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The lesson I've taken from learning drawing is that the observation accomplished by slowing down is different from the one made when you speed up. If you read, for example, Kimon Nicolaides, who was writing before any of the modern research on handwritten vs typed, he encourages students to progress to slower and slower contour drawings(outlines drawn without looking at your paper). The reason to use this approach is because it makes drawing more linguistic in nature: you "read" the line and instruct your hand to move slightly in a direction. You can't look back and check, so you have to know by feel how much you moved. Repeating this makes you extremely aware of tiny differences between lines, so you end up with good control over proportions as a result. Of course, you could get around this study and use a method like tracing, and get a very detailed outline. But then you wouldn't develop any awareness of what you're looking at.

So when you go slow and engage more senses and muscles, you aren't taking "better notes", you're making your brain linger on the content longer and in more depth. It's borderline useless if it's a business meeting that you're notetaking, but it's also potentially very helpful for developing the language of shapes and lines, math symbols, molecular diagrams, etc. A lot of study recommendations now say, "take the notes twice". Once in lecture, just letting your hand move without understanding and reducing anything that's lengthy and repetitive to a shorthand symbol. And then a second time when you are at home, allowing yourself to go slowly and develop more comprehension as a mode of study.


I "gave up smoking" by not giving up.

I just deferred the decision to have one cigarette.

When the urge came up, I put it off five minutes.

And crucially, the rules allowed me to have one if I really wanted.

At first there was lots of deferring and then deciding to have one.

Eventually I just deferred the decision five minutes then five minutes more and on and on forever.

The reasoning is that your subconscious mind does not like "giving up" anything. "Giving up" implies you are losing something you value for nothing in return.

When you defer the decision to indulge your addiction, you are not fighting against your subconscious - remember the rule is you are allowed to have the thing you crave.

So in effect I never gave up smoking, I'm just a smoker who deferred the decision and never decided to do it.

I "stopped smoking" about 20 years ago. I'm still a smoker but just haven't had one for a long time.

"Giving up smoking" is very hard. Deferring one cigarette for five minutes is easy.

Off topic also, I highly recommend the podcast "The Vaping Fix". It's closely related to Silicon Valley and is compelling binge listening.

https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-vaping-fix/id15628...


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