What type of facts can you learn about?  There is much for you to know about communication, arts, culture, technology, nations of the world, history, science, the human body, earth, books, sports, thought, our environment, and so on.  Knowing that the capital of Chile is Santiago, or that en passant is a specific chess attack move involving pawns, or that a major is higher ranked in most nation’s armies than a captain will help you out in your daily living.

Do you ever notice how you don’t see many of a type of car until you drive one, and then you see them all over the place?  The same is true with information, where we ignore something until we find out about it, and then we see that it was showing up over and over.  This is true for most information.  The follow is a list of 18 benefits of learning facts about the world:

1. You will have a better sense of where world news stories are occurring, and what the situation in those countries is like, giving you better context.
2. Conversations with strangers will go more smoothly  because you will be more able to connect, and will have more information to provide.
3. You will be better able to defend your views and self in the context of a debate.
4. Knowledge of events in the recent past will give you a better sense of how humans progress, as well as what has stayed similar about people over time
5. You will maintain a bigger mind, focusing on larger issues that matter instead of smaller ones that are nearly a waste of time
6. Understanding other cultures will give you a much more favorable presence to people of those cultures, as well as to those who appreciate a worldly person
7. Knowing terms that are used regularly in business or sports or finance or medicine will allow you to communicate more effectively to people of those professions, and to be able to read works about those topics without getting confused at some point
8. No one is going to look down upon you for knowing more about various concepts and countries, unless it makes them feel inferior, and in that case, it doesn’t matter
9. You will keep your brain more active, and this will assist you in all aspects of daily living.  An active brain is an efficient brain.
10. You will have more confidence because you will feel less likely to appear foolish in public or in conversation.
11. You may motivate others to learn more as well, so the benefits are not only limited to you.
12. In your quest for random facts, you may find out something that makes a huge difference in how you exist or perform, like a certain habit you can do to strengthen your lower back, or a conversational method that attracts people instead of repelling them.
13. You will find out something you were confused about for a long time, and will then not be avoiding it when it shows up again.
14. Since facts likely fit into the 80/20 rule, you will have the biggest gains in relevant facts and information soon after you start, because a small percentage of facts are the ones that come up over and over again in society.
15. You don’t know what you don’t know until you know it.  Things you find out will solve problems of yours that you didn’t know were solvable or needing to be solved.
16. Understanding how class and power structures are set up in your city, county, country, and in other countries is the way to be able to get into positions and move up.  You can only win in chess once you know the rules and limitations.
17. Power comes from knowledge.  If only one person in an office of 20 knows how to use PowerPoint, that person is the boss when it comes time to make a PowerPoint presentation.  To gain prominence, you need to know information and relevant people.
18. We live in a knowledge-based world.  Physical ability has its place, but mental efforts have taken us to where we are technologically and culturally.

“Sometimes people don’t want to ask their questions because they don’t want to appear to be the person in the room that’s not the knowledgeable person, and I could care less as long as I leave with the information that I need.  I’d rather get it there than learn failing.”  -Curtis Jackson from interview with Tavis Smiley

How many of us haven’t asked something or found out some information because of how we would look in the process?  How many of us have missed out on opportunities due to not wanting to look stupid in front of someone else?  Is it the constant test of our character to not be so consumed with protecting our image?

You may be consumed by thoughts of how others perceive you, and if this is the case, then you are likely holding back on finding out what the next step is, or who you need to talk to next.  You might look stupid right?

Looking Foolish Is Temporary, Understanding Is Not

Is anyone wondering if Curtis asked a question about who some bigshot was ten or twenty years ago(example)?  Your information-gathering is forgotten, and people look at who you are now.  When Curtis says “I could care less”, he means that he isn’t foolish enough to weigh the current moment of looking un-knowledgeable as more heavy than years of not knowing.  Some of us weigh “looking smart now” more heavily than years of having the information in the future, as ridiculous as that seems.

Find Out So You Can Move On

What happens when you get the information you need?  You can move on to the next step.  What happens when you don’t get it?  You don’t move on, so you wallow at your level, maybe attacking others for moving, maybe being disappointed or frustrated about being stuck.  It is like being stuck at level 2 in a video game.  How long will it be before you start thinking level 3 is out of your reach?

Maybe in our minds, we imagine that someone will later say “Can you believe John didn’t know how to set his business up as a limited liability corporation?”  If this happens, so what?  Now you have a limited liability corporation and can move on to the next step.  Our own inability to get the information we need is far more damaging to our future prospects than any other person’s disparaging comments will ever be, and those comments are not even likely to show up.

