A Study On Cab Drivers Shows You EVERYTHING You Need To Know About Reading.

Eleanor Maguire, who’s a neuroscientist at the University of London, did a study on London cab drivers before the time of GPS. And in any of those things. And we need to know about the London streets. Is there complicated? There are all sorts of windy roads. I think there are like 12 bridges crossing the river. There’s no grid in a city like New York.

So it’s complicated.

And the cab drivers need to use their memory to memorize their streets. And what she found is that the posterior hippocampus, which is a part of the brain, was larger in the cab drivers that drove in London than in other people. And even more so the more time that they spent as a cab driver, the larger it was.

And you can explain that because they were using that part of the brain, which is associated with memory.

And it’s not just that musicians that play the violin, the cello, or the guitar, just anything that uses the left hand, the part of the brain used in controlling the left hand is significantly larger than in nonmusicians, mathematicians, their inferior parietal lobe. Again, a part of the brain has significantly more grey matter than non-mathematicians.

So the question is, what’s going on?

The answer is that you have about a hundred billion brain cells, which are called neurons, and they’re kind of like tiny octopuses with many arms.

And each one of these arms can connect to other cells and form chains.

So every movement you make, every thought that you think error-free feeling that you feel what it is, is a signal traveling through a chain of these brain cells.

And the more that you fire that chain, like shooting a basketball or exercising your investment muscles, builds insulation around that chain, kind of like a rubber outside of a copper that increases the strength, signal, and speed of that chain.

So when it comes to the cab drivers or the musicians or the mathematicians or anything that you want to learn, what’s going on is you’re changing your brain.

So talking about Michael Jordan or Oprah, or Warren Buffett, we’re not talking about reading something once and memorizing it.

We’re talking about developing connections between brain cells and strengthening those connections. That’s what lets them do what they do.

And what that means is that anything you want to learn, whether it’s a musical instrument, whether it’s math, but even more so if it’s business or entrepreneurship or public speaking or marketing, persuasion, art, relationships, sex, it’s all a skill and skill is just insulation around those brain cells, which wraps and grows according to taking action, according to taking action so you can fake learn something by memorizing rules or you can learn it by taking action, by changing your brain, by becoming a different person.

So what does this have to do with reading books?

Well, imagine this.

Imagine two people and one of those people has read one book and the second person has read a thousand books.

And the question is, who’s better off? It should be obvious, right?

This course, after all, is about reading more books.

But it’s not obvious when I was getting my two educations at the same time, I realized that a single paragraph and one of those books could be more valuable to me than a thousand pages of PowerPoint slides, because one thing you can use repeated a thousand times is greater than a thousand things you can’t use repeated one time.

Bruce Lee said:

“That I fear not the man who is practiced ten thousand kicks once, but I fear the men who is practiced one kick ten thousand times”.

Warren Buffett said:

Can you really explain to a fish what it’s like to walk on land one day on land is worth a thousand years of talking about it.

I remember hearing this stuff and I took up my journal and I wrote in big letters, a single idea thoroughlyapplied can revolutionize your life, while a thousand ideas you do nothing with just confuse you.

And all of a sudden I was freed.

I no longer hated to read.

I started loving it and I started reading only for things that could directly impact my life in school.

You learn things so you can have an intelligent conversation about it.

But now the book becomes a tool, a tool to guide you to action.So you always need to be thinking when reading something.

How can I apply this?

And if it’s something that you can’t apply, then it’s just entertainment, Telemann of Arcadia said in the fifth century B.C., he said it is one thing to study war and another to live the Warriors life.

So it’s one thing to talk about something, another thing to do it.And the whole point of reading is to be able to go through books to extract the things you can apply to your life and achieve your goals.

And as I started reading more and more books, I saw others were seeing the same thing.

Ryan Holiday, he said in his book, Trust me, I’m Lying, that when intelligent people read the ask themselves a simple question, what do I plan to do with this information?

Most readers have abandoned even pretending to consider this.

I imagine it’s because they’re afraid of the answer.

Dale Carnegie, he said in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People that only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.

Albert Einstein said information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.

Epictetus, the ancient philosopher, he’s something I loved.

He said, Don’t just say you have read books, show that through them you have learned to think better.

Books are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.

In other words, reading a book alone isn’t even making progress.

Think of it this way.

You can stand on a path and memorize every book ever written, but unless you start walking, you’ll never get where you want to go.

All learning should translate into a step on the path or it’s completely useless.

Remember what we talked about in the last video that it’s about changing your brain that only happens through action.

You need to ask yourself then about every book in every part of the book.

Is this moving the needle forward or is it just entertainment because it’s always, always one or the other?

Remember, you’re not reading anymore to have an intelligent conversation about something, leave that to the schools and to everyone else who still reads as if they’re still in school.

You’re reading for action. And it’s a complete mindset shift from what we’re taught and how we’re taught to learn. All learning should lead to action. That’s why I love what Jim Roanne said, the business philosopher and motivational speaker. He said, Don’t let your learning lead to knowledge. You’ll become a fool. Let your learning lead to action. You’ll become wealthy.