Category: Communicate

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Accidental Genius introduces you to the concept of freewriting, which you can use to solve complex problems, exercise your creativity, flesh out your ideas and even build a catalog of publishable work.

Often we’ve known the tools we need to deal with our everyday problems for a long time. Some of the best of them we learned as children – and promptly forgot while growing up. I remember writing short stories and poems and little essays as a kid. Even most of the early writing assignments in school I ended up liking.

But the older I got, the more forced it felt. Eventually, writing faded away and it took a very concentrated, deliberate effort to bring it back into my life three years ago. Maybe Accidental Genius can do the same for you. With this book, Mark Levy gives you all the tools you need to give freewriting a shot.

If you ever sat down when you were little and let the words just bubble out, this’ll bring that feeling back – and help you solve complex problems and practice your creativity at the same time.

Here are my 3 big takeaways:

• Follow three rules while conducting your first free writing session.
• Lying in freewriting can boost your creativity.
• Freewriting might be the fastest way to finally write your book.

Here’s more about my favorite activity and how it can help you succeed: writing!

Lesson 1: Your first freewriting session should follow three rules.

Warren Buffett likes to joke that the secret to a happy marriage is low expectations. I’m not sure about that, but for freewriting it sure sets the right context. The whole point of the exercise is to get ideas flowing, so perfectionism would only get in the way. Before you start a stream-of-consciousness session, relax, remember it’s no pressure and put yourself in a 90% mindset, rather than 110%.

The second key to a successful freewriting session is writing quickly and coherently. Don’t stop. Don’t edit. Never question your statements. Repeat lines if it helps you keep moving. Focus on quantity over quality.

Lastly, and this helps with the second point, set a time limit. Whether it’s an alarm, the wait for your coffee brewer or a washing machine cycle, a fixed start and end point will help you focus and move fast.

So, for a good, first freewriting session:

Lower your expectations.

Write fast and fluidly.

Set a time limit – 5 to 20 minutes will do just fine.

Lesson 2: Lie all you want in your freewriting. It’s an exercise in creativity.

Reality, psh, so yesterday, right? While most of the time the truth serves us well, freewriting might be the one of the few cases where you can and in fact should lie like a trooper. Since it’s an idea practice, abandoning reality for fantasy adds to your creative process. There are two ways you can do this:

Exaggerate. Turn slouching into running, houses into skyscrapers and mediocre into exhilarating.

Flip. If it rains it may now be sunny. Slow becomes fast. What was quiet now is loud.

Other exercises you can try are imagining a conversation with a fictitious character or person you know, writing a letter dedicated to a group of people or to your past self. You can even imagine what questions these characters would ask you and then try to answer them.

The whole point of lying in your freewriting is to question the assumptions you hold and see if there are new paths your neurons haven’t explored yet. It’s like the Einstein quote goes:

“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” – Albert Einstein

Lesson 3: A freewriting habit might just be what you need to finally start your book.

I really believe everyone of us has at least one book in them. Most people would probably agree. Yet, very few write books. Why is that? Well, writing a book seems – and is – one of the most daunting challenges we can think of. The financial reward potential is terribly low. The work is hard. It takes forever.

Now contrast that with writing for five minutes a day about your favorite topic. How does that sound? Doable, right? Fun, even. But if you do that for a year you’ll easily produce 60-150 pages of material! A regular freewriting practice might be the easiest and fastest way to write a book.

Or let’s say you write every time you do laundry. Three one-hour sessions each week. You’ll easily write 500 pages in a year. If you file and archive those, it’ll be very easy to pick these tidbits back up, edit them, revise them, link various ideas together and voilà, your first book is ready for a professional’s scrutiny before it goes live!

Even if you don’t intend to publish a book, keeping an archive of your freewriting sessions with a good tagging system will quickly add up to an invaluable idea stash.

Pro tip: If you write by hand, you can scan your documents into Evernote and it’ll make the text searchable.

