Chapter 15 Flashcards
(7 cards)
What are the advantages and disadvantages of learning on your own without being guided by a formal program of study?
Look up the phrase List of autodidacts on Wikipedia.
Which of the many autodidacts there would you most like to emulate? Why?
Choose a person among your own acquaintances (that is, not a celebrity) whom you admire but to whom you have never really spoken.
Formulate a plan to say hello and introduce yourself—then carry it out.
Why is failure not always a bad thing? How can it teach us better than success? Why is failure important to learning? How can you use it to help understand something?
Failure is not terrible.
Analyze what you did wrong and use it to correct yourself to do beterin the future.
Failures are better teachers than successes because they cause you to rethink your approach.
What can you do if you’re struggling with something that should be “obvious” to everyone?
if you find yourself struggling with the “obvious,” don’t despair.
Look to your classmates or the Internet for help.
One useful trick is totry to find another instructor—one with nice evaluations—who occasionallyteaches the same class.
These instructors often understand what you are experiencing and are sometimes willing to help if you don’t overuse them as aresource.
Remind yourself that this situation is only temporary, and no circumstance is truly as overwhelming as it might seem at the time.
How can empathy sometimes be a bad thing? When is it appropriated to be dispassionate?
We’re often told that empathy is universally beneficial, but it’s not. It’s important to learn to switch on an occasional cool dispassion that helps you to not only focus on what you are trying to learn, but also to tune people out ifyou discover their interests lie in undercuting you.
Such undercuting is alltoo-common, as people are often just as competitive as they are cooperative.
How can you stay determine and persistent to your goal?
Like Cajal, you can take pride in aiming for success because of the verythings that make other people say you can’t do it.
Take pride in who you are, especially in the qualities that make you “different,” and use them as asecret talisman for success.
Use your natural contrariness to defy the alwayspresent prejudices from others about what you can do.
