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82ccab0
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One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Hardy and I were talking about Einstein. Hardy had met him several times, and I had recently returned from visiting him. Hardy was saying that in his lifetime there had only been two men in the world, in all the fields of human achievement, science, literature, politics, anything you like, who qualified for the Bradman class. For those not fami..
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shakespeare
literature
politics
science
bradman-class
count-lev-nikolayevich-tolstoy
g-h-hardy
godfrey-hardy
godfrey-harold-hardy
lev-nikolayevich-tolstoy
vladimir-ilyich-lenin
leo-tolstoy
vladimir-lenin
einstein
tolstoy
archimedes
cambridge
lenin
isaac-newton
newton
william-shakespeare
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C.P. Snow |
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f4ca523
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By itself, one small win may seem unimportant," writes Dr. Karl Weick in a seminal paper for American Psychologist in 1984. "A series of wins at small but significant tasks, however, reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals." "Once a small win has been accomplished," Weick continues, "forces are set in motion that favor another small win." From"
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Shane Snow |
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3ad4f17
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To be good citizens, responsible workers and providers, and ethical businesspeople, we need a minimum level of knowledge about the way the world works, who's in it, and how things fit together.
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Shane Snow |
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c88f42a
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Both C.K. and Bieber are extremely gifted performers. Both climbed to the top of their industry, and in fact, both ultimately used the Internet to get big. But somehow Bieber "made it" in one-fifteenth of the time. How did he climb so much faster than the guy Rolling Stone calls the funniest man in America--and what does this have to do with Jimmy Fallon? The answer begins with a story from Homer's Odyssey. When the Greek adventurer Odysseu..
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Shane Snow |
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b3c84dd
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Kids there have much more sense that they're going to have to construct their own future," Wagner says. They're taught to be entrepreneurs of their own lives. Instead of standing passively on an education assembly line and being handed reams of facts and figures, they are thrown into rooms of bricks and asked to build castles."
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Shane Snow |
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e77cb4d
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Counterintuitively, however, "Informal mentoring," Underhill found, "produced a larger and more significant effect on career outcomes than formal mentoring."
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Shane Snow |
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6bd5e17
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Traditional paths are not just slow; they're no longer viable if we want to compete and innovate.
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Shane Snow |
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0cde5dc
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Mentorship is the secret of many of the highest-profile achievers throughout history.
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Shane Snow |
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8ba02fd
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You can accelerate your training if you know how to train properly, but you still don't need to be that special. I don't think I'm that special of a programmer or a businessperson or a race car driver. I just know how to train.
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Shane Snow |
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7d8085e
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The difference between Franklin's unconventional work and Abagnale's was that the former managed to create value for others while the latter cheated others. Franklin's approach was a lateral solution to the unfairness of present convention. Abagnale's, however entertaining, was a con, and he paid for it. And that's the difference between rapid, but short-term gains, which I call shortcuts, and sustainable success achieved quickly through sm..
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Shane Snow |
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f9089df
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I see this book as a simultaneous hat tip and counterpoint to some of the great success and innovation literature out there (check out shanesnow.com/ booklist for my recommendations). It's a re-analysis and first codification of the ways rapid success has happened throughout history. The step-by-step advice that made an ancient Greek hero rapidly prosperous will be entirely different from what makes a 21st-century businesswoman successful, ..
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Shane Snow |
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1e60330
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We're told that the best way to succeed is to start young, work hard, and move up through the ranks. The two ingredients are hard work--not quitting when things get tough--and luck--spots opening up on the rungs above you. LBJ's is that quintessential American story.
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Shane Snow |
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a30e52a
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Increasingly in today's culture, "hacking" is something done not just by criminals and computer scientists, but by anyone who has the capability to approach a problem laterally. (This is the original usage of the term, in fact.) Can't get that horrible plastic "blister pak" for those headphones open? Use a can opener. (It works!) Not enough seats for the four of you? Give yours up and weather the storm with the person of your dreams. The fi..
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Shane Snow |
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fb3c6f0
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Leverage is the overachiever's approach to getting more bang for her proverbial buck. It's how brand-new startups scale and young sci-fi geeks become movie directors. It's how below-average school systems turn around and revolutions are won. It's how surfers take championships and artists go from homeless to the Grammys.
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Shane Snow |
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04afe89
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When we hear a story, the neural activity increases fivefold, like a switchboard has suddenly illuminated the city of our mind.