Are You Like Curtis?

Why Curtis’ words were so important for me to present is because I am sure that many don’t respond the same way that he does/did.  While he said he “could care less” about the response, many care quite a bit about what the other person thinks when they ask what may be a very simple/low-level/obvious question.  This is a main trait that separates Curtis from the general population, which has led to his millions in profit.  He is the person who will find out the information now, while a more timid person will find out the information they need in, for example, two months, when Curtis has already set deals and plans in place.

This Is Just As Relevant For Dating

This is the same type of “could care less” thinking that makes it easy for Curtis to get a mate, because he “could care less” about the response, and will move on to the next attempt without a second thought, whereas the more timid person won’t even make the first attempt.  If dating is a numbers game, then the type of people like Curtis out there will always win at the dating game.  If it is not about numbers, but is about some other trait like confidence, he will still win at the game, because his “could care less” mode of presentation comes off as very confident, because someone who is not confident will care very much how they are responded to and accepted/rejected.

Get The Pencil So You Can Draw

The things we see people do, like starting corporations, or making certain business deals, or creating large membership-only groups, all started in their brains.  The way you process and deal with the world results in what you later acquire.  It is somewhat like our brains are drawing the man-made environment around us.  Get the information you need and your brain can then do the drawing.

There are a thousands things you don’t know right now.  There are people out there that already know them.  Some of them even reach out to teach you these things.  You can maintain your ego, that tells you that if you let someone else teach you something, that they are better than you.  You can defend your ego until the day you realize it is worth nothing to do so.

Gordon Ramsay Pushed His Ego Aside

The chef Gordon Ramsay once went to a Chinese restaurant in London to go through a day of cooking in their kitchen making dim sum with chefs who had done it for ten or twenty years(video here).  He could have let his ego tell him he would have looked like a neophyte next to people experienced in their material, since he mainly cooked Western style, but he ignored that, took a grilling from the Chinese chefs, and came out more skilled, humbled, and showing of strength to his American/European audience.

My Running Example

I normally run fast for a bit, and then walk, and then run faster for a distance, and then walk, repeatedly until I am fully warmed up, and then I run really fast for long distances, and then walk for bits.  I recently ran with my friend, who was on a cross country team in high school.  Although I know that some run continuously without stopping, until I ran with him and was able to directly see and compare his running style with mine, the difference would not have been as poignant.  Sometimes words don’t sink in until you see someone’s actions right next to your own.  Running continuously longer is now another option in my running plans.  You learn most when you open up to others, which is much easier than learning from hardship for not haven’t listened to others all along.

Your Critics Help You The Most

Your critics aren’t there to tear you down, or they would lose their audience, which would leave them unable to criticize.  They are pointing out things that are obviously wrong to them, but that you might not see.  They give you insight into the minds of others that don’t process exactly the same way you do.  That information that is provided by criticism is what can take you from a mediocre success rate to a heightened success rate.

Gary Doesn’t Let Ego Hold Him Back

Gary Vaynerchuk has a new book about following your passion coming out called Crush It.  The “It” in the title might as well be “Your Ego” because that is what you need to release or not get tied to.  Gary doesn’t care that he might not be at the research level of some scientist or as erudite about spinal injuries as a chiropractor, because he tossed that unhelpful portion of his ego aside and pursues the building of his wine-critiquing and selling career.  So many of us get held back by ourselves, don’t take action due to ourselves, and later look back confusingly at ourselves, seeing that the only thing holding us back was ourselves.  It is a cycle that we tend to regret participating in.  On the other hand, if you quiet your ego, and let other people provide you with guidance and knowledge, doors open up that are closed to the vast majority of individuals that remain in that unlocked room of inaction, pretending they are locked in.  On a related note, the more I toss aside my ego, the quicker this site’s subscriber levels grow.

People’s personalities are fairly fixed in place.  As I’ve said before, the person that caused you anguish a week ago is likely to be the same one to cause you anguish a week from now for the same reason that you clashed over last time.  We respond in similar ways over time.  Due to this, attacking someone for their mistakes is like attacking a wall for being in your way when you run into it.People that understand this concept travel through the day much more smoothly.  Using a verbal attack, and attacks of other kinds, shows that you work in short-term thinking.  Here I explain why:

What Type Of Thinker Are You?

