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I often get this said to me “how do you know so much about everything!”. I am not trying to brag, it is really something people say. I get called a know-it-all…sometimes worse things as well. I do happen to know a lot of stuff, but lately with age I think I am starting to slip as far as retaining information.
I have always known how to bridge connections in my brain by using various techniques.
- Creating songs or stories about the information
- Total immersion into the topic
- Visual cues for remembering
There are a lot of ways that you can help your brain retain information you find useful. However, what information you retain is important as well. In fact I would argue as we get older we need to bring down the amount of topics we seek to understand – basically we need to become masters of fewer and fewer bits of information.
As children we are huge sponges, soaking up information from everywhere. If taught at an early enough age, being multi-lingual is not that big of deal. Kids can become amazing learners very quickly if we give them the opportunity to.
Adults though, we have our attention pulled in a lot of different directions and the need for focus becomes paramount. So that is why I came up with a technique called Brain-Hedging.
Brain Hedging:
Hedging can mean various things. In finance hedging refers to offsetting your risk on one investment with another. In affect you are protecting yourself from an outside risk. In gardening you can create hedging by planting hedges around your yard creating a natural fence. That is the image I want you to stick with when it comes to Brain Hedging.
Brain Hedging is all about determining what you want entering into your brain for posterity and use. Do you really want to learn 4 different languages in your 30’s? Can you do that and still maintain the information you need for your career? Some people can, most can’t.
By determining exactly what you want to focus on and study, you can eliminate a lot of information that you don’t need your brain to hold on to. I mean really, do you still need the names of all the fraggle rock characters in there? Gobo Fraggle!
You can determine exactly what you want to focus on pretty easily by making a list of about 7 items that you really are passionate about or that you absolutely need to be sharp on for work. As a trainer/coach focusing on training would be a good thing, right? Focusing on accounting, while interesting, may not be the best course of action and it takes up needed brain resources.
So, I gave it a shot and these are the 7 focus topics I came up with for myself.
*in no particular order
- History
- Primal Diet/Fitness
- Religion
- Survival
- Spanish
- Training & Development
- OpenBSD
That was harder than I originally thought it would be, you see I am a generalist so I have a lot of interests. However, this exercise is all about focus. I want to break down each one of my topics to give you a better idea of what I was thinking with each one.
History:
To me history includes a few differing topics. Really you can’t study History without studying politics and economics as well. Also, you can’t study history without knowing the present. So keeping up to date on political events is part of focusing on history. I don’t need to be studying mandarin, but I could study the mandarins.
Primal Diet/Fitness:
I could have labeled this topics Health, but I wanted to narrow it even more to focus on the Primal diet. The primal diet can best be summed up in Mark Sisson’s book The Primal Blueprint. Basically going back to a diet that more closely represents what our Paleo-ancestors ate. Meat, Vegetables, Fruit, and Nuts. Pretty simple, I have seen a lot of people have great results with it. The fitness aspect of it intrigues me as well. I figure if I go full bore into this I will get some results and learn a lot about my physical self. Should be interesting.
Religion:
Religion is mainly focused on Christianity for me, but I study all religions as a course of habit. This will stretch my brain out of its normal logic based thinking. This topic also includes by default – philosophy. I spend a lot of time in this area of study, so controlling other sources of information is key to keeping my brain hedged enough for me to take in as much as possible.
Survival:
Guns, tents, water, foraging…these are all areas of study I think most of modern American has let slip and to the detriment of their overall life. If things do continue to get worse this information will keep me alive long enough to study the others.
Spanish:
Okay, I don’t need to explain this too much. I live in an area where learning Spanish and speaking it fluently would give me a big advantage in the workplace.
Training & Development:
To continue to get better at my career I need to get better at training and developing my clients/customers/co-workers. Learning to coach, motivate, and teach are my main focus points here. They will make me better, as well as those I am working with – as Michael Scott would say “A win-win-win”.
OpenBSD:
You will probably start seeing this leak onto combsy.com in the coming weeks. I have always wanted to know the ins & outs of OpenBSD. If you don’t know what it is go here. I am a total novice at this point, but I am learning very quickly. Very interesting topics…for geeks anway.
Review:
So there you have my 7 focus points. If you know me, you know I also enjoy sports and video games. I will still enjoy them, but gone are the days of memorizing stats or level maps. I just don’t have the capacity for it anymore. Brain Hedging is all about becoming a Master of something, 7 things in this case, no mediocrity.
I will update you with this experiment as I get deeper into the process and technique. Any psychologist out there want to experiment? Just kidding…maybe…
Practice limiting the sources of information coming into your brain. Multi-tasking is dead. Focus and go full blast. In a later post I will start ranking each of my topics to show you how to focus even more. The idea is to become great at something for the benefit of others. Being a generalist can be good but often it leaves you out of doing some amazing things as well.
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