Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Stretching the mind is generally a good thing. There are many ways to do this, so just do it.

Over the years, I have spent hours playing the guitar. If I spend half-an-hour a day playing day after day, what I play starts to resemble jazz. I have some sort of lifetime membership to Next Level Guitar. The idea there is I open a new lesson, can’t play a bit of it, but work on the lesson for a week. A few weeks later, I come back to it, and I can play it.

At this time, once a day, I go to Cornell University’s arXiv site and read most of a paper. These are pre-publication research papers. As such, they stretch the current state of the art. I don’t understand everything that I read, but I find that a few weeks later I can discuss the topic of the paper. Somehow, time and more papers have increased my brain in some way.

I just picked up “An Introduction to Statistical Learning.” I bought this a couple of years ago, read the first 100 pages, but became side tracked with something else. I am reading again. I don’t understand everything, but as above, I am learning more than I realize.

These are next-level exercises. I try to do something that is beyond what I can do. I am stretching. I find that to be a good thing. Perhaps I don’t “get it” all, but I seem to understand more.

This can be quite rewarding to me. This can also be quite annoying to others. I need to learn to exercise and stretch and not tell others too much about it. Thank you for reading.