24-12-2012, 02:58 PM
Power Up Your Mind: Learn faster, work smarter
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Introduction
THIS BOOK IS BASED ON THE NOTION THAT WE ALL HAVE THE CAPACITY TO
succeed, but most of us only use a very small portion of our minds,
and therefore of our capacity. In an age when creativity and time are
the key commodities, learning how to learn is the key skill and the
brain is the key organ. Only if we can learn faster and more effectively
will we be able to thrive.
Most of us don’t understand the central role our minds have
in helping us to perform more effectively: we are simply not taught
how to learn or how to apply our learning. While we have discovered
more about the brain and how it works in the last decade than
we have ever known before, we apply very little of this in our daily
working or personal lives.
It is possible for everyone to learn faster, work smarter, and
be more fulfilled.
Power Up Your Mind translates what we know about how the
brain works into useful insights for the workplace. It has been written
from the conviction that intelligence is multifaceted and not
fixed at birth. It draws ideas from the broadest possible range of
subject areas, from neuroscience to psychology, motivation theory
to accelerated learning, memory to diet.
THE 5 RS
Contrary to what you may have been taught at school, being good at
the 3Rs—Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic—will not be enough for
you to get very far today. While everyone certainly needs these basic
skills, in the era of lifelong learning there are a much broader set of dispositions
that we all need to have. These are the 5Rs: Resourcefulness,
Remembering, Resilience, Reflectiveness, and Responsiveness. These
new skills are explored in Parts II and III of this book.
INTELLIGENCE AND THE MIND
A similarly narrow view has been taken toward the idea of intelligence
in the past century. While the word “intelligence” entered
the English language in Europe during the early Middle Ages, it
has become a synonym for IQ or intellectual quotient. This one
kind of intelligence has dominated our experiences of schooling
and influenced many of the psychometric tests we undergo and use
at work. Invented by Alfred Binet and William Stern at the beginning
of the twentieth century, IQ’s influence has been pernicious,
artificially inflating the importance of language and figures and
taking no account of creativity, common sense, or the ability to
manage emotions.
Yet, we know now that intelligence involves a combination of
“know-how” and “know-what” across a multitude of contexts. If
you are intelligent, you are good at using your mind in many different
ways. If your mind is working well, you are able to learn to
do many things that you did not think you could do. Nurture not
nature is in the ascendency.
For most of the time that it has existed as a concept, intelligence
has been linked to the brain. Interestingly, the ancient Egyptians
believed that a person’s ability to think resided in their heart, while
their judgment came from either their brain or their kidneys
POWERING UP YOUR MIND
For far too long, these three key stages have been viewed in isolation
when they need to be taken together. If you can do all three
things well, then you will truly have powered up your mind.
This book will help you to be ready, to go out and learn with
confidence, and to be steady when it comes to putting your learning
into practice. It will always come back to some common-sense questions:
So what? What do I need to know about this? Does it work?
How can I apply it in my life? How will it help me to be more successful
at work and in my personal life?