My personal take-aways

Most of science agrees: genius is not a genetic trait reserved for the magnificent few. Instead, what we’ve learned from books like The Eureka Factor is that genius happens in serendipitous moments. In Accidental Genius, Mark Levy presents a practice to facilitate these chance encounters in our brain. More freewriting, more firing neurons, more good ideas. That’s the idea. And from over three years of both free and deliberate writing, I can assure you: it works.

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10 Days To Faster Reading helps you bring your reading skills to the current century, even if you’ve stopped developing them, like most of us, with the end of elementary school, by helping you select what to read in a better way and giving you actionable techniques to read and retain faster and better.

This book is the result of America’s number one speed reading expert teaming up with The Princeton Language Institute. Over the span of ten days, it encourages you to run various reading experiments, so you can figure out which bad reading habits you have to let go of, which good ones will help you and what reading techniques you’ve already mastered.

Whether you think you lack the time, the attention, or the memory to properly read, this book gives you a stretch of rope to hold onto and pull yourself out of the hole.

Here are 3 lessons to help you become a better reader:

• Don’t just read everything, be picky and ask some questions first.
• Preview everything you read.
• Focus on important keywords to grasp sentences without reading them.

Ready to read like a pro? Let’s crank up your literary intake!

Lesson 1: Be restrictive with what you read by asking these two questions.

Just like true productivity doesn’t mean doing everything, but doing it faster, being a prolific reader doesn’t mean reading everything that lands in front of you.

The easiest way to read more is to read less of the stuff you don’t need to. Reading is food for the mind and just like a good diet requires you to take responsibility for what you put in your mouth, you’ll also have to stand up for what you put in your brain.

The authors suggest you ask yourself two crucial questions before ever reading anything longer than a tweet:

Why am I reading this?

Why do I need the information that’s in here?

The first question helps you figure out if you’re just servicing someone else’s request, or your own desire of being able to say “I have read that.” For example, just because you failed to read the 2014 industry report for the past two years does not make it relevant now, so you might as well toss it.

The second one digs into whether you’ll actually use what you read. For example, a scientific paper that might help you solve an important problem one of your clients has should probably take precedence over your child’s homework review, especially if your kid is already an A-student.

Lesson 2: Subject everything you’re about to read to a preview, it might be enough.

This won’t work with fiction books, but for everything non-fiction, it helps a lot. By getting an overview of what a book or article is about, you’ll get a better sense of the bigger picture and figure out which parts will be relevant for you to read in the first place.

Just like you don’t have to read everything that ends up in your hands, you don’t have to read everything that’s in whatever you do decide to read.

Here’s how: Read the title, foreword and text on the back flap, followed by skimming the index. Then, leaf through the chapters and look at the headings and subheadings. Read the first sentence of paragraphs or chapters that seem interesting.

After doing this, you’ll already have a good sense of what’s about to come, which makes you less likely to have to re-read lines and paragraphs as you go through.

According to the authors, previewing can give you up to 40% of the information – and sometimes that’s all you need. For example, a book like The One Thing has one predominant and specific message, which you can get in five minutes flat. That doesn’t make the rest of the book bad or unnecessary, but depending on the time and place it might be all you need for now, until you return to the book later.

Lesson 3: Focus on important keywords to grasp sentences without reading them.

You could look at the entire lesson above and instantly tell me what its core takeaway is, without reading a single sentence.

Why is that?

Because I’ve bolded the most important keywords. Just by taking a glimpse at the paragraph above, you’d instantly recognize that looking at title, foreword, back flap text and index give you a great preview of a book.

Usually, our eyes jump around while reading, but by following a constant stream of keywords, you can read more fluently. These keywords are often longer than three letters and carry the meaning of the sentence.

This is easier in texts with highlighted parts (like this summary), but with a little training you can employ this method even without particular visual guidance.

My personal take-aways

I was expecting a bunch of scammy speed reading techniques, but this turned out well! I like the focus on prioritizing and changing what you read in the first place. The book then talks about bad reading habits and good reading habits, which makes it easy to distinguish between things not to do and things to strive for. The speed reading part really more rounds out the book, as opposed to dominating it.

Good read!

