Since studying the brain extensively during my neuroscience degree, I’ve had a particular curiosity about the extent of which it is possible to improve cognition. But now as an over-worked medical student getting closer and closer to finals, I’ve taken a more practical interest in this topic rather than purely curiosity! As such, I thought I’d share a few of my personal techniques to get the most from your cognitive abilities!

Here, I explain my preferred nootropics and review piracetam and the uses of combining l-theanine and caffeine.

Welcome, Sebastian, to SETT, and hats off and kudos to Tynan, the creator of SETT, for creating a new blogging platform that will allow the communities of our three great blogs to explore and learn about each other.

Ever since Tynan first told me about SETT, I've been a fan.  I always wanted my blog, DanielOdio.com, to be about more than just me sharing my thoughts with my readers.  I wanted it to be a conversation we could all have together, so we could all learn from each other.

Now that Sebastian's blog is joining SETT, readers will have easy ways to pique their curiosities around the things we all write about and share thoughts and expertise with each other.  And that's amazing.

Tynan's blog is about world travel, good habits, freedom and minimalism.  I'd also add that it's about self optimization, and being proud of who you are, and what you accomplish -- and doing it in really fun ways.

My blog is a sanctuary for entrepreneurs to learn from each other.  A place to learn about angel fundraising, about how to build yourself as a brand, how to get massive amounts of press for your startup, about why you should productize your expertise , a place to learn from startup mistakes and how to be uber efficient with a computer and much more.

Most things in life that matter: SIMPLE BUT NOT EASY.

Meaning: You don’t need to be smart. You just need the ability to get over yourself and do the hard work.

“She’s not really smart. She just works hard. I can also do that if I try.”

That above is the most AMATEUR, PATHETIC, and LIMITING mindset I (and most smart people) have.

It doesn’t matter if you can figure out stuff most people don’t understand. Doesn’t matter if you can come up with witty lines every once in a while. Doesn’t even matter if you can come up with brilliant ideas that can change the world.

Modafinil has been one of my favourite drugs since I first used it over 5 years ago. It was during my neuroscience final year and after a lot of research into how to over-ride my need for sleep I found it.

It's a great drug and on the whole, fairly safe for most people. But people who buy it without consulting a doctor first should be careful about any other medication use.

I also highly recommend taking it in very early in the morning. I leave a tablet next to my bed with some water, set an alarm for 4am, wake up and swallow it before falling back to sleep. It takes over 2 hours to reach peak plasma concentration and you will find it wakes you up after about 2-3 hours. This way, the second you start your day you are fully-dosed, and by the time your day is ending and you actually want to sleep, the dose should be wearing off (with a half-life of 10-15 hours).

To learn about how mod works, how to stay safe and check drug interactions and other useful info, please read this article I wrote: http://improveanthony.com/2013/10/29/conqueringsleepwithmodafinil/

Stay safe and good luck achieving! Peter

It would be pretty awesome if we all had plenty of mental energy to stay motivated and disciplined all day long, to be highly productive and highly creative whenever we needed, and to always feel vibrant and optimistic about the future.

However, the more you try to control elements of your life – whether it is to improve your health, wealth, social life or whatever – the more apparent it is how finite and scarce this “mental energy” can be.

In particular, it seems that whenever we use willpower – in any form and for any reason – we are using up resources from this pool of mental energy, much faster than the pool is replenished.

Psychologists have carried out plenty of experiments that strongly appear to confirm this model of willpower – Jason Shen and Sebastian recently put together a great post about it here: http://sebastianmarshall.com/developing-willpower-by-jason-shen which is very much worth reading if you haven't already!

Psychologists have also shown[1] that decisions on matters that affect us can deplete the same mental resource as willpower. In some sense, these decisions and willpower are the same:

A note to self, that turned out to be a near universal truth to all young entrepreneurs.

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No, I am not ahead of the game.

I do not have ample time.

