February 2006
Intermediate to advanced
332 pages
9h 3m
English
Content preview from Mind Performance HacksBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Hack #16. Map Your Mind
Collecting and connecting related ideas reveal patterns that stimulate new thought, as well as contradictions to be resolved.
Are your thoughts organized? Most of the time, people live in a river of thoughts and sensations, like the story line of a movie. Our thoughts arrive as events in a sequence.
But we can map out our thoughts on a plane. When we see them side by side, we can compare them with one another and organize them. Observing the whole picture, all at once, we make startling realizations and discover an order to our thoughts, a top-down understanding of them.1
Alternatively, we find a disorder, and gain insight into tensions and confusions in our life. As soon as we see them clearly, though, our mind starts cranking away, working to resolve them—or, at the very least, to understand the subtlety behind the tension.
In Action
Mind mapping begins with collecting thoughts into a source list: a list of ideas you start out with and that you're going to map. It's useful to separate assembling your mind map from collecting your source ideas.
Creating the source list
Your source list can come from free writing, from a catch [Hack #13], or even from a chat transcript. What's necessary is to turn the source into a list.
Let's start with free writing. Think of a subject you think about a lot. Situate yourself in front of a keyboard, close your eyes, and then type out everything that comes to you about the subject. You can try to focus on one topic, or fan out to ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.