29 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2025
    1. How can you tell when someone has real potential in pure mathematics?

      question by u/OkGreen7335 at https://reddit.com/r/math/comments/1m0qe7f/how_can_you_tell_when_someone_has_real_potential/

      The same way the music teacher in Liverpool who had half of The Beatles in his elementary school music class knew they had music potential—you can't possibly.

      Potential is by definition the unknown part. The rest of it is interest, desire, enthusiasm, and time working at the thing itself over long periods which slowly unleashes that potential. You don't know until you try, so quit worrying about it and enjoy the area, even if it's just as a hobby you do on the side. There are garage bands that hustle on the side, why can't you be a garage mathematician?!?

      Most of the smart, talented university professors in mathematics are there because they had the passion and (often had the luxury to) spend the time. Nurture your own passions and those of your students and encourage them to spend the time.

      How many parents unabashedly encourage their kids to become international superstar musicians? I'll bet The Beatles' parents didn't. I'll also bet that number is close to the numbers of parents who encourage their kids to do the same thing in math.

  2. Jun 2025
  3. Sep 2024
  4. Nov 2023
  5. Sep 2023
    1. Passion, purpose, and curiosity are psychological elements that serve as powerful flow triggers, driving you to experience heightened engagement and enjoyment in your work. Here’s how each plays into performance and flow: Passion: Passion refers to that deep, fiery connection to a specific activity or endeavor that fuels your journey into flow state. It sparks an intrinsic motivation that propels you to wholeheartedly immerse yourself in the task at hand, surmounting challenges and maintaining unwavering focus throughout. Purpose: Purpose gives meaning and significance to your actions and goals. When your work aligns with your values, it’s easier to get into a flow state. Purpose acts as a guiding compass, enabling you to stay resilient despite obstacles and distractions. Curiosity: Approaching tasks with genuine curiosity is key to hacking flow state. As your mind thirsts for novelty and discovery, curiosity drives unwavering focus, honing creative problem-solving abilities and a deep sense of engagement.The triad of passion, purpose, and curiosity creates a formidable fusion of flow triggers. These triggers help boost intrinsic motivation, achieve a challenge-skill balance, and provide a clear sense of direction to enter flow state.

      First flow trigger is passion, purpose, curiosity

      • see zk: on how discernment of these is important to achieve flow (discoverable in many sections), and how we have to figure these out in a bottom-up manner, with tools that aid us
  6. Nov 2022
    1. not really about the content of the sessions. Or anything you take from it. The most important thing are the relationships, the connections you gain from sharing the things you're passionate about with the people who are interested in it, the momentum you build from working on your project in preparation for a session

      I somewhat disagree - I think this community building is successful precisely because there is a shared interest or goal. It goes hand in hand. If there is no connecting theme or goal, the groups fall apart.

  7. May 2022
    1. “I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.” ― Roald Dahl, My Uncle Oswald

      A longer form of the idea:

      The answer to any question about doing something is either HELL YES!, or no.

  8. Oct 2021
  9. Aug 2021
    1. An essay is good if it has sprung from necessity

      If someone has a personal need to write about something then their passion for the topic will hopefully shine through and make it a great essay. Saying "an essay is good if it has sprung from necessity".. is just not true in my opinion. I might need to write about pollen in Australia for a class. If i am not passionate about pollen my essay probably won't be that great.

  10. Apr 2021
  11. Jan 2021
  12. Feb 2020
    1. The second-guessing and doubts are justified, because indeed, that can happen. For hobbyist levels of creative ambition, a steady paycheck job that you’re not too ambitious about, with free evenings and weekends, is a much better setup.But if you’re serious, and want to take your passion mission places, the indie life situation is definitely a far better environment for it, once you do the things necessary to make it work. It won’t happen magically.The making-it-work goes both ways. The passion mission has to inject soul into the money-making activity, and the money-making activity has to be artfully arranged around the core creative disciplines of the passion mission. Either both are sustainable long-term, or neither is.
  13. May 2018
    1. Choose your passion. You know you’ve discovered your passion when you love what you are doing. But wait a minute. Nothing is that simple is it?Check out what Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon, tells us:" One of the huge mistake people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don't choose your passions. Your passion chooses you".
    1. The most common mistake people make when choosing a happy and fulfilling career is that they wait to be hit in the face with passion.Seeing this in movies and TV shows we have gotten to believe that passion is something so definite and easy to find that it just hits you square in the face when you see it. That is how passion in both love and your work works… right?Wrong. The truth is that it is you who develops this passion over the course of time.

      Bra!

  14. Nov 2017
  15. Feb 2017
    1. When the sisters addressed groups together, Sarah usually began by carefully laying out evidence of slavery's evils and biblical justifications for opposing it, and then Angelina would take the floor to passionately denounce the institution based on her eyewitness experience of its horrors, exhorting the audience to act before this moral evil brought Divine vengeance on the nation.

      Thinking here about Whateley when he admits that logic alone may not always be enough when forming an argument.

      "Are emotions not part of human decision? Do we not often seek to persuade ourselves to choose a course of action by representing to ourselves appropriate thoughts and feelings? It is legitimate and necessary, Whateley says, to stimulate emotions such as hope, fear, and altruism because they lead to worthy aims."

      It's almost as if the Grimké sisters operate in the kind of rhetorical duality that Whateley imagines between "logic" and "passion" but do so in a physical sense by literally sharing the stage. Sarah acts as the "logic" when systematically presenting evidence and justification, and Angelina acts as the "passion" by motivating the audience into action by supplementing the evidence with feeling.

    1. Another remark on this article that deserves our notice is, that the less improved in knowl-edge and discernment the hearers are, the easier it is for the speaker to work upon their passions, and by working on their passions, to obtain his end.

      This is a persistent view both since Campbell and preceding Campbell. Of course, it is predicated upon Campbell's previous divisions concerning imagination, passion, understanding.

    2. and by the justness of the reasoning the passion may be more deeply rooted and enforced; and that thus both may be made to conspire in effectuating that persuasion which is the end proposed

      I appreciate that Campbell values the relationship between logic and passion and that both are necessary to ensure that rhetoric is successful. Again, he contrasts previous thinkers, such as the Stoics, who disregarded the importance of passion, and only viewed "passions" as a hindrance to human happiness.

    1. With 11 rervcnt pen

      I'm in a Digital Humanities course, but we've spent a lot of time discussing the ways DH emphasizes overlooked issues of Analog Humanities, where photo scanners let us pick up the details that publishers lose in the transcription from manuscript to print. Fervente calamo certainly comes across through vibrant rhetorical trickery and flimflam, but there's nothing like the physical marks a furious pen stamps on a document.

  16. Oct 2016
    1. Knowledge will not give you what you want, but it will give you what you need and what you long for. Wants and wishes are temporary things, so changeable, so influenced by the world. The flames of your passions and desires can burn hot or cold, depending on what is stimulating you and how secure you feel within yourself. Knowledge is not governed by such emotions, and you cannot make it come into a relationship that you may want.
  17. Aug 2015
    1. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction.

      It's that "special direction" that becomes the key to organizing a curriculum. How do we help students to attach their interests to a direction in their lives? Or am I wrong to think that Whitehead, here, is pointing to a learning experience that connects interest with being of use in society, with political activism.

  18. May 2015
  19. Sep 2013
    1. A wrongdoer must either understand and intend the action, or not understand and intend it. In the former case, he must be acting either from deliberate choice or from passion. It is deliberate purpose that constitutes wickedness and criminal guilt.

      Is not acting on one's passions a choice?