not make them crazy. For example:

  • Write a story backward? Tell the ending first, then the middle and then beginning.
  • Start a course from the middle rather than the beginning. You will be surprised to find out you already know a lot and your concentration level has doubled.
  • Write with your eyes closed? Describing what you are seeing on the inside of your eyelids. Do they become a tiny screen and a film starts playing on them.
  • Put some constraints. Write for just fifteen minutes and see what you can come up with. Learn to play only two notes for a month and master them. Draw the same sketch twenty times.

Let me summarise what I have covered so far.

Learning itself is fun. You keep learning as long as you are having fun. As soon as the fun stops, learning stops.

Fun in learning is linked to “ease of learning”. As long as learning is easy, it is fun. As soon as learning gets difficult, the fun stops. And the learning stops too.

So how to bring the fun back in learning. 1) make learning easy by dividing it into small components 2) remove any expectations 3) introduce fun by doing crazy things.

Photo by Lidya Nada on Unsplash

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Gifts of writing

Neera

Last night I was going through an old notebook when the following words jumped at me.

The very activity which gives me the greatest pleasure makes me suffer beyond anything. Writing doesn’t come to me in sentences or paragraphs. It comes in words or phrases, the disjointed blurb which makes sense only to my muddled mind with lots of blank spaces where a keyword is missing. I am forever looking for the right word to complete that thought, word that exists in my mind, the word that I have read so many times before but I cannot seems to recall it. Sometimes I find its closest companion. Then begins the task of compiling the incoherent rambling in some sort of order so that it makes some sense at all. Why do I torture myself with all this day in and day out? Why do I bother? Why can’t I be like other girls? Looking for new cosmetics instead and having a facelift at the new parlour of which they have taken membership all paid for by their lovers or husbands.

I don’t even know who the original writer of these words is, I failed to record it. But I recorded these words because they describe my state of mind and perhaps of every writer’s state of mind working on their craft.

Writing is hard but it bears a lot of gifts. Over time I am beginning to understand that writing itself is a gift given to only a select few. It gives you an opportunity to live life with an intensity not available to everyone.

Writing motivates you to look closely at life as it lurches by and tramps around, says Anne Lamott. She finds in writing what Carl Sagan found in science — profound awe, deep reverence, a source of spiritual elevation.

She writes in Bird by Bird:

In order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? … Think of reverence as awe, as a presence in and openness to the world. Think of those times when you’ve read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone’s soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of — please forgive me — wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious.

[…]

There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.

If you give freely, there will always be more. … It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host, of hosting people, of being the person to whom they come for food and drink and company. This is what the writer has to offer.

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird

She goes on to say:

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

Bird by Bird is a must read for writers, a gift by a writer to the writers to understand gift of writing given to them by god.

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

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Three principles of personal storytelling

Neera

Scott Harrison was sitting in the restaurant of an Ethiopian inn with a few people when the innkeeper walked in and started telling him the story of a woman who lived in his village, unprompted.

His was a small remote village, where all women used to walk for water for eight hours a day. They would carry heavy clay pots on their backs and one day, on the way back, this woman, Latticur slips and falls. The clay pot breaks and all the water is spilled on the ground.

At this point, the restaurant owner took a pause making sure they were listening. Then he said, we found her body swinging from the tree in the village. They all stared at him. Stunned. “The work you are doing is important, keep it up,” and he disappeared back in the kitchen.”

Scott Harrison is the founder of a charity called Water. He has been able to raise over 100 million dollars by telling stories like that of Latticur.

When I heard Scott telling this story in a YouTube video I was as stunned as Scott and his friends were when they first heard it from the innkeeper. Not only because the story is powerful but the way it is told.

There are 663 million people in this world who live without clean water. Scott has been telling the stories of these people, and in the process discovered three important principles of telling more engaging stories in any environment.

The first principle of storytelling is to take the listener on the emotional journey.

While telling the story Scott sets the scene describing how innkeeper walks in on him and his friends and starts telling them the story, uninvited.

He then mentions the innkeeper’s pause, so that we can get his attention just like the innkeeper waited for his. We get to absorb what he says just as he did when he heard the story for the first time.

The temptation while telling a personal story is to jump ahead and tell the listener what you learned as quickly as possible. Do not do that.

If you slow down you take people on the same winding journey you went on and the story connects much more.

As he continues he also talks about his emotional response, that he doubted the truth of this story just as we might.

I remember we said “What!” It felt as we were hit by a ton of bricks. And then we starting doubting it. Is that story really true? Can we tell this to the international donors? But I just couldn’t shake the idea or the picture of a woman that slipped and fallen, like all of us have done, and was in such despair on her living conditions that she tied a rope around her neck climbed a tree and jumped.

