This week I have been checking out some video blogs and presentations. A friend turned me on to the TED videos, so I checked out several of those. Probably my favorite find so far would be Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity Also watched Seth Godin on standing out. Also watched a 1974 video of the Cree Hunters of Mistassini.
Super Memory, or SuperMemo, is a program written for helping you drill yourself on memorizing material. Sort of like flash cards on steroids. Perhaps most useful would be the incremental reading facility.
I keep coming back to SuperMemo, reading about it, thinking about buying it, and then putting the idea aside. I stop and wonder, what things do I need to memorize rigorously at this stage of my life? Could certainly learn more math. Not currently planning to take up any new foreign languages (SuperMemo is apparently fantastic for learning new languages). Could be useful for memorizing all that esoteric boundary law procedure and precedent for the surveyor’s license exam, but that’s a few years away yet. So the question becomes: What, if anything, do I need to have utterly reliably memorized? Is it simply the idea of rigorous overkill in memorization that is so tantalizing?
Over the last few days I have been watching a few Tim Ferriss videos, and one point he raises may apply here: That efficiency is never a good substitute for effectiveness, and it is easy to become fascinated by process. SuperMemo is a fascinating process, and clearly efficient for some tasks. For what current goals would SuperMemo be effective?
Shortly before our good friend Wayne Coleman was promoted to glory, he sent me a reminder, “Remember Fukuoka.”