Name: How to 10x Your Intelligence
Uploaded: 2021-02-26T20:05:07.000Z
Duration: 9 min 51 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The superlative

The best way to 10x your intelligence is:

To-infinitive

to go on a difficult books reading regimen.

Modal verbs - A2

That's where you read ten or less books a year, and each one should be harder than

And this is probably the opposite of a lot of what you see and hear on YouTube, where

the game is often to read as many books in a year as you can,

something which I think will be very inefficient if you're trying to boost your intelligence

Let me show you how and why the difficult book regimen works better.

Let's define it as the ability to solve our own problems.

The more intelligent we are, the more of our own problems we can solve.

Ok, but how do we improve our intelligence?

One of the main ways we improve our intelligence, our ability to solve problems, is by creating,

And there are at least two types of tools we use: physical tools and mental tools.

An example of a physical tool is a hammer.

If you need to apply force to something, the hammer is handy for that.

but I think less people talk about and understand the importance of mental tools, which is what

An example of a mental tool is the word forgiveness.

and how much power this word gives you within yourself and within your relationships.

When you forgive yourself, you make peace with your past self and your previous mistakes,

and you give yourself permission to be a better person tomorrow than you were yesterday.

Forgiveness frees you from the burdens of the past.

When you forgive another, you make it possible to repair a relationship for the better and

It's hard to imagine a world without the concept of forgiveness.

Forgiveness, like all words, is really a kind of technology or mental tool.

It's kind of like a glue that allows us to repair a broken relationship, whether that

relationship is with others or ourselves.

It has changed our lives immensely for the better and improved our ability to cooperate.

Now think about how many books are out there, how many words and mental tools are out there

for you to obtain, tools that will completely change how you interact with yourself and

with others in the world, just like the concept of forgiveness has, tools that can give you

immense power and strength to solve more problems.

Every time you truly learn a new word, you expand your mental tool kit, and by doing

so, you increase your intelligence, and you expand your ability to solve a variety of

Mental tools are just as important and powerful as physical tools for solving and overcoming

Mental tools help us make meaning of the world.

And meaning can help us overcome problems or even remove them from our lives.

Now imagine that you're given a reason for this suffering.

Imagine the clouds part and a voice gives you a reason, a justification, for why you're

Does this make the suffering more bearable?

I think most people would respond by saying yes.

In his book Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl details his experience as a prisoner

And in it, he says, “In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds

a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”

He found out that meaning could lessen one's suffering.

He also paraphrases Nietzsche when he says, “'He who has a why to live for can bear

So how does Frankl's experience relate to what I'm talking about?

Reading difficult books and expanding your mental toolkit will help you discover more

It will help you create greater meaning for the life you live.

And according to both Frankl and Nietzsche, meaning, and the ability to produce it, is

one of our greatest protections against the suffering of life.

So I said that you can 10x your intelligence, your ability to solve problems, by expanding

And I said that one way to expand your mental toolkit is by reading difficult books.

Reading is a lot like weight lifting for the mind.

The more difficult books you learn to read, make sense of, and overcome, in some sense,

Your mind becomes better at making meaning of things and responding to the world in a

I think that, in essence, for most people, what makes a book difficult is two things:

Novelty is when you come across something new: a new idea, a new word, a new perspective,

or a new problem that you haven't seen before.

It's a meeting with the unfamiliar, and unfamiliar things often make us feel uncomfortable

and they require a lot of work to make meaning out of.

The more novelty there is inside a book, the harder it will be for the reader to get through

But novelty is often what makes a difficult book worth reading!

It's introducing you to new mental tools which you can use to update your mental software.

But if you shy away from new and difficult ideas, you become like the grandparent who

uses old technology because they're too scared to learn the new one, and by doing

The second thing that makes a book hard to read is abstraction.

The best way I can explain abstract ideas is by comparing them with their opposite:

Concrete ideas are things you can identify with any of the five senses: taste, smell,

Anything you can experience with these five senses is concrete, but anything you can't

And because they're not easily understandable through sense experience, abstract ideas are

hard to understand and many people think they are useless.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How to 10x Your Intelligence

mental

physical

description

improve