Archive for the 'Mental Discipline' Category


Your Education Plan

I find Abraham Lincoln’s method of planning the most appealing and the most practical. Jokingly, he has stated that his “plan is to have no plan.” When pressed further, he equated his method of planning with how he navigated a river as a riverboat captain. When navigating the river, he would plan […]

Practice makes practice. Experimentation makes perfect.

I’ve always had a problem drawing wheels. I eventually tracked down the problem: my understanding of how circles are effected by linear perspective was flawed. I had studied the problem, but when I applied what I thought I knew, my wheels never turned out quite right. No amount of practice with my […]

Unchain Your Brain Part 5: Learning Traps

Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4— Part 5
Intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.
— Albert Einstein

The main point about reading, collaboration, and experimentation is not that these are simply three ways to learn, but rather they represent an integrated approach to learning where […]

Unchain Your Brain Part 4: Experimentation

Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4— Part 5
When there’s no experimenting there’s no progress. Stop experimenting and you go backward. If anything goes wrong, experiment until you get to the very bottom of the trouble.
— Thomas Edison
Experimentation is vital to the development […]

Writing Wizardry

With a book and a blog underway, I have become more attuned to good writing. Sculpting a lumpy mass of words into linguistic art seems to me to be a feat of magic.
Below is one of the tightest paragraphs I have come across in recent memory. I found it unexpectedly in a review […]

Putting Things in Perspective

[B]ad drawing springs from basic faults as surely as good drawing springs from basic merits.
– Andrew Loomis
One of the most critical fundamentals of draftsmanship is perspective. You really cannot draw much without it. Even an expert understanding of anatomy will be worthless unless combined with a basic understanding of perspective. Fortunately […]

Unchain Your Brain Part 3: Collaboration

Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4— Part 5
The good men may do separately, is small compared with what they may do collectively.
— Benjamin Franklin
One of the misleading things about attributing greatness to a person is that we often give too much credit. Thomas Edison is credited […]

Always Faithful in a Marine’s Potential

Mission accomplishment is the primary objective of Marine Corps leadership. To reinforce this prioritization, the Marine Corps gives each Marine a steady stream of ongoing professional military education. For enlisted Marines, it starts with bootcamp, extends to Marine Combat Training, then to the Marine’s military occupational specialty school. A Marine can […]

I am not talented or smart . . .

But I know that I can simulate those traits through hard work. We all can.
Corey pointed me to an article on Scientific American’s site about the link between beliefs about the fixedness of intelligence and actual achievement. Here is my favorite excerpt:

In the growth mind-set classes, students read and discussed an article entitled “You […]

The Art of the Disagreement

Cam started a discussion about authenticity, transparency, honesty and doing the right thing. He quoted Seth Godin’s book “All Marketers are Liars,” which is probably my favorite marketing book. Being familiar with the book, I jumped into the conversation. The book is not about lying, by the way, it’s about authentic […]