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It took me about a month to realize something small but surprisingly important. being left handed is a quiet advantage if you are a teacher, a professor, or anyone who lectures using a board.
I once read:
“one of the greatest tragedies in life is that you will always be loved more than you will ever know, someone in your class might find your presence inviting and warm even if you’ve exchanged a few words with them or maybe none at all, someone on the street loves your smile and it brightens their path for the next few blocks, someone who regularly comes to work is disappointed when you aren’t there, someone missed you today, someone noticed when you’re gone, someone loves you when you’re there, someone loves you when you’re nowhere to be found at all, you might think you have always disappeared when you’re no longer in the picture, but you never left the frame”
It was a rainy day when I realized that I was 19 years old, and I only had a few months left to turn 20. I’m no longer becoming a teenager, just like how John Green puts it, my 20s will go fast. My 30s will go faster than I can imagine, and suddenly I’m 40.
This is part of a series of notes I’m taking to understand the person I am when learning something. most of them are about understanding myself and applying useful techniques.
Reading about neuroscience can help me save time instead of experimenting blindly and trying to see what works. and I plan to study neuroscience some day, but as for now I want to share what I’ve learned by myself, as I spent the first 19 years of my life learning how to learn. I never even signed up for the famous Coursera course on this topic. the road of learnign was lonely, paved with faliure moods, it was an experimentation based road.
I call this problem floating information. It is a literal translation of the Arabic word “طائفة”, which means floating in space without connection. I first noticed that there is information that is not linked to anything. it has no context, it solves no problem, and this kind of information is the hardest to keep in my mind. I forget it very easily.
One of the main incentives behind sharing my notes in public is not the urge to talk. As social creatures, we naturally love sharing experiences, stories, and ideas. But I buried that essential human feature for a long time. I used to post on Facebook , not consistently, and then I went through what I called “ Manulasis ”(I heard of this back in high school in one of the articles but I forget the spelling/word but never the definition): the tendency to give up explaining things to people. I essentially gave up sharing altogether. I became detached from the external world without even noticing, day by day.
There’s an anecdote about Richard Feynman when a historian walks up to his desk and sees all the sheets of paper lying around on Mr Feynman desk and makes a comment about these being a record of Feynman’s thinking and then Mr Feynman corrects the historian and says that: these are not a record of my thinking I think on paper and then the historian presses on and says that surely you’re thinking in your head and these are only records of the thoughts in your head and that’s when Mr Feynman says: no they aren’t a record of my thinking process they are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.
Progress:
One of the good things I lack in my life is receiving feedback. Usually, everyone assumes that I’m an expert at everything, and they tend to define the way of our communication based on my social presence (oh, that’s Ahmed, everyone likes this dude. he is amazing… etc) while the reality is significantly different. I know several quality skills, like anyone, without having superpowers, I know how to speak, communicate, but I guarantee you I’m not the best!, and there is alot that you don’t know about me.