A low-level thinker will respond quickly to put someone else down for their faults, whereas a high-level thinker will realize that that will bring negative response from the person, as well as bring no benefit to themselves.  A high-level thinker might have just as much frustration about the other person’s mistake, but they always put themselves first.

Think About Your Health

The person that gets angry in a conflict, and converts that into attacks on others, wastes energy.  Intelligent and wealthy people don’t do this.  They save their fights for very rare important occasions where they want to make a point, and even then, they avoid being in high tension or anger.  For concern to health, getting riled up, which causes a rise in blood pressure, is not worth any short-term verbal victory benefits.

See If You Attack Others And Adjust As Desired

Next time you see yourself putting someone else down, if that is the case, take note of it.  See if attacking someone helped you.  Whether it was a driver of another car, a a teacher, a co-worker, or a person on the internet, think for a minute about whether attacking them helped you out as a person.  If you do this a few times, you might provide yourself with the answer in actual terms.  It is usually better to think through problems by your own experimental analysis.

There are various memory enhancement tips that are worth noting.  Separate from them, you can create a short list of tips that you can use based on past memories that you have.  If you are wondering how to memorize a large set of biological terms, math formulas, vocabulary words, or geography facts, look at items that worked for you in the past.  You will be able to see trends of what caused you to retain information, versus trends of where you memorized items without much success.

The Past Can Be One Of Your Best Tools

Whenever you have an issue, memory-related or not, your own past experiences should be one of the first places you turn to.  You have mental records of where you went right and where you went wrong, as well as what fit you well and what didn’t fit your personality at all.  You might be a person that is productive in the early hours of the day, or a person that is productive in the late hours of the day.  Whichever one it is, it is not likely to change.  In the same way, the ways you memorized facts well before are not likely to change.  If you memorize best when walking around talking out loud, that is the path you want to take.  On the other hand, if you memorize best when you are in a quiet room and sitting in a chair writing out what you need to memorize, that is the path you want to take.

Instead of researching ways other people recommend for you to memorize facts, you can recall a time where you were able to memorize something, and copy that procedure.  Although you may need to tweak it a little so that it is bearable to you at this current time, the way your neural system responds is still mostly similar.  Sometimes it is best to write up your own top 10 list of tips before searching for someone else’s top 10 list of tips on the same topic.

There are two separate types of memory that our minds work with, with one being retrospective memory which refers to the memory of things in our past times, and the other being prospective memory, which is our ability to remember an action to take based on a specific time we planned for it or trigger we had in mind.  Here I point out a research paper that discusses how prospective memory is affected by aging:

Age And Its Effects On Memory

In this meta-analysis of the effects of aging on prospective memory, Bob Uttl points out the concept that prospective memory shows large decline as age increases, much moreso than the effects on retrospective memory.  An example of prospective memory would be like remembering that you were planning to go running at around 6 PM.  The time would be the trigger and prospective memory would provide the recall based on checking your watch.

Here is a table from the paper, with examples I have created:

Use Your Memory While It Is Intact

Knowing that your memory recall abilities, especially for those of the prospective type, will diminish over time, you can see that the “acting sooner than later” concept has many variables behind it.  You are as fit as you will ever be right now, especially mentally, and the things you take for granted that your mind is able to recall lose their accuracy as time progresses.  The big advantages of your current day is that you have the highest mental capability of your days right now.  Memory or physical ability may diminish later, but you don’t have to put things off until then.

We always hear about the health issues that arise from stress, and how stress can cause negative effects to our body over time.  What if the hormones weren’t released, or were released in smaller amounts, when high pressure was on you?  Thinking about that question provides you with perspective on what you should be targeting, and leaves you in a more realistic mindset.  Here I discuss the impacts of stress, what stress normally connotes, and how to view it as a tool:

Stress And Some Background On Its Purpose

In acquiring research information on the topic, I found a review paper that matched part of the point I was looking to bring up here.  According to Stress and Memory: Behavioral Effects and Neurobiological Mechanisms by Carmen Sandi and M. Teresa Pinelo-Nava:

Although stress effects are frequently regarded as deleterious to cognitive function, very intensive work during the past decade is delineating a great complexity, both in the nature of interactions between stress and memory functions and in their outcome. In addition to the overemphasized negative side of stress on brain and behavior, there are many instances in which neural function and cognition are either facilitated by stress (de Kloet et al. [2]; Joëls et al. [8]), or even not affected (Warren et al. [10]; Beylin and Shors [11]).

