Chapter 39 7.b Benefits of advance preparation

The benefits of preparing in advance are often only those who prepare in advance may truly appreciate.However, no matter how troublesome it is, as long as you allow me to talk a little more, I can make those who read my text understand the benefits and "surprises" of preparing in advance even if they have never really prepared anything in advance the benefits of.In order to be clear, it is necessary to start with some seemingly unrelated things. so-called "inspiration" In the process of reading, a particularly interesting phenomenon is that when you realize that you need and want to find a book about a specific field, good books will automatically appear-either a friend gave you, or you I randomly found it in a bookstore or library, or it was mentioned in a post I didn’t know who wrote it while browsing the Internet, or it might even have existed on your bookshelf for a long time but you have never had time to read it...

I've had a lot of this happen recently.While I was sorting out this book, I found an original version of Thomas Sowell's "Knowledge and Decision" on a friend's shelf that he didn't know where he got it but never opened it. It inspired me a lot; I have read "The Tipping Point", "Mean Genes" and several other books on my bookshelf many times, and "discovered" many particularly good examples; There is content that can verify many of my past ideas. The packaging and design I saw in the airport bookstore (the bookstore is always nondescript in the airport, and there are few good books except magazines), but the author's reputation alone is enough. Bi Shumin's new novel, which can be guaranteed to be read without regret -- there is a particularly good analogy in it that will be mentioned in the following pages...

When I teach composition classes, students always complain to me, "Teacher, I can't find examples, what should I do?" At first I always tell students patiently, "Examples are just like money. It came out, not thought out." Some students asked, "Teacher, why can't I find as wonderful examples as you gave in class?", I replied: "Keep looking. Everything is just Rely on accumulation." Thinking about it today, such an answer would be an oversimplification.However, several years passed, until one day, when I was teaching a GRE essay question, I realized that I was oversimplifying.When I was talking about that question, I mentioned this sentence: "Our society tends to forget those important people-in fact, all societies may be like this." So I had to give examples to students "Who are important people?" Is there a forgotten person?" I asked the students, "Can anyone name three people who are very important to our society but have been forgotten?" When they heard "three", the class Hundreds of people, a few students who just hesitated before raising their hands hurriedly put them down.

To give an example of "Which important people have been forgotten?" is not only difficult, but even close to impossible.Think about it, you are a member of the whole society, and the whole society has forgotten about it, so how do you as a member know?Even if you just use Google to search the Internet now, you don't know where to start.Afterwards, I mentioned a series of names such as Chen Yinke, Zhang Zhixin, Jiang Yanyong, Gao Yaojie, etc. in one breath.Every time I mentioned a name, I asked all the students who had never heard of the name, or who did not know who it was, to raise their hands. As a result, most of the students raised their hands every time.

Some students asked in class: "Teacher, how did you know?" I told them, "I didn't know at first, and I couldn't even know." However, there is only one difference between me and them, These titles and the sentence just now "Our society tends to forget important people--in fact, all societies are likely to do so." I recorded it in my notebook a long time ago, so I read it later Regarding the articles written by those people just now, although the reading at that time was based on other reasons or purposes, which had nothing to do with writing, I immediately thought of the sentence that was written in the notebook, so there were more words beside the sentence. Another example of an "important person forgotten by society as a whole".

I remember reading books written by learned people when I was a child, which often led to very low self-esteem, wondering "How on earth did they even know this?!" Tianxiao, let’s go to Kunlun.” Tan Sitong also wrote such a text more than a hundred years ago: “A detailed examination of how the tendons and muscles move during copulation, and the texture of the saliva, the diagrams are exhaustive. It is also modeled on the human figure, which can be disassembled to distinguish the truth, open more museums to study obscenity, and widely distribute books that clarify the theory of obscenity, so that everyone can understand why."

The other one I can't find the source now.It is said that the American novelist Scott Fitzgerald (Scott Fitzgerald) who is famous for "Biography of Tycoon" was distressed because his penis size was "too small". After Hemingway learned about it, he took Fitzgerald to the boys' toilet to see the truth If it was not enough, I simply took him to visit the artworks in the Louvre and said, "How can your group lose to the lower body of any male sculpture?" Hemingway also explained perspective to Fitzgerald in detail. Tell him that many men feel that their own things are not as big as other people's. In fact, they just have different perspectives when observing their own and others'.Only then did Fitzgerald begin to live like a normal person.

