Welcome back to the 1st Law Newsletter - Friday Edition.

In this email:

• Have you ever had an original thought?

• Concepts from the book "Ultralearning"

• Quote from Bruce Lee

Your ideas might not be yours after all

Do you ever wonder how original of a thinker you really are?

Its a real concern of mine.

How many of your thoughts and opinions are actually critically thought out and well considered? Are they ideas that come from the depths of your soul, that you truly believe for a reason, or are they just some surface level knowledge and 'information' you got from social media? It's really hard to evaluate this for your own ideas as well. You must know thyself well and dissect your opinions honestly.

Everything you know ultimately comes from the external - you cannot perceive anything that your senses cannot perceive. Touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing - you are a sum of your senses and everything you know has been learned through them. However, your brain can sift through the endless amounts of sensory inputs and remember what’s important and discard what’s not, and can connect ideas to form opinions.

This goes back to killing distractions. If you curate your reality and carefully select what sources of information you are allowing into your tight bubble of focus, you can more easily understand why you believe what you believe.

Remember, Socrates was put to death for encouraging people to think critically and seek the truth.

How to be an Ultra-Learner

Ultralearning is an approach to learning that aims to achieve rapid mastery in a particular subject or skill. The main principles are as follows:

• Metalearning: Learning and planning how to efficiently learn the skill/ subject. Just like you spend 5 minutes looking for restaurants before committing to eating at one, similarly you can spend some time learning about how you will learn a new skill. This will ultimately increase the effectiveness of your time spent actually learning and increase your results.

• Focus: Immersive focus is key (obviously). Minimize distractions, single-task, use the pomodoro technique to maintain focus for longer periods, and have a goal for each work session.

• Directness: Learn by doing. Similar to when cramming for exams in 2 days, you wont waste your time watching lectures, you simply dive into the problem sets and learn by actually doing what you will need to do on the exam. For me, I am trying to learn copywriting so I write everyday (e.g. this email newsletter). If I was trying to learn to play the guitar, I would play the guitar rather than spend excessive time reading books about guitar.

• Drill: Repeated, focused practice is essential for skill development. Drill by doing the skill, but also break the skill down into components and drill your weaknesses. E.g. playing scales or focusing on certain difficult chord transactions while practicing guitar.

• Project Based: Have an ultimate goal to know when you have learnt the skill adequately. E.g. successfully playing a difficult song on the guitar, or learning video game development by having the goal of releasing a video game. To complete the project, you will have to learn the necessary skills.

Tbh, I didn't even finish the book but I got enough out of the parts I did read and just googled the rest. I hope you get something out of this segment :). If you want to read it I have linked it here.

Quote I Want To Share

On the same train of thought as the first point about original thoughts, Bruce Lee highlights how different people process and understand knowledge differently. What you learn is pointless, all that matters is how you use the information you have learned. Wisdom is knowledge plus the experience required for it to be useful.

Thanks for reading!

Lucas