One point I was looking to make is identified in the phrase “overemphasized negative side of stress”, as stress is brought up the majority of the time as a negative item.  High stress is said to cause health problems.  Stress isn’t normally thought of in a positive light.  However, this paper presents it as a tool or buffer.  I wrote in a past article that pressure causes memories to be made or learning to occur, and here that information is linked with stress chemicals placing that pressure(AKA causing the physical learning pathway changes) on sections of the brain.

Stress Hormones Keep Us Active

Without stress hormones or chemicals being a part of our natural response system, neural function and cognition suffer.  Although this doesn’t link directly to the physical occurrence, you can think of stress in the mind being the pressure of a pen that writes on the paper of the mind.  In that sense, it is a requirement for our functioning.  Now, in the sense of high stress conditions, they are just as helpful.  The body’s response to high stress, in releasing chemicals to provide more ability for you to handle the stress, protects, or buffers you, from further complications.

Without Stress Hormones, Deadlines Are Meaningless

If the body didn’t release these hormones for high-stress situations, you wouldn’t get the signal to continue to meet a deadline or complete a task.  A few rocks or a concrete slab are under no stress of the cognitive type, but they are also not processing anything.  Stress is the signal that you have something relevant to your continuity that needs to be worked on.  Productivity loses relevance when there is no mental reminder of the urgency of completing anything.

A couple of days ago, I discussed the details of a quote that talks about the various activities we do and the memory recall rates associated with them.  This procedure is able to be applied to any topic like learning how to cook a certain recipe or how to study for the national boards for optometry.  Here, I exemplify the most useful techniques in order to show how they can be used to learn one new vocabulary word:

Avoid Regular Memory Methods

Let’s say you have a word you want to learn like sanguine, which means cheerful or confident.  You could try studying it simply by memorizing that sanguine means cheerful and confident by reading it five or ten times.  While this has a low rate of working, there are many methods of learning the meaning that have a much higher efficacy.  It would make more sense to not focus on raw memorization or simply reading it a few times, and to instead focus on making the word important to your mind.

Try Making A Unique Memorization Method

Take the word “sanguine” and get into a habit of finding ways that are inventive in order to learn the word more quickly.  If you are able to use mnemonics to use parts of the word to remember it, that would be the first step.  Maybe you could think that you become cheerful when in the sand at the beach, and that relates to the san- in sanguine.  In another way, you might think of the word sandwich, and how you enjoy sandwiches that you make yourself.  Then you would just have to remember the nuances that make sanguine mean confidently optimistic and cheerful.

Pictures Are Powerful

If you can draw a picture that shows the meaning of sanguine, you will certainly not forget its meaning, because you have taken the time to draw a picture about it, with your mind processing how you could depict its qualities in an image, possibly by having one with a person walking by smiling with his head held high.  The picture itself could be used as a future tool.  There are plenty of opportunities like this to encode information into our thoughts.

Use New Media

For this vocabulary example, you could easily learn the word by searching for its usage on Google News or Twitter Search or a regular Google search.  You could even search a set of PDFs that you have for presentation of the word.  By searching for usage of the word in a regular location or area you normally check online, it would make its meaning more relevant to you, and would make it that much more valuable than a random word taken out of the Oxford English Dictionary.

A popular quote that is easy to find online says “We learn… 10 percent of what we read, 20 percent of what we hear, 30 percent of what we see, 50 percent of what we see and hear, 70 percent of what we discuss with others, 80 percent of what we experience, and 95 percent of what we teach to someone.”  The percentages in the quote have no scientific accuracy, and don’t really mean much, as can be seen on this page, but relevance can still be taken from the quote about the various methods to maintain something in memory.  Here I discuss what you can take from this quote:

Reading Is Not The Only Way To Learn

It is easy to see from the quote that reading is not the only way to absorb a concept.  This means that you would want to try alternatives to reading.  If you read a book, but then don’t read any of it out loud, don’t discuss it with others in person or on an online forum, don’t implement what you read in your day-to-day activity, or  don’t teach concepts from the book to someone else, you are missing out on some key ways to solidify the material in the reading.  It doesn’t take much effort to supplement your reading, so it is always worth it.