Now it seems that they may not necessarily know everything before writing.It is likely that we searched and accumulated in order to write it out, and only then did we discover the content that surprised us.Of course, if I'm not wrong, they themselves are often taken aback by their own discoveries, otherwise, how could there be such sighs as "articles are naturally made, and clever hands get them by chance". Therefore, material accumulation is of course very important. However, if you determine a direction or goal in advance, you can even accumulate a lot of material that was originally impossible to imagine-surprises.Later, one afternoon a week or so before I wrote this article, when I had nothing to do, I took out my past reading notes and flipped through them, and suddenly found that there was such a sentence:

We've all probably been there.At a cocktail party, everyone is talking to each other in groups of about the same size.You are talking to someone or people, and for a considerable period of time while you are talking, the voices other than what the people you are talking to and what you are saying to those people are virtually all over your head. Ignore, equivalent to not exist.But if your name pops up in another group of people's conversation, maybe even when they're not actually close to you, you'll pick up that sound instantly, as if it's popping into your ear Same.And the strange thing is that for a long time before, those people have been talking at the same volume and at the same distance as you are now, but you have no idea what they are talking about. Everything before that is filtered out.This is the so-called "cocktail party effect" (Cock-tail party effect), the name was named after Collin Cherry (Collin Cherry) first noticed it in 195318.Scientists were trying to figure out how to solve the various problems faced by air traffic control for airports.At that time, the controller had to get the pilot's voice information from the control tower through the loudspeaker, and it was very tricky to distinguish the voice of a specific pilot from the noisy voices of many pilots.

I finally have a clearer explanation. "Attention to specific information" will give us the magical ability to pick out the "information we pay attention to" that we need even in the "noise" that is very noisy. Either way, I did more homework on Wikipedia and Google.It turns out that scientists now have more simple and clear scientific explanations for the so-called "subconscious mind".Only a small part (hardly more than 12%) of the various information stored in the gray matter of our brain is stored in an orderly manner, and this part is what we call "conscious".And more information, or information fragments, are stored in an unordered manner, and it is even difficult to directly recall them consciously. These are often the parts we call "unconscious" or "subconscious".The existence of dreams is the most basic evidence of the existence of the subconscious mind.