So I sent one of my partners to the village to find out if anyone by that name of Latticur lived in the village and whether what happened to her was true. A couple of weeks later I got an email from him saying, yes the story was true. He saw her grave. He met her family.

Then I asked my wife, I want to go there and live there for a week.

The second principle is that every story needs a near-constant element of mystery to keep the listener engaged.

You need to constantly raise questions in the listeners’ minds if you want to keep their attention. Every time you answer one, you need to plant a new one.

Scott hints on a bit of mystery right at the beginning of the story by asking whether the story is true. When he finds out that it is, he immediately raises another question – what happens when he goes to Ethiopia himself?

So I went to the village, I lived there for a week. I met the priest who gave her the funeral. I saw the pile of rocks behind the church that was her grave, I met her mom, I met her friend who was with her that day. I went on writing about it on Medium about the experience and seeing the tree.

It is a frail tree. And I didn’t know until I went to the village that she was thirteen.

That was a huge shock for me. I was expecting an old lady. This hunched back mature woman who has walked water all her life.

She was thirteen years old girl. A teenager.

I remember asking her friend, through translater, why she thought she hanged herself. Her best friend said, she would have been overcome with shame because she had broken the clay pot and she spilled the water.

So that is the main action of the story but it doesn’t end here because there is a third principle.

The third principle is that the best stories have a lesson in the end, like Aesop’s fable.

It doesn’t have to be explicit, but it needs to be there like an overarching point. When you get to this point you need to know your purpose of sharing the story.

What is the audience supposed to take away from your story?

Here is what Scott thinks what we should learn from Letticur’s story.

This is an emergency. Something has to be done where thirteen-years-old are not hanging themselves on trees for breaking clay pot and spilling water.

I found this story while researching storytelling for my book.

I learned three principles of storytelling and they are powerful but what is more powerful is the lesson of the story.

It has inspired me to tell the stories of people like Latticur who have no voice. People like George Floyd whose life has been cut short by racism, a plague more dangerous and widespread than the coronavirus.

Credit: The full credit of this story and the whole post goes to Charlie who runs the YouTube channel Charisma on Command.

Photo by Johann Siemens on Unsplash

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Is perfectionism stopping your progress? Here is how to beat it.

Neera

An average adult reads between 200 to 300 words per minute, and you get to that level by the eighth grade. For success in college, you should be able to read 350 to 450 words per minute. If your work involves reading a lot of material on a daily bases, like that of a writer, you are expected to read at least 500 words per minute.

Yet I averaged about 83 words a minute. Every time I sat with a book that I was dying to read, I couldn’t manage more than ten pages in half an hour.

What was surprising that I wasn’t always like this. I used to be able to finish a book within three days. What was hindering my progress?

It was only recently that I realized that very quality that should make me a better reader was stopping me from finishing the book.

There are two ways of getting things done.

The first is to be slow and methodical. The second is to beat the clock.

Many of us like the idea of perfection, toiling away at our work, in order to reach a seemingly impossible goal. 

Will your work be any better if you take twice as much time.

If you consider yourself to be a perfectionist, chances are, you wear it as a badge of honour. You think you should be producing your best work at all times.

Perfectionism is the enemy of getting things done.

Have you ever tried to write a book in one month?

The idea was absurd and close to impossible when Chris Baty and his friends thought of it in 1999. But they went ahead and did it anyway. Six out of twenty participants completed the challenge including Chris Baty.

They succeeded because they were not out there to write world’s best book or even their own best book. They succeeded because they went out to beat the clock. They wrote 50,000 words in one month. Each day they raced the time, writing 1667 words.

Next year they launched the project on the internet. 140 people participated, 29 won the challenge. Last year (2019), more than half a million people participated, over 60,000 won the challenge.

How come?

Because they put the perfection aside and went on to beat the clock.

Speed beats perfection every time.

Being a typical perfectionist, I was turning the simple act of reading into a much harder exercise.

Rather than enjoying the book, I was analyzing every sentence trying to figure out how the writer has transitioned from one idea to another, how she has managed to move the story while giving minimum details.

To my perfectionist mind, what was the point of reading a book if I couldn’t learn from it?

By striving to learn more I was jeopardizing the learning that comes from simple reading.

Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving to be your best. Perfection is not about healthy achievement and growth.

Brené Brown, a writer and research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work

I started reading with a timer, finishing 30 pages in 30 minutes. The eighth-grade reading speed can help me read three books in a month.

You’re probably trying to shake your perfectionism but finding it too hard.