See How You Can Supplement What You Read

If you are going to read a book, use some of the big methods for retention to make it worthwhile.  If the book has how-to material in it, don’t read something unless you are going to go do it afterwards, using what you read and thought about.  If the book goes over a concept that is confusing or interesting to you, go talk to someone about it, or find an online book forum where that book was discussed in a thread and add to it or read what others had to say.  Read parts of the book to yourself out loud if they seem like important portions.

Memory Retention Is Based On Pressure

Our minds have developed so that we remember the items that really make an imprint.  Also, emotional events are very well remembered by us.  You learn so much of what you teach to others because big pressure is on you at that time to not seem clueless while explaining the content.  There is pressure on you here, since you would appear foolish if you offered to teach something and didn’t have the concept understood.  You also learn a lot from what you experience because you do it on the spot, and have to correct errors during the process or it won’t work out.  The pressure is on you there to continue through until you complete the procedure.  You remember much of what you discuss with others because you have to have solid comprehension to be able to respond to others and their possible arguments or comments.  This goes on for the other points.  The more pressure there is on you to know the material, the higher the probability that it will be encoded into your cognition.

Create Pressure Where You Want To Improve

What do people who want to learn public speaking most quickly do?  They join Toastmasters or a similar organization and place themselves in pressure-filled(early on at least) speaking environments with others watching them, or they go and find speaking engagements to take part in.  This creates pressure where the improvement is desired.  The pressure wasn’t provided by life, but by the choice of the pro-active individual.  If you want to learn vocabulary for a standardized test, or for your own vocabulary expansion, put pressure on yourself to do so.  Tell 20 people to test you at random times, find an online forum where there is a vocabulary contest, pick a book that has loads of words you don’t know and make a commitment to underline and then find the meaning of every word you don’t know, start using 5 new vocabulary words during the day each day so that people see you learning them, or e-mail me asking me to write a vocabulary eBook.  You want to keep your desire running in the high retention rate activities, which are:

1. discussing the concept with others
2. experiencing the material in real-time action
3. teaching the material to someone else

There are many methods you can use to keep something in memory.  Remember that you are most likely to remember something if it is actually valuable to you as a person.

We run across a lot of information daily.  Do you ever get into the habit of shrugging off advice or guidance as common sense knowledge that you won’t be able to benefit from?  This is even more the case when we see the same advice provided constantly in one location or another.   If you label something as “common sense”, but you aren’t using it, then there is something difficult about it that is keeping it from becoming your “common habit”.

What Is Common Sense?

With regard to this, it is vital that we look at what “common sense” is purported to mean, and what it would be better if it represented. We might say that brushing your teeth a certain amount of times a day is “common sense”, but there are plenty of people who don’t match the “2 times a day” that they see as “common sense” on a regular basis.  This means that they are indirectly saying they are not able to keep up with a habit that they see as obvious.  This shows that there is a disconnect.  There has to be an issue in place, because if you think something is common knowledge, but are not making use of that common knowledge, then you either don’t really have that common knowledge, or don’t see that knowledge has to be implemented for any real-world changes to take place.

There Is More Than Meets The Eye

The problem here is that we take the activity as a distinct item of its own, without connecting it to all the parts necessary to make it happen.  With the tooth-brushing example, it may be obvious to you that brushing a certain amount of times per day is a smart concept, and that any less times would be deleterious to the health of your teeth, but you may be leaving out factors that allow for brushing to occur.  Maybe you don’t make time for it to occur, and therefore it does not occur and you become frustrated.  Maybe you have a habit of constantly eating throughout the day, and brushing your teeth would get in the way.

Advice You Get Usually Includes Many Parts That Are Left Unsaid

When you see tips like “sleep early enough” or “read a book a week”, you will want to avoid calling those obvious and moving on.  “Read a book a week” doesn’t just mean to read a book a week, but means that one should take all the steps to get into that habit, including setting time for reading, finding books of interest, finding motivational factors to keep the process going, building up one’s vocabulary to assist in the process, joining a book club, looking for an online forum to present interesting points from the book, etc.  You probably already have a 100% success ratio on the tips that are a one-step deal to advantage, but most tips represent multiple activities to engage in to maintain a habit.

Common Sense Is Better Viewed As “The Common Sense You Want”

The next time you see a tip and are quick to pass it off as obvious material that a child would know, ask yourself if you are using it, and if not, look for the difficulty that keeps you from making it part of your day-to-day.  There is usually something in the process that is more complex than the tip first looks to be.  “Common sense” is only common sense if you implement it at all times, or else it has been mislabeled.