And as more and more information is input, the brain needs more and more gray matter cells.Scientists have found that people who speak two or more languages ​​have more gray matter cells.The size of the cranial cavity is limited, so the increase of gray matter cells will eventually lead to higher and higher gray matter density.Thus, the gray matter cells are more likely to be connected by neurons.This creates the possibility of what we call "fusion" -- information that might otherwise appear to be unrelated now has the opportunity to be linked.Therefore, the so-called knowledgeable people are those who store an extraordinary amount of information in their brains. These people can always "integrate", so they are full of "wisdom". In this way, it is superficial that many people hate rote learning.Aristotle once said that the so-called wisdom is memory, which should be a simple and natural experience for him although he could not fully explain it at the time.Some fields of knowledge are relatively more in need of so-called "rote memorization", such as history, geography, foreign languages ​​and so on.In fact, "rote memorization" has another impressive synonym of the opposite -- "extensive knowledge and strong knowledge". Personally, I think it's quite possible for this to happen.Every day we consciously or unconsciously receive and store a large amount of information in the gray matter cells of the brain. Although a large amount of information exists in the subconscious state, we cannot even call it out consciously, but they are like disordered and noisy "noise" at a cocktail party ", but sometimes our "attention to specific information" will make us "magically" capture certain information related to "the information we pay attention to"-this situation is probably what we often say " A sudden inspiration."If this is the case, there is a reasonable explanation for Kekule's dream about snakes - he has paid too much attention to the question of what the benzene ring should be, how many seemingly chaotic and noisy things should be in his subconscious "Noise" too!Finally, one day, the "cocktail party effect" appeared-in the form of the colorful snake connected from head to tail in his dream. So, don't believe in the existence of "sudden flashes of inspiration" needlessly.Even if inspiration exists, it will not appear for no reason, it must have a source.It is just the flower of iron tree that suddenly blooms at the moment when we often say "quantitative change to qualitative change". Perhaps out of the same feelings, Li Ao once jokingly said, "Prostitutes can't receive customers based on sexual desire, and writers shouldn't rely on inspiration to write."Although Li Ao's later behavior was somewhat disappointing, his erudition is real.Li Ao's reading method is quite unique, but it is easy to see its mechanism and benefits.Li Ao introduced his reading method in Phoenix Satellite TV's 19 January 19, 2006: I, Li Ao, rarely forget the books I read, why?The method is good.what way?Cruel.All the scissors and utility knives were removed, and the book was dismembered, that is, it was cut open.I need this page, I need this paragraph, and I have classified it.What about the back?Make a photocopy of it, or buy two books at the beginning, cut both books and print them out, and cut the part you want to read.As a result, after reading a book, the book was dismembered.This is how I read books. How to classify?I have a lot of clips I made by myself. I write on the clips and classify all the materials.After reading a book, it all went into my folder.I can separate thousands of categories, very finely divided.For example, according to the classification of the library, philosophy, religion; religion is further divided into Buddhism, Taoism, Catholicism.I, Li Ao, made the classification more detailed. Catholicism can still be divided, and priests are considered one category.Priests can also be subdivided. Priests who are homosexual are one category, and priests who are laymen are another category.There is one category for nuns who are gay, and another category for nuns who are prostitutes. Any relevant content in the book will be included in my profile.What are you doing here?When I want to write a novel, I need this information, open the information, and just write it.Or some event happened, related to the nun’s homosexuality, I wanted to express my thoughts on the news, I brought the news, opened my profile, merged the two, and the article was written immediately. In other words, after I finished reading this book, I was dismembered and dismembered.But I was hooked. I don't memorize these materials by memory. I use detailed and patient efforts to hook them tightly and put them in the data folder.My memory only needs to remember these titles.The titles are divided according to my habit. Basically, they are translated into English words and arranged in English letters, and occasionally there are some Chinese ones. Today I will tell you the skills of housekeeping. Li Ao knows so much, he is well-known and memorized, and his memory is so good.I tell you that memory can be trained.From the beginning of memory, you should not be lazy, let alone lie there and read a book. After reading this book, it will still be clean and tidy. This is not right.After reading this book, this book will be disassembled into eight pieces, and the book will be considered as finished after it is put into the file folder. Today I will give you a special show and tell you how to read books.Don't think that you have finished reading this book, a clean and new one is counted as reading.That is not counted as having seen it, because it was seen at that time, but it was wasted.You cannot systematically withhold these materials and link them with the materials.But with my method, you can capture the essence of all the books you have read and buckle them together.This is my study method of this indigenous method of steelmaking. With such exquisite diligence, it becomes clear where Li Ao's colorful "inspirations" come from. In this understanding, then, all success is essentially the same.Spend considerable time and energy to lock a direction or goal first.After confirming that it is realistic and feasible, use the power of the mind to invest more time in this direction, and a little more time.Treat time as a friend and move forward.When time is with you long enough, your patience will pay off from it.People who don't know why will say that it's "luck", or that it's the "inspiration" of those who have been lucky with shit; but what we know is that if the reward does come, there is only one name, called "inevitable". The so-called "ability" After understanding the essence of the so-called "inspiration", we can understand another word-"ability" by analogy.I have always believed that in terms of study and work, how capable a person is in a certain aspect almost directly depends on how long the person can prepare in advance in that