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Shane Snow |
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7b53511
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Too many of us place our hopes and dreams in the unreliable hands of luck, but the world's most rapidly successful people take luck into their own hands (even though many are too humble to say so). Too many of us accept the plateaus our lives have offered us and succumb to passivity, to the well-meaning delusion of "If I work hard enough, something good will hopefully happen to me." By the end of this book, I'd like to convince you that ser..
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Shane Snow |
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47b96a6
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If you want people to buy your product, you have to get them to care about your story.
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Shane Snow |
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3fbf4a2
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In the end, Castro's revolutionary message reached a massive audience through a superconnector--a radio--but the rebels won the people's hearts because they showed that they sincerely cared. The movement harnessed the power of the superconnector by giving service as a publisher and educator. J. J. Abrams built his career by collaborating with talented, fast-rising, and well-connected people and by making them look great. And Mint grew busin..
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Shane Snow |
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a24fcec
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If you had an Internet connection and lived in North America at the time, you may have seen it. Vasquez is the man behind the "Double Rainbow" video, which at last check had 38 million views. In the clip, Vasquez pans his camera back and forth to show twin rainbows he'd discovered outside his house, first whispering in awe, then escalating in volume and emotion as he's swept away in the moment. He hoots with delight, monologues about the ra..
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Shane Snow |
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e392ca4
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For the billionaires, champagne baths every morning and new Lamborghinis every afternoon couldn't deplete the fathomless amount of cash on hand. "Your entire philosophy of money changes," writes author Richard Frank in his book, Richistan. "You realize that you can't possibly spend all of your fortune, or even part of it, in your lifetime, and that your money will probably grow over the years even if you spend lavishly." There are dotcom en..
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Shane Snow |
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a47d5a8
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Intuition is the result of nonconscious pattern recognition," Dane tells me. However, his research shows that, while logging hours of practice helps us see patterns subconsciously, we can often do just as well by deliberately looking for them. In many fields, such pattern hunting and deliberate analysis can yield results just as in the basketball example--high accuracy on the first try. And that's where, like the dues-paying presidents or o..
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Shane Snow |
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0e93c12
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There were certainly multiple factors contributing to these men's post-moonwalk slump, but the question What do you do after walking on the moon? became a gigantic speed bump. The trouble with moonwalkers and billionaires is when they arrive at the top, their momentum often stops. If they don't manage to find something to parlay, they turn into the kid on the jungle gym who just hangs from the ring. Not coincidentally, this is the same reas..
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Shane Snow |
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e762f59
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WE LIVE IN AN age of nontraditional ladder climbing. Not just in politics, but in business and personal development and education and entertainment and innovation. Traditional paths are not just slow; they're no longer viable if we want to compete and innovate. That's great news, because throwing out the dues paradigm leads us toward meritocracy. But to be successful, we need to start thinking more like hackers, acting more like entrepreneu..
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Shane Snow |
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c2f56ab
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Jimmy's goal since childhood, he explained to Siegel, had been to join the cast of Saturday Night Live. He was endearing. After a two-hour call, Siegel offered to represent him. She had one question, however. "Why don't you stay and graduate?" Jimmy was a semester shy of a degree. Siegel suggested that they get started in the summer, so he'd have a bachelor's degree to fall back on, just in case. "No, no," Jimmy insisted. "I need to get on ..
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Shane Snow |
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3d74b15
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the secret to harnessing momentum is to build up potential energy, so that unexpected opportunities can be amplified.
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Shane Snow |
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a1c6ec7
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Luck is often talked about as "being in the right place at the right time." But like a surfer, some people--and companies--are adept at placing themselves at the right place at the right time. They seek out opportunity rather than wait for it."
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Shane Snow |
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df56010
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Not every astronaut struggled postspace like Buzz Aldrin did. Several parlayed sideways rather than stopping their momentum. Earth orbiter John Glenn went into politics. Alan Shepard, America's first man in space and the fifth to stand on the moon, became a successful businessman. Alan Bean, who moonwalked in the Apollo 12 mission, became a painter. And Apollo 15 spaceman James Irwin found fulfillment in helping others as a minister. Each p..
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Shane Snow |
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13fe8fe
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Google was in the water when the waves of Internet traffic came because it was tinkering with new ideas under the umbrella of Google's famous "20% Time." "20% Time" is not Google indigenous. It was borrowed from a company formerly known as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, aka 3M, which allowed its employees to spend 15 percent of their work hours experimenting with new ideas, no questions asked. 3M's "15% Time" brought us, among other th..
