Hey,

Before we start: I had stopped writing a few months ago due to personal reasons. But over the past couple months, I've been getting urge to write and create things again and again. I tried to refuse the call but I can't seem to ignore it. So I'm restarting this blog fresh and simple. This will be the first issue.

So for this post I wanted to share an idea I've been thinking about. Think first, then write.

How many times have you read and taken notes from books but feel like you never understood or learned from them?

How many times have you consumed all these educational YouTube videos and blog posts and lectures but never seem to make anything out of the ideas?

You've probably fallen into this trap of taking copious amounts of notes and writing down every single thing word for word but you can’t seem to make anything out of it or truly connect the ideas into your life. We fall into frustration without understanding that it is exactly that that is causing the problem. You transcribe everything you listen to, you highlight everything you find fascinating. But you never take the extra couple minutes to actually think through things.

This reminded me of something I read on the More to That blog a while ago,

Knowledge is not understanding. Familiarity is not understanding. It is true writing things down helps in understanding things. But truly internalising that information by actively engaging with it helps even more. That is what actually solidifies it into your mind.

Because if you simply take notes, information enters your archive. But when you think through and actually experience things, it becomes part of who you are.

Of course you don’t have to stop reading and go suffer. But take a couple extra minutes to actually work through the information you’re consuming. Waiting a couple minutes before writing down notes from videos, leaving a small note of what you understood and how it relates to your life when highlighting things in a book. These are all simple ways of engaging more actively with the information you’re consuming.

If you truly want to learn something and make something a part of you, think through it. Think what it means to you and relate it to you. Think how you can apply it for yourself. Then write it down. This is how you actually learn things.

In case you have any thought about these, feel free to hit reply and let me know.

Have a great day!

Arshad.

❤️ My Favourite Things

This section will include all the interesting things I come across each week.

📹 Video - How to make a Vision Board that actually works by Dr. Izzy Sealey. Watched this video and made myself a vision board. A vision of a good life for me. Made wallpapers based on that for all my devices and I’ve decided to do a small practice for the coming week. Everyday i’m going to stop for 30 seconds, just imagining myself as the person in my dreams. As if i’ve already achieved it. I think that’ll help with aligning myself with that. Try out and make a vision board for yourself.

📹 Video - Arm focused Training Split by Chris Edmonds. Chris is a really underrated fitness person on Youtube. I don’t follow everything to the T from his videos. But I learned how to organise training splits and how to design programs from his videos. Check out this video to understand how to design your own workout programs. I’ve designed this block to focus on shoulders for me.

📖 What I Read

Re-read Steal like an Artist by Austin Kleon again this week. Really good book on creativity and making things in general. I hope to publish a full summary of the key lessons by next week🤞. So for now here’s a quote from the book:

Read this if you think you don’t have anything worth creating or you don’t have ideas.