aspect.Very few people actually prepare long enough in advance.Just look at any cohort of seniors at any college and you'll easily find countless successive failures and an ever-present handful of successes. The reason why too many students start preparing for TOEFL and GRE exams is not because they finally "choose" the way of studying abroad after calm thinking, but because they suddenly found that the job It is not easy to find, and the prospects for the domestic postgraduate entrance examination are not very optimistic.In fact, these students just regard "going abroad" as a life-saving straw based on the same heart as "going to the doctor in a hurry". However, the straw of "going abroad" is really just a straw for them, and it cannot save lives at all.In my teaching experience at New Oriental, I have seen too many students fail just because of mistakes in time planning-of course, this is actually the biggest mistake that can be encountered in life; The result is interpreted as an excuse such as "the injustice of fate", which is more absurd and regrettable than imagined. Let's take a look at the basic timeline.If a student wants to go abroad and hopes to enroll in the fall of next year, he'd better submit all the necessary materials before the end of this year, including transcripts of various exams, personal statements, letters of recommendation, etc.In this case, in order to be able to submit the materials on time, he must at least finish the GRE composition test around June this year, and finish the other parts of the GRE around October.The TOEFL test should be completed by October of this year at the latest. Of course, it is ideal to get the score at the beginning of this year.Whether it is the TOEFL test or the GRE test, based on my many years of teaching experience, I firmly believe that it takes at least two years of serious preparation for a successful score that can be exchanged for a high scholarship in a prestigious school-- And it also needs a fairly solid foundation before that. Personal statements and letters of recommendation play a very important role in the entire application process, sometimes even surpassing TOEFL and GRE exams.Writing these documents takes a lot of time and energy.Even if I find a so-called "expert" with hundreds of successful cases like me who pays for tutoring, I will need at least a month or so to communicate with the applicant repeatedly before I start writing the first draft, and then I will have to go through many hours. revision.And, the more outstanding the student is, the more time and effort it takes, because the more outstanding a person is, the higher the risk he faces.But my experience is that students often find that they can't write a decent personal statement and recommendation letter at the end of the year, and then when they ask me all the way for help, I can only say, "Sorry, I can't do this case. "--This is not a question of how much money can be given to me, but time is running out for him. Every link can go wrong.Many students don’t realize that they should prepare for TOEFL and GRE exams until the end of the second semester of their junior year. Then all the following behaviors are just "cramping Buddha's feet"-seeing everything as a Buddha, regardless of the " Buddha's feet are not infected with beriberi.Theoretically speaking, all "crash courses" and "intensive courses" are nothing more than selling and satisfying illusions-of course, it is precisely because of this that such courses will have a huge market and high profits.People who are cramming don't know that they have already entered the whirlpool of absurdity. They spend their days busy and doing nothing, and they don't know where they are wrong until the final result appears. Many years later, they say to themselves , "When I was young, I also worked hard..." There are also many students who finished the "study" of the "crash class" and "intensive class", only to find that not only do they have more homework to do, but the most terrible thing is that all the test centers are fully registered, and it is impossible to book a test seat .If you work harder in your studies, you still have a chance.However, without an exam, there is no way to solve it-except regret.It is entirely conceivable that less than 20% of the students who are a little bit lucky and have already obtained the exam can finally get meaningful results, and the other 80% of the students just get an "examination experience" --The reason is that I don't believe it's a question of IQ, and this kind of test can't measure IQ; there is only one reasonable explanation: insufficient preparation, in other words, insufficient time investment, or in other words, not enough time in advance to prepare. In fact, this is not only true for the choice of studying abroad, but also for any other choice, including postgraduate entrance examinations and job hunting, most people fail and panic based on the same mechanism.The dilemma faced by those who are not well prepared is like handcuffs, the more they struggle, the tighter they are.Facing a deadline can't help but create immense anxiety.And the only effect of these anxieties is to distract attention and reduce production capacity to the limit; conversely, the only effect of low production capacity and time urgency is to increase anxiety...a vicious cycle. These people don't know that time has become their enemy invisibly; what they don't know is that time is originally neither good nor evil, and they themselves have become the enemy of time, or they have turned time into their own. enemy.Every moment, these people think that they are competing with others, but they don't know that other people are not competing with the world at all, just because the starting point has been advanced, they have the opportunity to treat time as a friend--who can imagine such a situation? What kind of backer in the world is stronger than time?The enemies of time never know who has defeated them - for them, at the end of life stands a tombstone they cannot see, and on it is engraved "the cause of death is unknown". To give an extreme example, it is not even an exaggeration to say that even a man's sexual ability may be prepared in advance.The so-called sexual ability is often closely related to cardiopulmonary function.Therefore, if a man knows this from any source when he is twenty-five or six years old, then he should insist on long-distance running at least three or four times a week.A few years later, when he accidentally turns thirty, he will find that when his friends and colleagues are all overwhelmed by work and have no joy in life, he can actually To be the best. The conclusions of some scholars may attract fierce criticism, and in fact they often do.For example, after a lot of investigations, some scholars finally came to the conclusion that "wealth determines IQ to a large extent".This is no nonsense, although it is difficult to accept.Biological psychologist