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Shane Snow |
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b8c1368
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They have so much money that they have nothing to prove to anyone. And many of them are totally depressed.
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Shane Snow |
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fff3c44
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The common pattern among these fastest-rising US presidents' journeys is that, like the BYU students, they didn't parlay up a linear path. They climbed various ladders of success and then switched to the presidential ladder.
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Shane Snow |
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4662dec
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All ten of the top ten presidents in C-SPAN's survey were hackers. Only one, JFK, climbed a semblance of a traditional ladder; he served in both houses of Congress, but was a war hero and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book--clearly not the average ladder climber. Each of the men on this list worked hard in his career, learned and proved leadership through diverse experiences, and switched ladders multiple times. They continuously parla..
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Shane Snow |
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3b126e2
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In an age of platforms, creative problem solving is more valuable than computational skill. To
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Shane Snow |
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11f0afc
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Oscar Wilde once said, "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." The mourners at Startup Funeral are among the many people in the American technology culture who regularly celebrate said experience. Since the rise of the Web, the Silicon Valley crowd has decided that failure in the quest to build a business is not only OK, but cool. "Fail often" is a guiding aphorism."
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Shane Snow |
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7956d5e
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They called the results a "paradox of failure." It turns out that the surgeons who botched the new procedure tended to do worse in subsequent surgeries. Rather than learning from their mistakes, their success rates continuously declined. On the other hand, when surgeons did well on the new surgery, more successes tended to follow. Just like the startups in the Compass and Harvard studies. But what's really interesting is what happened to th..
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Shane Snow |
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c8d410c
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Like The Second City, Upworthy turned its work into rapid, scientific experiments. It turned tiny failures into depersonalized feedback and created an environment where total failure was nearly impossible.
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Shane Snow |
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ca2062f
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10x progress is built on bravery and creativity instead. Working smarter.
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Shane Snow |
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13e0d93
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Why fit in when you were born to stand out?
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Shane Snow |
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cecbb4f
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THE SECOND CITY MANAGES to accomplish three things to accelerate its performers' growth: (1) it gives them rapid feedback; (2) it depersonalizes the feedback; and (3) it lowers the stakes and pressure, so students take risks that force them to improve. For the first year, Leonard explains, The Second City's goal is to get students used to anticipating negative feedback and to get them out of their own heads. This is about building confidenc..
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Shane Snow |
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d0842bb
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A filmmaker made a short documentary about this happy-go-lucky teenager on death row, called My Last Days. It showed Zach living happily, hanging out with his family, and playing music. Everybody loved Zach. When you see the footage, you can't help but like him. As you watch him laugh and love and sing, you catch yourself forgetting: this kid is about to die. Zach's family tells the camera how knowing he would die has helped them realize wh..
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Shane Snow |
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6159547
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The Happiest Story about a Kid Dying of Cancer I've Ever Seen." Upworthy watched the "feedback" pour in, monitoring both the percentage of people who clicked each headline and the number who shared it with their friends. It was a perfect, dispassionate science experiment, where the feedback could show Upworthy editors exactly which packaging would have the biggest impact--before they released it to the rest of the world. In moments, the res..
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Shane Snow |
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0c2bc0f
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Dr. Adam Grant, professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says this is because J. J. Abrams is "a giver," a rarity in an industry full of takers. No good TV show or film is made by one person, but whereas Hollywood bigshots are known for being credit-hogs, J. J. Abrams is a fantastic collaborator. Grant would know. He wrote the book on the subject. In his bestseller, Give and Take, he pr..
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Shane Snow |
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2752316
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Crucially, experts tended to be able to turn off the part of their egos that took legitimate feedback personally when it came to their craft, and they were confident enough to parse helpful feedback from incorrect feedback. Meanwhile novices psyched themselves out. They needed encouragement and feared failure. The
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Shane Snow |
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5b8ce16
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Hands-on learning and the use of tools, he says, helps us to want to learn, to get rapid feedback, and to actually grasp math better than memorizing facts from the bottom up.
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Shane Snow |
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7c4faad
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Effort for the sake of effort is as foolish a tradition as paying dues. How much better is hard work when it's amplified by a lever? Platforms teach us skills and allow us to focus on being great, rather than reinventing wheels or repeating ourselves.
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Shane Snow |