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.
Chapter 8. Mental Fitness
Physical fitness is commonly defined as consisting of strength, flexibility, and endurance. You can also think of mental fitness as consisting of these characteristics. Mental strength is the ability to attack a problem, mental flexibility is the ability to stretch your mind to see all of the problem's aspects, and mental endurance is the ability to keep at a problem until you solve it.
This last chapter puts together everything you learned in the previous chapters. It contains hacks about caring for your brain with sleep, nutrition, and exercise [Hack #69], and mental warm-ups [Hack #66] and mind sports [Hack #67]. Finally, the last hack in the book enables you to integrate all the previous hacks and carry them around in a big, red, mental toolbox [Hack #75] that you can bring with you, even where there is no electricity or pen and paper.
Hack #66. Warm Up Your Brain
Get the blood flowing to your gray matter with a few mental push-ups.
Sometimes the mind simply doesn't want to think. The morning caffeine hasn't kicked in yet, or perhaps it is wearing off. Thought seems like an effort. In this situation, you might normally be inclined to wait until the sluggishness wears off, perhaps by taking a break with someone else's thoughts (browsing the Web, reading a book, or watching TV, for example).
If you would really rather get busy, you might be able to push past the threshold of resistance by doing a little mental warm-up. If thinking is normally a pleasurable ...
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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.