Mark Rosenzweig once conducted a very famous experiment: Select a group of mice with similar genetic qualities, and divide them into three groups arbitrarily: the first group of 3 mice is in a "standard environment", that is, they are kept in an iron cage and fed together; the second group of mice is in a "poor environment". That is, they were isolated alone in a three-sided opaque cage with dim light and almost no stimulation; the third group was in an "enriched environment", that is, more than a dozen mice were locked together in a spacious, bright and well-equipped cage. In the cage, there are swings, slides, wooden ladders, small bridges and various "toys" in the cage.A few months later, Rosenzweig was surprised to find that the mice in the "enriched environment" were the most active and looked very smart, while the mice in the "poor environment" were the quietest, almost giving people a sense of stupidity. Feeling dumbfounded.Then, the experimenters dissected and analyzed the brains of the mice, and found that the thickness of the cerebral cortex, the protein content of the cerebral cortex, the proportion of the cerebral cortex to the brain, the size of the brain cells, the number of nerve fibers, the number of synapses, and the nerve fibers of the three groups of mice were different. There were stark differences in the number of glial cells, as well as in brain chemicals associated with intelligence, among other things. The mice in the "enriched environment" group had the most significant advantage, while the mice in the "poor environment" group were at an absolute disadvantage. Imagine the environment that rich families can create for their children, and compare the environment that poor families can create for their children.Therefore, on the whole (note that individual counterexamples do not fully explain the overall problem), the polarization of the rich and the poor may even cause huge differences in intelligence. The environment has a huge and even irreversible effect on the growth of an individual.Because of this, some people have views such as "blood lineage theory" and "birth theory".These people have such absurd and superficial views only because of their mental retardation.However, the phenomenon does exist, but the explanation is too simple, naive, crude, and rough. "A dragon begets a dragon, a phoenix begets a phoenix, and the son of a mouse can make holes." "Father is a hero". "Tiger father has no dog son". "Like father, like son".The judge in the Indian movie "The Wanderer" said: "The son of a thief is still a thief."There is a proverb in English that says, "an apple doesn't fall very far from the (apple) tree".All of these are naive observations of the consequences of the forces of circumstance. Scholars believe that poverty, as a whole, is a "persistent problem".No matter how the world develops, it is impossible to completely eradicate poverty, because in the end, the so-called poverty is relative.However, from an individual point of view, poverty is not an inescapable spell.Any individual, in fact, has the opportunity to use the mind to be liberated.Just imagine that a person can develop the habit of being diligent and frugal, that is, he can achieve both "increasing income" and "reducing expenditure", and then he can start to accumulate wealth-of course, it is impossible to get rich overnight.However, a lifetime of diligence and frugality, that is, a lifetime of increasing income and reducing expenditure, is equivalent to being friends with time for a lifetime.And if his children are diligent and frugal, then they will accumulate exponentially increasing wealth. In fact, all the families that control huge wealth on the earth today have experienced the process of "self-made".In the barbaric era, the role of "patience" may be overshadowed by other factors, but today, which is more civilized than ever before (although there are still many disappointments), "patience" has become the most important and most important thing. There is a power factor.Even the ancients have long noticed that "poor is no more than five pictures, rich is no more than three generations" - please pay attention to the first half of the sentence. However, how many people have the patience to make a plan that can only be completed by two or even three generations?The answer is, very few.However, what needs attention is not how many people behave like this, but that there are indeed such people!If you think about it carefully and feel that you are not that kind of person, then don't complain, because you gave up that future voluntarily.Even in the Warring States Period, people like Lu Buwei could appear.In a sense, it is their extraordinary patience, which is one of the specific manifestations of what we call "mental power", that allows them to accumulate a lot of wealth. "Getting rich overnight" is always possible, but it depends on and can only rely on one thing that those with developed minds are willing to accept but never expect - luck. There are some people who can make plans that last decades or even a lifetime, or even span generations, and then execute them meticulously. When I read it back then, I felt that the characters in the story were awesome.After watching the movie adapted from Stephen King's novel, I once again felt that such a giant must exist somewhere in the world.Few people learn such skills, just because they are unlikely to be lucky enough to have such giants around them, and they cannot directly rely on "experience" and "observation" to obtain tangible "experience" and benefits. Although the mature minds of us tend to avoid comparison-based happiness, there is no reason to reject comparison-based relative success.Therefore, the most basic way to break through the "vicious cycle" just mentioned is to start preparing earlier than others, earlier, and earlier.Come to think of it, some people can start preparing for something a lifetime or two in advance.The earlier you are, the closer you will be to this friend of time; this friend who is closer to you will make you a little more calm every day; You fall in love with the time guy. Don't blame me for blah, blah, blah.After all, it is the truth we mentioned earlier. So, what we see is the conclusion that wasting time is shameful, and wasting youth is not only shameful, but also sad, and it can only be irretrievable.To put it simply, one must work hard.If everyone is working hard, then you'd better start working hard earlier and work harder.People always say that stupid birds fly first. In fact, the reason why many birds fly first may not be because they are stupid, on the contrary, it is more likely because they are smarter. If the verbiage really works, even the boredom it can be is a boredom that pleases you.My teaching experience has given me the habit of blah blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Compared with time, factors such as intelligence and diligence are really insignificant.