Sherlock Holmes says in the book, The Study of Scarlet:
I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands.
This was written in 1887. Imagine how he’d feel today – phone buzzing in his pocket, social media feeds gushing out useless information.
Deciding what to pay attention to is hard, overlooked, and most important, it’s a negative skill – it’s about what you willfully ignore as much as what you actively seek out.
Francis Crick, who discovered the double helix structure of DNA, was once asked what it takes to win the Nobel Prize. He responded: “Oh it’s very simple. My secret had been I know what to ignore.”
Author John Barry writes:
Einstein reportedly once said that his own major scientific talent was his ability to look at an enormous number of experiments and journal articles, select the very few that were both correct and important, ignore the rest, and build a theory on the right ones.
The best reading strategy I’ve come across is the idea of a wide funnel and tight filter. Be willing to read anything that looks even (Read more...)