It is understandable.

It is hard to break any habit.

The mistake we make is that we want to make a massive jump.

The key to breaking out of your comfort zone, you stretch yourself ever so slightly.

That massive jump may not be possible. Instead, take a smaller one—just a slight stretch goal. Set yourself the time in which you’ll complete the job.

Your work may not be as perfect as you hoped, but it gives you a chance to finish it and improve it later.

If you follow this simple formula you’ll find yourself less exhausted and with more energy. However, the biggest benefit of all is you’ll become far better and far quicker at what you’re doing.

Photo by Tai’s Captures on Unsplash

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The magic of timers

Neera

The year was 1998, the month was February. I have been out of the workforce for seven years and desperate to get back to work. The only problem was there was no more work in my chosen field. Research money had dried up and technical jobs in the field of Biochemistry didn’t exist.

Flipping through the job section of the newspapers I realized I was in the wrong field. There were plenty of jobs in Information Technology and all I needed was get another piece of paper that said I understand the subject and can be employed.

But the only problem was the enrolment date had passed. I met the course coordinator, and she told me that I had missed the lectures which she had conducted all through February to familiarize new students to programming. She suggested I should try next year.

But I was not prepared to wait for another year.

“Guess, this is what I will do,” she said “Take this book and see if you can go through the first six chapters in the next five days. If you really understand them, on your own, I will allow you to join the course.”

Those six chapters amounted to 200 pages. I needed to finish one and quarter a chapter a day. I made a rough estimate, if I can spend five minutes per page, I could go through them. That is when I discovered that my kitchen timer had other uses too.

Timer gives you an arbitrary deadline.

Parkinson’s law says that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. No matter how much we detest deadlines, deadlines get the work done.

Clock ticks away relentlessly, getting you tired by the minute. It’s not just time that’s being drained away, but also energy.

The more time you spend, the more tired you get. The more tired you get, the more inferior the work is.

By the time you get to the editing and formatting stage, you’re so exhausted that writing seems like a chore to avoid. And eventually, you decide it’s too much of misery and doesn’t want to write anymore.

This painful experience can be minimized if you learn to write with a timer.

A timer forces efficiency. And it forces you to stop. It gets your continually editing mania under control. It allows you to divide writing into small tasks, and finish them one at a time. When the buzzer goes off, it’s time to finish the piece.

How long you think it should take you to write a 200-page novel?

In 1996, the Wall Street Journal reported that Brazilian novelist Ryoki Inoue has just written his 1,039th book since he took up the craft ten years ago. He wrote his novel in less than eight hours, right in front of the Wall Street reporter. Inoue started the book around 10 p.m., and by 5:30 a.m. had put the finishing touches on a 195-page story of drug traffickers and corrupt cops.

Ryoki Inoue holds The Guinness World Records, as the world’s most prolific writer having published 1075 books.

How do you think he has pulled it off?

“The important thing is to abandon inertia — even if it means walking sideways like a crab,” Mr. Inoue writes.

Inertia is something we all struggle with.

Over 20 years ago, Time Timer inventor Jan Rogers’ youngest child struggled to make transitions from one daily routine to another. Whether it was time to get ready for school, or for homework, practice, or bed, her young daughter often felt frustrated and anxious because of her inability to grasp the concept of elapsed time.

To solve this problem, Jan created the Time Timer — an innovative, simple time management timer designed to “show” the passage of time through the use of a red disk. As time elapses, the red disk disappears giving an idea of how much time has passed and how much is remaining.

I discovered timers again while doing the cartooning course. Speedy sketching a skill every cartoonist has to master. We were to sketch within 15 minutes, no matter what. Soon I discovered that my sketches were better when I did them with a timer and pathetic when I took as long as I wanted.

The timer doesn’t compromise the quality of your work rather it enhances it.

“George of the Jungle” started out as a Saturday-morning cartoon. One day, as the show was being developed, two professional songwriters got a call from the Walt Disney Pictures. “We need theme songs for ‘George of the Jungle’ and two other cartoons,” they were told. “And we need them fast.”

“How fast?”

“Four hours from now.”

The songwriters went to work. The clock ticked. Four hours later they had banged out all three songs.

And guess what? The studio not only liked them and used them, but the song for “George of the Jungle” turned out to be one of the most memorable and successful things they ever wrote.

So get away from your assumptions about how long a task is supposed to take. Get it done much more quickly.

What if you don’t finish within time?

Have you ever missed a work deadline?

Your boss asks for a report within twenty-four hours, how do you accomplish that? You might spend little extra time at work the thing that really gets the report done is your concentration level.

That comes with the timer.