Buy this book– https://amzn.to/2DORBJz

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The Book in Three Sentences: To become a better writer, you have to write more. Writing reveals the story because you have to write to figure out what you’re writing about. Don’t judge your initial work too harshly because every writer has terrible first drafts.

Read the full book summary »

Add to Library

10 Days To Faster Reading helps you bring your reading skills to the current century, even if you’ve stopped developing them, like most of us, with the end of elementary school, by helping you select what to read in a better way and giving you actionable techniques to read and retain faster and better.

This book is the result of America’s number one speed reading expert teaming up with The Princeton Language Institute. Over the span of ten days, it encourages you to run various reading experiments, so you can figure out which bad reading habits you have to let go of, which good ones will help you and what reading techniques you’ve already mastered.

Whether you think you lack the time, the attention, or the memory to properly read, this book gives you a stretch of rope to hold onto and pull yourself out of the hole.

Here are 3 lessons to help you become a better reader:

Don’t just read everything, be picky and ask some questions first.
Preview everything you read.
Focus on important keywords to grasp sentences without reading them.
Ready to read like a pro? Let’s crank up your literary intake!

Lesson 1: Be restrictive with what you read by asking these two questions.
Just like true productivity doesn’t mean doing everything, but doing it faster, being a prolific reader doesn’t mean reading everything that lands in front of you.

The easiest way to read more is to read less of the stuff you don’t need to. Reading is food for the mind and just like a good diet requires you to take responsibility for what you put in your mouth, you’ll also have to stand up for what you put in your brain.

The authors suggest you ask yourself two crucial questions before ever reading anything longer than a tweet:

Why am I reading this?
Why do I need the information that’s in here?
The first question helps you figure out if you’re just servicing someone else’s request, or your own desire of being able to say “I have read that.” For example, just because you failed to read the 2014 industry report for the past two years does not make it relevant now, so you might as well toss it.

The second one digs into whether you’ll actually use what you read. For example, a scientific paper that might help you solve an important problem one of your clients has should probably take precedence over your child’s homework review, especially if your kid is already an A-student.

Lesson 2: Subject everything you’re about to read to a preview, it might be enough.
This won’t work with fiction books, but for everything non-fiction, it helps a lot. By getting an overview of what a book or article is about, you’ll get a better sense of the bigger picture and figure out which parts will be relevant for you to read in the first place.

Just like you don’t have to read everything that ends up in your hands, you don’t have to read everything that’s in whatever you do decide to read.

Here’s how: Read the title, foreword and text on the back flap, followed by skimming the index. Then, leaf through the chapters and look at the headings and subheadings. Read the first sentence of paragraphs or chapters that seem interesting.

After doing this, you’ll already have a good sense of what’s about to come, which makes you less likely to have to re-read lines and paragraphs as you go through.

According to the authors, previewing can give you up to 40% of the information – and sometimes that’s all you need. For example, a book like The One Thing has one predominant and specific message, which you can get in five minutes flat. That doesn’t make the rest of the book bad or unnecessary, but depending on the time and place it might be all you need for now, until you return to the book later.

Lesson 3: Focus on important keywords to grasp sentences without reading them.
You could look at the entire lesson above and instantly tell me what its core takeaway is, without reading a single sentence.

Why is that?

Because I’ve bolded the most important keywords. Just by taking a glimpse at the paragraph above, you’d instantly recognize that looking at title, foreword, back flap text and index give you a great preview of a book.

Usually, our eyes jump around while reading, but by following a constant stream of keywords, you can read more fluently. These keywords are often longer than three letters and carry the meaning of the sentence.

This is easier in texts with highlighted parts (like this summary), but with a little training you can employ this method even without particular visual guidance.

My personal take-aways
I was expecting a bunch of scammy speed reading techniques, but this turned out well! I like the focus on prioritizing and changing what you read in the first place. The book then talks about bad reading habits and good reading habits, which makes it easy to distinguish between things not to do and things to strive for. The speed reading part really more rounds out the book, as opposed to dominating it.

Good read!

Buy this book– https://amzn.to/2DOmiP8