So, the team began testing a co-founder matching platform with some early users in January this year and it went live in July. When aspiring founders come to the platform, they describe themselves and the kind of co-founder they need. The platform then offers a pool of candidates who might be a good fit for the aspiring founder. If their requirements overlap and mutual interest exist on both ends, a connection is made

If I went to Stanford and worked with some YC-backed startups, chances are that I’ll find it relatively easy to find one or two co-founders, get millions in funding and build a billion-dollar company. However, as someone who grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and studied at the University of Nigeria, those chances are much slimmer, and it’ll be hard to find the same resources to build a successful company.

Whatever goals you want to achieve, attaching a commitment device to it will greatly increase your motivation to take action.Commitment devices cut through ambiguity.Often there are no immediate repercussions for procrastinating until much later. By self-imposing consequences such as a financial loss or damage to your reputation, the consequences of inaction become clearer.

You can tell your friends and family of your plans to become healthier so they can give you encouragement and keep you accountable. There are no real consequences to breaking your pledge other than letting other people down.But a commitment that comes with only a psychological price tag for failure is surprisingly effective for two reasons:We don’t want to be seen contradicting ourselves in front of people we respect and love.We want to be consistent with our past pronouncements. Cognitive dissonance, where we say one thing but do another, can cause unpleasant feelings within us.Through soft commitment devices, you are using the power of social pressure to promote behaviors you want to change in your life. And if your goals are made to show, they are made to grow.

If every time you missed a workout you had to donate $50 to a political party you don’t like, how much more motivated would you be to exercise?This is an example of a financial commitment device that is paired with one of your goals. You can apply this to waking up early or eating healthy. You are creating your own personal tax system.As a human, you are primed for loss aversion. Losing money stings more than gaining money, especially when your hard-earned dollar goes to an organization you don’t like.By levying a financial cost for your inaction, you are creating immediate consequences to your procrastination, which can be the motivating factor to get you moving.

We are overly optimistic about our ability to use willpower to overcome temptation. After a long and tiring day, the option to binge Netflix becomes more appealing than exercising.Commitment devices force you to create consequences for inaction.

To thrive in the new world of work, focus on learning timeless horizontal skills to support your core skill. Build other competencies around your expertise.People with a host of interdependent skills can build meaningful and lasting careers in the 21st century. In our increasingly connected and interdependent world, your wealth of knowledge can make you indispensable.

Successful generalists master a few domains and build complementary skills to thrive. They use the t-shaped approach to learn better.“A T-shaped person has deep knowledge/skills in one area and a broad base of general supporting knowledge/skills,” writes Ransom Patterson of College Info Geek.People who have t-shaped skills learn broad base general skills to support their core knowledge. For example, a t-shaped marketer knows just enough about content marketing, email marketing, search marketing and social marketing to stay relevant.

The point is, being good at many things and fabulous at a few save you time and help you thrive in a rapidly changing world. You don’t have to be the best at everything, but you can creatively learn a few complementary skills that can make your work easier.History is full of people who combined many domains and changed the course of history. Influential people like Isaac Newton, Galileo, Aristotle, Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison and Leonardo Da Vinci were generalists.

Today, cross-domain knowledge can save your career. If you a writer, learn how to market your content. Your success depends on it. If you are an entrepreneur, don’t just launch products; learn how to lead, delegate, relate better with people, use better technology and connect with the right people.With limited knowledge and skills, progress can take twice as long. You need experts to get great results. But basic knowledge can significantly improve how you work.

But what if things change? What if your skills are no longer needed?Being a specialist pays for a while until change happens. And then you are forced to adapt. The bad news is, if you don’t have another skill, you could quickly become obsolete unless you are at the top 10% percent of specializations society need to function.

Specialization is common knowledge — learn a popular discipline and build a career around it.Society is designed to function based on specialization. “…career advisors advocate specializing as much as possible — the more narrow the specialty, the better, writes Josh Kaufman.A greater percentage of people commit to a single skill. If you get good at it, you become indispensable to your employer as long as business is good.

Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. //Anaïs Nin

People looking to lose weight are often told to snack or have frequent, small meals, as it’s “good for the metabolism”.However, as with a lot of topics in the sphere of nutrition, this is a complicated matter, and the current literature is leaning towards avoiding snacks if we want to not only lose weight, but also be healthy.

With our current knowledge, the idea that frequent snacking is better for weight loss and the metabolism is untrue.In fact, frequent snacking actually leads to greater fat gain due to the body constantly remaining in fat-making mode from the constant influx of food. Therefore, for optimal health, we want to avoid eating between meals. This allows our fat-making processes to switch off, and also gives the digestive system a well-needed break.If you’re looking to lose weight, or optimize your health in general, try to take breaks between meals by avoiding snacking.

Aim to take a break from any calories for at least 2 hours at a time, but ideally closer to 3–4 hours. Ensure your meals are nutrient-dense and filling so that this 3 hour break isn’t difficult. Eating adequate healthy fats, protein, and fiber will ensure you stay full between meals.Another trick I like to use is having a cup of black coffee. It has zero calories and also acts as an appetite suppressant. If you’re feeling hungry, try this.

When the digestive system gets a break from digesting, it is allowed to perform other necessary functions, such as:A sweeping out of the small intestine to rid the system of bad bacteriaInsulin levels decrease:“Between meals, as long as we don’t snack, our insulin levels will go down and our fat cells can then release their stored sugar, to be used as energy. We lose weight if we let our insulin levels go down.” — Harvard Medical School

Simon estimated chess masters learn between 25,000 and 100,000 of these chunks during their training, and that learning the chunks was a key element in becoming a first-rate chess player. Such players really see chess positions very differently from beginners.

With that said, I've found the transfer process relatively easy. In the case of the command line, I use it often enough that I have plenty of opportunities to make real use of my Ankified knowledge of the command line. Over time, that declarative knowledge is becoming procedural knowledge I routinely use in context. That said, it'd be good to better understand when the transfer works and when it doesn't. Even better would be a memory system that integrates into my actual working environment. For instance, it could query me on Unix commands, while placing me at an actual command line. Or perhaps it would ask me to solve higher-level problems, while at the command line

Why not use more of Anki's features? Part of the reason is that I get an enormous benefit from just the core features. Furthermore, learning to use this tiny set of features well has required a lot of work. A basketball and hoop are simple pieces of equipment, but you can spend a lifetime learning to use them well. Similarly, basic Anki practice can be developed enormously. And so I've concentrated on learning to use those basic features well.

For instance, it's possible to try to remember as an isolated fact that 1962 was the year the first telecommunications satellite, Telstar, was put into orbit. But a better way of remembering it is to relate that fact to others. Relatively prosaically, you might observe that Telstar was launched just 5 years after the first Soviet satellite, Sputnik. It didn't take long to put space to use for telecommunications. Less prosaically – a richer elaboration – I personally find it fascinating that Telstar was put into orbit the year before the introduction of ASCII, arguably the first modern digital standard for communicating text. Humanity had a telecommunications satellite before we had a digital standard for communicating text! Finding that kind of connection is an example of an elaborative encoding

Indeed, I believe the act of constructing the cards actually helps with memory. Memory researchers have repeatedly found that the more elaborately you encode a memory, the stronger the memory will be. By elaborative encoding, they mean essentially the richness of the associations you form.

I should say at the outset: I have no reason to think this paper is misleading! But it's also worth being cautious. As an example of that caution, one of the questions I added to Anki was: “What does Jones 2011 claim is the average age at which physics Nobelists made their prizewinning discovery, over 1980-2011?” (Answer: 48). Another variant question was: “Which paper claimed that physics Nobelists made their prizewinning discovery at average age 48, over the period 1980-2011?” (Answer: Jones 2011). And so on

As mentioned above, I'm usually doing such reading as part of the background research for some project. I will find a new article (or set of articles), and typically spend a few minutes assessing it. Does the article seem likely to contain substantial insight or provocation relevant to my project – new questions, new ideas, new methods, new results? If so, I'll have a read.

