The Best Tips for Becoming Smarter
Learning about the “the world around us”. A simple and quick daily mental exercise to become more intelligent.
“These newsletters serve a demographic of highly intelligent readers, and deep thinkers with a passion for ideas, critical thinking, and unknown possibilities. Wu wei and the Law of Attraction are among those ideas. Readers of my posts are usually tired of being patronized elsewhere by fact-less, opinionated know-nothings, who complain about everything they don’t like, but lack a willingness to think about, find resources, or create life hacks, shortcuts, and solutions to fix what they don’t like.” If you are a visual type of person please check out my “AskLewis, Lewis Harrison” Channel on YouTube
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On a personal note: Please excuse grammatical errors, typos, repetition, and any general nonsense, and such in this post. I am getting a bit older now, and I have about 20,000 pages of information that must get published before I leave the mortal coil. I simply write and publish more than my humble editors are able to correct. If you find enough errors you are welcome to contact me about being an editor of my work.
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Q. Lewis, I am a college-educated person, and yet I feel that I don’t have a clue about what is going on around me. I know I pay a price for embracing this intentional ignorance. Can you help me to become a smarter person
A. Yes. Keep in mind that being a smarter person doesn’t make a person necessarily wiser. Still, being smart about things, even for a spiritually oriented person can be very useful. Even the Dalai Lama explores current research in Neurobiology to better understand the effect of meditation on the nervous system.
I'm always amazed when I talk to students and peers about how little they know about the world, around them. The easiest way to become smarter is to do things that will make you smarter. If you just take fifteen or twenty minutes a day to know what is going on in the world around you will be on your way to becoming a more educated, and aware person. This will help build your social and emotional intelligence as well.
Even the most intelligent and educated people I know are so hyper-focused on particular areas of interest that they seem to ignore the rest of the world.
Whether the subject at hand is politics, technology, climate change, economics, or issues related to democracy and globalism, many people seem to be intentionally ignorant. This intentional ignorance and the ignoring of important facts do not serve them in surviving and prospering in the seeming chaos of our times.
It doesn’t matter what one’s political orientation is. A person can be equally ignorant of the facts whether they are alt-right, a political moderate, or on the radical left.
Of course, we need to know what's going on around us concerning people, places, and things, and this can easily be done by taking fifteen minutes a day to watch or read a few news feeds. My favorites are the Washington Examiner, The Washington Post, CNN, The Cato Institute, Al Jazeera, and Politifact.com. These cover the entire political spectrum in a generally factual way.
Obviously one can get news by Googling any of these news feeds. Still, it is possible to be easily overwhelmed by all the available information.
For example, did you know:
Desmond Tutu passed away (Google that name)? If you don’t know who he is it is a clear indication that you are intentionally ignorant.
O.W. Wilson, the “modern Darwin” passed away (If you love plants and animals you need to know who it was)?
There is a Cream Cheese shortage in NYC?
It is illogical to claim to be a right-wing libertarian and also be against Abortion and Gay Marriage?
One of the most influential countries in the world right now is tiny Qatar, a dictatorial Monarchy with only 313,000 citizens?
All the facts I have listed above influence your life daily whether you know it or not. Just imagine the effects of the present New York City cream cheese shortage on; wheat growers, bagel-bakers, Dunkin Donuts, coffee sales, coffee growers in Columbia as well as the emotional health of millions of Americans and Canadians, and United Nations Delegates who have no interest in drinking coffee without a bagel and cream cheese, or putting jam on their morning bagel?
I both believe, and know from experience, how important it is for anyone engaged in the world to know what is going on in the world! It is important that people know the major news stories of the day, even if it is knowledge built on a headline and a first paragraph skim. Doing this can expand your critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and common sense
In my crusade to end intentional ignorance, I will be publishing a simple news piece every morning about a few events or trends that you need to know about.
The story may be on the passing of a visionary thinker or an important influencer, or even a major change in the landscape or the status quo in economics, politics, wellness, personal development, or the sciences.
This short daily news-based newsletter is a reflection of my passion for knowledge and an extension of my Life Strategies Playbook Method and Course, a program I created to help people Win the Game of Life through strategic thinking and applied game theory. (You can learn more about this below by clicking on the Chessboard graphic.)
The Takeaway
One, of the motivating factors for me in creating this daily NewsFeed, is that so many people who are intelligent, and do actually follow the news may not have an understanding of evidence-based facts, deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and the difference between causation and correlation? This may lead them to become conspiracy theorists or who accept sloppy journalism and truthiness and the real thing.
By offering a simple post daily (mornings EST) I hope to eliminate this problem of confusion and intentional ignorance and help you to become more effective, efficient, precise, productive, accurate, and self-aware.
I hope you take the time to read the one or two paragraphs on “the world around us” I will be posting daily.
Lewis
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This newsletter is an excerpt from Winning the Game of Life: Lewis Harrison’s Life Strategies Playbook Method from A-Z.
Click on the button just below to learn more about the course …
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