Month: March 2022

David Epstein’s Range in 3 Sentences

1. The world is made up of wicked vs kind environments, controlled spaces like golf and chess are kind, and variable events like work and football are wicked.
2. Having more generalized experience makes you flexible and more adaptable to wicked environments.
3. We benefit ourselves in the future, even with increased AI, to be more adaptable in our skills, to keep learning, and have wider areas we pull inspiration and analogies to solve problems.

Impressions

I wasn’t a massive fan of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and this felt like the antidote to that book. Bill Gates recommended this book, and I knew I needed to check this out. This book helped me see you are never too old for anything, it’s really a situation of deliberate practice. With the proliferation of AI, being adaptable and gaining new skills quickly is going to be incredibly valuable to get ahead. This one felt like a validation of my ultralearning pursuits and self-taught/studying. I really love that in a wicked world, being less rigid is a life hack.

Who Should Read It?

If you are a career switcher, someone with multiple interests, interested in learning a new skill later in life, or someone who isn’t sure about the 10,000 hour idea.

Top Quote

Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help. Instead, as Herminia Ibarra suggested for the proactive pursuit of match quality, start planning experiments. Your personal version of Friday night or Saturday morning experiments, perhaps.

During lockdown, I watched a documentary called Brain Games. It was about memory athletes all around the world. You may be thinking, “WTF is a memory athlete?” It’s someone who competes to prove they can memorize anything from a deck of cards, hundreds of binary digits, images, random names, and the list goes on.

One year after watching that documentary, I became a ranked memory athlete, and I want to share a technique that I learned through my training.

In memory training we use something called a PAO system, in the case of numbers you assign a person action and object to every number.

How do you assign the person? Well, you use something called a Dominic System. In it’s simplest terms, the Dominic System assigns a letter to every digit 0-9.

• 0 = O
• 1 = A
• 2 = B
• 3 = C
• 4 = D
• 5 = E
• 6 = S
• 7 = G
• 8 = H
• 9 = N

Why do certain digits equal certain letter? No freaking clue. But those are the rules of the memory games and I just follow them. (There’s something else called the Major System, but we can cover that another time.)

It’s up to the memory athlete to create a person for every digit set, for me two-digit sets are the easiest, and then your action and object. 31 in my PAO system is Charlie’s Angels doing their iconic pose holding blow dryers. Another, 24, Kobe Bryant in a fast breakaway with a black mamba wrapped around his ankle. 17, Ariana Grande, doing the splits with a giant ponytail.

In a 6 digit number the first set equals the person, the second set the action, and the last set the object.

How do we link it all together 241731, Kobe Bryant doing the splits holding a hair dryer.

Tired of hearing talking heads “dunk on feminism?”Yea me too.

Most critiques of feminism are focused on mainstream feminism, aka White Feminism.

For Women’s History Month, it’s time to make your feminism intersectional, and here are 5 books that can help you do that.

The first rec is Bad Fat Black Girl.

This book challenged me in its frank conversation around sex workers, respectability politics, and privilege even within the Black community.

It also uses pop culture brilliantly.

https://bookshop.org/a/20243/9780063028708

Next up, Hood Feminism.

I cannot recommend this book enough!

This book embodies the idea of “until everyone is free, no one is free.” It deals with queer feminism, BIPOC feminist issues, all the things.

This should be on your TBR.

https://bookshop.org/a/20243/9780525560548

Outlawed.

It wouldn’t be a book rec list from me if I didn’t include fiction. This is such a wonderful commentary on “what makes a woman a woman?” It deals with gender identity, colorism, and sexuality…and did I mention a Wild West bank robbery.

https://bookshop.org/a/20243/9781635575422

The 2000s Made Me Gay

I loved this collection of stories. It was a beautiful look at how pop culture and content can inform and challenge our sexuality, and that a lot of times characters help us through our own identity.

https://bookshop.org/a/20243/9781250760142

Last…Minor Feelings.

This is an open, honest, and vulnerable look at a Korean American woman’s experiences. Hong lets you really see what her life was like with humor.

https://bookshop.org/a/20243/9781984820389