Nothing is guaranteed.

Sometimes learning happens more easily than other times, and it's useful to understand why. There are many factors involved, and one is the regularity with which you think about the topic that you're learning.

Learning is essentially the process of forming sufficient links in the brain between related ideas, and so while learning anything complex it's important to be able to hold a large amount of information in memory ready for processing.

Our short-term memory is limited, so for complex tasks it's essential to use medium and longer-term memory to assist with the learning process. Think how an expert in anything improves - whether it's a professional tennis player, a musician or a businessman: each refinement in their skill is based on lots of previous experience, mostly held in longer-term memory.

Information gets placed into medium/longer-term memory when there are enough neural connections that involve it. This sometimes happens by random chance, but usually it requires deliberate repetition. It also fades from there quite quickly without rehearsal (which would link it to other information).

The implication of this is that if you are trying to learn a skill by occasional practice (rather than frequent practice) then rather than slow progress, you may find that you make almost no progress at all. You never have enough information stored in medium-term memory to make meaningful progress, because much of it evaporates between successive practices. You need to keep up the momentum when learning in order to make meaningful progress.

“生兵法、大怪我の元”

[Unripe strategy is a source of great self-injury.]

— Miyamoto Musashi 宮本武蔵 (c. 1584–1645)

straight from http://brannerchinese.wordpress.com/2013/08/11/premature-optimization-as-phrased-by-musashi/

This is an excerpt from my May 2013 Monthly Financial Review. I thought it was worth reposting here.

A lesson in negotiation

I've been reading a lot lately, mostly business and personal development books. Here's a quote from Sebastian Marshall's Ikigai:

Theres always people fighting over which programming language is the best. I think there probably is a "best" language out there but I think that if you're programming then you're doing something right. It all just depends on what companies are looking for and which languages they want you to know. It all seems overwhelming to me. From my point of view, it seems like Java, Python, C++, Ruby, and Javascript for UI seem to be the big languages right now.

I'm currently learning Python and C++. My university, Whitworth, kind of forced me to learn C++, whether I liked it or not. It seems like a really strict language to me. From what I've learned (I've only had one semester of C++) it's a very mathematical language and can handle math based algorithms really well. So it would seem to me that C++ is really good at physics engines. My older brother, who is pretty successful in the world of computer science, showed me this website: http://roberthodgin.com/eyeo-2012/. I don't know if you can click that or not. But you wont be disappointed when you look it up. The C++ source code on that website is all on git hub. It's a physics engine that Robert Thodgin, Andrew Bell, Hai Nguyen and Steven Schieberl wrote and played around with. It seemed like a really cool project to me.

I'm learning Python on my own. From what I understand, it is a dynamic language. I seems very freeing compared to C++. I like it because you don't have to use << endl; and you dont have to us the "<<" and ">>"! It just seems a lot easier to write more code with python than it would with C++. As I've mentioned, I'm learning python through Learning Python The Hard Way. It's kind of interesting that im learning python this way. In school, I'm getting exercises and I'm suppose to write all the code from scratch to do what the exercise is telling me to do. In LPTHW I'm copying all of the code and running it and then I change some of it to see what certain things do. Im curious to see which way is better for me to learn. The classroom/exercise way seems to be a lot more frustrating because you can make a stupid mistake and be stuck on it for quite a while. But of course you can make a copying error in LPTHW, which I have done a couple times. It gives you an error but you know that the code should run perfectly.

So, in the end, I was kind of forced to learn C++. It's definitely not a bad thing. I think it's and awesome language and I'm going to keep it up. I chose to learn Python because i think it's a lot different than C++. I didn't want to learn a language on my own that turns out to be basically the same thing as C++. Just in general I didnt want to learn a C based language as my second language. I'm still not well versed in either language but I think over the next year I'll actually be able to start cool projects! I'll probably post them on Github. I like the idea of open source code, and I want to promote that.