Despite the fact that I'd thought little about AlphaGo or reinforcement learning in the intervening time, I found I could read those followup papers with ease. While I didn't attempt to understand those papers as thoroughly as the initial AlphaGo paper, I found I could get a pretty good understanding of the papers in less than an hour. I'd retained much of my earlier understanding!

Of course, instead of using Anki I could have taken conventional notes, using a similar process to build up an understanding of the paper. But using Anki gave me confidence I would retain much of the understanding over the long term.

After five or six such passes over the paper, I went back and attempted a thorough read. This time the purpose was to understand AlphaGo in detail. By now I understood much of the background context, and it was relatively easy to do a thorough read, certainly far easier than coming into the paper cold. Don't get me wrong: it was still challenging. But it was far easier than it would have been otherwise.

I began with the AlphaGo paper itself. I began reading it quickly, almost skimming. I wasn't looking for a comprehensive understanding. Rather, I was doing two things. One, I was trying to simply identify the most important ideas in the paper. What were the names of the key techniques I'd need to learn about? Second, there was a kind of hoovering process, looking for basic facts that I could understand easily, and that would obviously benefit me. Things like basic terminology, the rules of Go, and so on.

Procrastination is avoidance due to emotional discomfort. The activities that prompt procrastination differ for everyone. Telling bad news might be difficult for everyone but, for some, it is also having to buy a present or to call a friend. If you’re unsure what drives your procrastination, try keeping a daily journal for a week or more, to help you become more aware.

That last part is probably the most problematic. I advise starting on small tasks and working on them in a regimented way: set a short time-frame, take a break, then register how much you got done (or if you ended up doing something else instead). Let’s say you choose to work on an essay for 15 minutes. If you succeed in staying focused for that time, then you could consider doubling the session next time. The point of this approach is that it makes you realise what targets are actually doable, rather than setting yourself a burdensome load of work that discourages you from even starting on it.

Unfortunately, avoidance does not make the obligation or necessary action go away; it is still there, of course. So procrastination is a way of coping that might help you feel better for a while, but it is no solution. The activities that were done instead of the intended one mostly do not make you feel better in the long run. They were just temporary and easy distractions, often not a productive activity or something that makes you feel proud, accomplished, or at least worthwhile spending time on. Some might brush this off, but for others this can then prompt further angst – now they feel they wasted time. And therefore, procrastination can lead to many negative emotions, such as feeling guilty, ashamed, nervous or depressed. The realisation of not having completed a vital task might get worse over time and, at some point, the barriers to completing the task might seem unsurmountable (for instance, after a deadline has passed).

Of course, at different times, some people might use both strategic delay and procrastination, depending on the particular activity. The key difference between them is the emotional connotations – that is, putting pressure on oneself purposefully versus irrational avoidance that runs counter to one’s intentions.

The psychological explanation for this common but irrational behaviour is that, by avoiding the emotional discomfort of engaging in the behaviour, procrastination provides a temporary relief or escape. The task might go undone, but at least the confrontation with the negative emotion is avoided. Easier and more fun things encourage us to stay away, at least momentarily, from what needs to be done. This is the main problem: procrastination is avoidance behaviour. It is the avoidance of something aversive by occupying your thoughts with something you would rather do and that is available right now, not taking into account the future. It can be seen as a conflict between what you want to do now versus what you should be doing for your future self. In short, it is a self-regulation problem.

