personal development

This is a sequel to my MOOC learning journey post, in which I compared the different online learning platforms and recommended good AI/Math/PM courses. In this post, I want to discuss how using metacognition (to be aware of what/how one’s doing and thinking) can improve learning effectiveness, in terms of absorption and knowledge application. Such self-awareness helps you adjust your strategy/approach as needed. It is like having an alter-ego that zooms above you, instrumenting each process and guiding your next step with rational data....

Current problem As a lifelong learner of a wide range of subjects, I need robust tools to manage my acquired knowledge and act as an idea pad for content creation. My minimalist mindset also requires the number of deployed tools to be as few as possible. This post is a summary of my journey in notetaking with Obsidian. I’m going to go over why Obsidian is a great (although not perfect) tool for notetaking, project management and journaling....

Learning is my biggest hobby, and I am always looking at ways to improve both my skillset and learning methods. As my main professional interest is using NLP to build recommenders, I have been using the kinesthetic learning approach in the past few years, to learn while actually coding personal projects using NLTK, SpaCy and various Japanese language modelling libraries. This approach, while fun and provides instant feedback, lacks a foundational structure....

People often have stereotype or fantasy that artists receive their inspiration from high above, as if the “drop of gift” appear all of a sudden. Wouldn’t it be eye-opening if professionals reveal how that process actually works? In fact, numerous books have been written by artists to disprove the “muse” myth, showing that it is nothing romantic but just consist of routine hard work. In this blog post, I’ll talk about what unites novelist Murakami Haruki, advertising legend James Webb Young and choreographer Twyla Tharp in the creation process....

We always hear the catchy phrase you are what you think, but is this true? Recent reading of neuroscience and psychology books taught me that our brain is not trustworthy, because thinking can be unreliable due to its automatic (thus uncontrollable) mechanism. We are easily derailed by cognitive bias, and allow our contrived stories/thoughts to create negative experiences. In this post, we will see how our brain’s wirings can trip us, and how mindfulness can mitigate....

In the book “100 basics of life”, the Japanese essayist Matsuura Yataro has proposed writing down your kihon - the core basics, or guiding principles of your life. It not only acts as your anchor and guidance, but also becomes a living document for reflection during uncertain times. With it, you can also trace your important changes as you continue to learn and evolve, something akin to a changelog. Kihons...

What is Danshari Danshari is a mental model pioneered by Hideko Yamashita via a book series in the 2000s, as a way to organize our lives by making deliberate choices. Per Yamashita, she got the idea from her yoga practice and a pilgrimage stay in Koyasan. I used the term mental model and not housekeeping tactics because I truly believe that this has far more practicality beyond just organizing our...

This is Part 3 of the “Improve knowledge conversion with book tracking” series. In this series, I will explain why we should build a tracking system to assist in converting what we read into actionable knowledge. In Part 1 and Part 2, I’ve explained the why and how of the book tracking system. Now let’s dive into implementing the metrics to track our investment. How many books am I reading now?...

This is Part 2 of the “Improve knowledge conversion with book tracking” series. In this series, I will explain why we should build a tracking system to help converting what we read into actionable knowledge. In Part 1 I discussed why we need to take an investment view to scrutinize the output of what we read. In this post, I’m going to show you how I build the book tracking system using Google Sheets, Apps Script and AppSheet....

Why we can’t recall what we read This is Part 1 of the “Improve knowledge conversion with book tracking” series. In this series, I will explain why we should build a tracking system to help converting what we read into actionable knowledge. In Part 2 and Part 3 I will explain the technical details of building one. Have you spent a lot of free time reading books, only finding out later that you can’t recall anything?...