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 #27. Play Mind Music
You can condition yourself to use your favorite music as a creative trigger, as well as a filter for environmental noise, and if you put it on your iPod or MP3 CD player, you'll always have it at hand.
Practically everyone has worked to music at one time or another, from late-night college study sessions to the night shift at a fast-food joint. Consider the beat of a drum to encourage a crew pulling at oars, or the fife and drum corps of an army. Music has always been used to change people's moods and get them to work together; it coevolved with ritual drama, which was also used to change people's state of mind.
However, what is appropriate for one situation might not be appropriate for another, and the same music that gets a team working in synchrony might be completely distracting for someone who is trying to think in solitude. The converse holds true, of course. Some kinds of music are appropriate for thinking that would probably be a drag on physical work.
In Action
Get yourself a good pair of headphones that are as sonically isolated as possible, and make yourself a mind music MP3 CD or playlist on your iPod that you can fill with music to help you concentrate and focus on thinking. You might already have an idea what music this might be; if not, see the "In Real Life" section of this hack for some ideas.
Condition yourself to think while this music is playing so that it becomes a kind of musical thinking cap: put it on and you become a thinker for the ...
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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.