Procrastination is arguably even more irrational than strategic delay because the person will often be fully aware that delaying a task will have bad consequences, yet they still choose to delay. This is puzzling from a psychological perspective. For instance, even if someone has intended many times to finally file their taxes, and they fully recognise it would be in their best interest to do so, they still don’t do it. Instead, they start to watch their favourite TV series, perhaps thinking that they might feel more like it after one episode. But when the next episode is suggested, they start watching that one. After that, they think to themselves: ‘It is really too late to start on the taxes now. Tomorrow I will feel more like it,’ and then they go to bed. Procrastination describes this type of delay, where there is a striking gap or mismatch between your intention and the actual action you take, and you feel incapable of overcoming it

We in the West are used to thinking of the mind and the body as separate. But a burgeoning field called “embodied cognition” is demonstrating that thinking is actually a full-body experience. This is true in a few different ways.First, the internal sensations of the body—our “gut feelings”—guide our perceptions and our reactions. When we learn to tune in to these inner signals, we can use them to make sounder decisions, and even to connect more effectively with other people.Second, the movements our bodies make affect the way we think. We’ve come to believe that serious thinking entails sitting still, but research shows that moving—walking, exercising, acting things out—enhances our mental processes in ways that don’t happen when we’re sitting down.Third, a specific kind of movement—the gestures we make with our hands—extends our thinking by capturing and expressing concepts that we can’t yet put into words. Research shows that our most advanced, most cutting-edge ideas often show up first in the motions of our hands—motions that we then use to inform and construct a verbal account of what we’re thinking.It’s common in our culture to compare the brain to a computer, but this is a deeply flawed analogy. A laptop operates the same whether it is open on a desk in an office or on a bench in a park. But human brains aren’t like that—they are exquisitely sensitive to context. One of the most fertile and fruitful places to “think with” is nature. That’s because, over eons of evolution, our brains were tuned to the kind of sensory information available in the natural world. Spending time in a hard-edged, highly designed, built environment drains our mental resources, while spending time in nature actually replenishes them. We can also deliberately arrange the interior spaces we occupy in ways that extend our thinking. Research shows that it’s especially important that we feel a sense of control and ownership over the space in which we do our learning or working. It’s also important to incorporate into these spaces cues of identity—that is, objects or symbols of who you are, what you’re doing in that space—and also cues of belonging—objects or symbols that represent your membership in a group that’s meaningful to you.

More than 20 years ago, two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers wrote a journal article that opened with a question: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Now, that question would seem to have an obvious answer, right? The mind stops at the head. It’s contained within the skull. But Clark and Chalmers maintained that this assumption—as common as it is—is wrong. The mind, they said, takes elements from outside the head and draws them into the thinking process. These mental “extensions” allow us to think in ways our brains couldn’t manage on their own. They called this phenomenon “the extended mind.”

We hear a lot about how amazing the brain is, but the lesser-known scientific story from the past 20 years is how much researchers have learned about the brain’s limits. These limits are not a matter of individual differences in intelligence; they are common to all our brains. They’re a product of the brain’s status as a biological organ, one that evolved to do things that are very different from what we ask of it in our complex, knowledge-centric modern world.Drawing on the resources of the extended mind allows the brain to “overachieve,” to do more than would be possible on its own. In fact, we can think of experts among us as those people who have mastered the art of thinking outside the brain. Research shows that top performers don’t do it all in their heads; they achieve their superior results by integrating internal and external resources.When we intentionally cultivate the capacity to think outside the brain, a new world of possibility opens up; we gain access to reserves of intuition, memory, attention, and motivation that are not available to the naked brain. In order to think the intelligent, informed, original thoughts we’re capable of, we can’t rely on the brain alone. We have to think outside the brain.

Tagging can also be helpful for your own research purposes. In the above example, the student has tagged some thematic elements that may come up later in the text under study or other texts that are part of the course. Having marked these themes might make it easier to gather evidence and quotes for analysis in a final paper.

Have students explore the Internet on their own with some limited direction (find an article from a respectable source on a topic important to you personally), exercising traditional literacy skills (define difficult words, identify persuasive strategies, etc.). Many of the above exercises presume that students are annotating for the most part together on a shared course text. But the nature of web annotation is that we can see the notes of others even if we are not reading the same text. In this way, we can attend to annotations as texts themselves.

Annotation is typically perceived as a means to an end. As marginal note-taking it often is the basis for questions asked in class discussion or points made in a final paper. But annotation can also be a kind of end in itself, or at least more than a rest-stop on the way to intellectual discovery.