I was able to read all 200 pages within five days. Some pages took a bit longer but others even less than two minutes giving me time to revise the previous pages and take some notes. But timer kept me on time with finishing the task. Needless to say, I was accepted in the course and was offered three jobs even before I finished my degree.

Next time you sit down to do a task, turn on the timer.

Time flies, so can you.

Photo by Bonneval Sebastien on Unsplash

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What if newbie writers stop writing…

Neera

One of my writing buddies had a rant last week when she was due to submit an assignment. Why the hell am I putting myself through this? She lamented. Who cares about my story? What difference does it make if I write this story? Or any story for that matter? I am such a crappy writer anyway.

I could feel her pain. I have asked myself the same questions a number of times. So many times I wanted to give writing up. Writing is an ordeal even for experienced and bestselling writers. New writers have very little chance of making a name for themselves, let alone earn an income from it.

What if we give up writing.

Sure the world will not come to standstill. No one will miss us because we haven’t been ‘discovered’ yet. Hardly anyone reads our blog articles and our short stories and novels are still buried in our computers. If we stop writing now the world will be spared of the rubbish we create and we will be spared the daily agony and can get on with our lives just like ‘normal’ people.

Except for one thing.

We will never find out what would have happened had we stuck with it.

The problem with giving up is that it is such a knee-jerk response. It is our first instinct when things get difficult. Our physiological mechanism to protect us from danger and undue hardship.

We tend to forget that, even at a time of grave danger, our inbuilt physiology gives us three choices — freeze, flee, or fight. Most of the time we choose to freeze (inaction) or flee (run away).

We rarely opt for the fight. It is because we tend to think the enemy is too big and too strong and the best chance we have of survival is to flee from it.

What happens when people stick it out.

Have a read of these three stories.

1. Carl Friedrich Gauss was born in Germany to poor, working-class parents. He didn’t know his birthday. His mother was illiterate and never recorded the date of his birth, remembering only that he had been born on a Wednesday, eight days before the Feast of the Ascension (which occurs 39 days after Easter). 

So strong was his obsession with finding his birthdate that it led young Gauss to derive methods to compute the date of Easter, both past and future years. He eventually was able to figure out that he was born on 30 April 1977. His obsession led Carl Friedrich Gauss to become one of the most outstanding mathematicians of all time.

2. James Hutton got interested in meteorology and geology many years after successfully taking a degree as Doctor of Medicine and working as a physician, introducing experimental agriculture in his own farmland and establishing profitable chemical manufacturing business. He devoted 25 years of his later life “studying the surface of the earth, and was looking with anxious curiosity into every pit or ditch or bed of a river that fell in his way,” developing the theory that geological features were not static but underwent a perpetual transformation over long periods of time. James Hutton is now known as the father of geology.

3. When Claude Hopkins came into advertising, the advertising was a haphazard way of creating awareness for products and depended more on chance and exposure to sell rather than proven and scientific methods. He took disorganized marketing and added core principles to it.

What do all these men have in common?

They followed their obsession. 

One of the common themes that most smart people have is “sticking with it”.

When you stick with a problem, you learn to solve it. Slowly and slowly you start getting better at it. Your learning accumulates and you start gaining confidence.

When I started my blog two years ago I couldn’t write even a few paragraphs. I agonized over them for hours. I wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote. It was taking me 7–8 hours to write 700–800 words articles. I would work till midnight to write while fully aware no one was reading what I was writing.

I thought it will get easier in three months, or six months or even a year. But it didn’t.

Then at some point late last year, I realized I am writing 1200 to 1500 words articles and I am doing them in much less time than before.

I had devised several little ways to improve my productivity.

I had discovered to break the writing process into small steps and to spread them over several days. I learned to do my research beforehand and save it in such a way so that I could easily retrieve it. I became regular, writing two articles each week.

At some point, the penny always drops.

t’s almost like one of those slot machines. It seems like you’re not getting anywhere in a hurry and then suddenly you have this gush of coins. But unlike a slot machine that mostly works against you, ‘sticking it out’ is almost predictable in its reward system. Stay with something for about a couple of hours every day, find a system to learn, and suddenly you will nail it.

Rather than stop writing why not do the opposite and “write a lot”.

You will be pretty hopeless in the first six months. And you’ll be just about average for at least a few years. Which isn’t to say that you will not get better. It’s just to say that you’re quite far away from where you want to be.

However, you are getting better in a small incremental way. So small that you don’t even notice it. Then one day, someone raves about the article you wrote, or poem you composed or the story you published.

And voila! your confidence soars. You realize you are not that bad after all.

Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash

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