If you inherently long

“If you inherently long for something, become it first. If you want gardens, become the gardener. If you want love, embody love. If you want mental stimulation, change the conversation. If you want peace, exude calmness. If you want to fill your world with artists, begin to paint. If you want to be valued, respect your own time. If you want to live ecstatically, find the ecstasy within yourself. This is how to draw it in, day by day, inch by inch.”

Victoria Erickson

Expanding our limits by learning a language

The full transcript is here.

“how can you help a normal adult learn a new language quickly, easily and effectively?

Now this is a really, really important question in today’s world.

We have massive challenges with environment. We have massive challenges with social dislocation, with wars, all sorts of things going on and if we can’t communication we’re really going to have difficulty solving these problems. So we need to be able to speak each other’s languages, this is really really important.

The question is how you do that.

Well it’s actually really easy.

You look around for people who can already do it, you look for situations where it’s already working, and then you identify the principles and apply them.

It’s called modelling and I’ve been looking at language learning and modelling language learning for about fifteen to twenty years now.

And my conclusion, my observation from this is

is that any adult can learn a second language to fluency

inside six months.

Now when I say this, most people think I’m crazy, that this is not possible.

So let me remind everybody of the history of human progress, it’s all about expanding our limits.”

The Action Movie Fairy Tale

An excerpt entirely by thelastpsychiatrist.

I.

80s and 90s action movies were often maligned not just for their violence, but also for their lack of depth and psychological sophistication.  “They’re not important.”

But these movies built a generation of men who are now in their 30s and 40s.

They didn’t learn that killing is cool, which was the worry of people who didn’t watch those movies and didn’t understand.  This violence was central to the cinematic experience, but incidental to the story. 

The complainers ignored the story because they thought it was basic, trivial.  Wrong.  Write down the plot synopsis of every action movie, and awareness will come over you: 

A marginal guy must save a hot chick from bad guys; when he does, he gets the girl.