True success is the experience of the miraculous, not the fulfillment of our plans, however visionary.

International corporations are making big money using national borders to divide ordinary people, see roaming as the most obvious example.

Much learning does not teach understanding, as Heraclites said. Now it’s much easier to grasp, as it’s clear that nobody can read all the books, nor even only all the great ones.

If you’re hyperactive, balance it with something contemplative and truly useless. Look at clouds half an hour a day and you’ll see the difference. Dare you try? Or your time is too precious? :)

Undoubtedly, one of the main problems of the Information Age is information. How we can select, digest, interpret, learn and transfer it the most effectively? For example, it’s crucial in any form of learning, but especially in online learning, to be sure a student has really understood a topic and got the meaning the authors have intended to convey. It’s equally important when we come to personal development: how to find a sure ground in the overwhelming chaos of theories, movements, views and possibilities constantly present around us?

One of the hints comes from Merab Mamardashvili, a Georgian/Russian philosopher who introduced the idea of “Perception Cone” — an evolving field of findividual experience.

It’s clear that our perception doesn’t hold all the information we are able to perceive — in fact, we ignore the most of it. Our perception, our ability to feel, experience, be alive, are, Mamardashvili says, inside some cone which doesn’t coincide with the set of external objects around us. For example, you can listen to radio without actually hearing anything, but instantly hear a song that moves you. In the same way, if you try reading a book that isn’t interesting to you, its contents is just inaccessible to you. It looks like the way we communicate with the world is via a sort of “speaking things”, impressions or dream particles which arise in us interest, emotions and motivation. We can learn and work productively only within our inner cone, as all unrelated information will be screened anyway. That cone grows basing on growing personal experience (not on cramming).

Then, the first task of learning is to transfer knowledge and skills from an external state of impersonal “information” to the inner perception cone of anindividual , making them accessible for further exploration. Accordingly, the first task of self development is to realize your cone, to track the path of your personal evolution, your relationships and ideas history. That means that the half of the time we spend to learning new things should, in fact, be spent to getting the meaning from the experience we’ve already got.

The most important secret of life isn’t hidden somewhere in the head of a Grandaster who has to reveal them to us. The most important secret is that we already know everything the most important to us.

There are many useful alternative reading techniques that may help you to find new ideas and develop your creativity.

1. Before you even open a book, try to compose its table of contents. (A preferable technique of Bernard Shaw). Besides developing your imagination, it’ll help you to recall and organize your knowledge on the subject and, therefore, to prepare yourself for better learning.
2. Stop at book’s middle and try to outline the rest of it.
3. Try reading only right pages of a book, thinking out what happens on left ones. The book’s plot will enrich :)
4. If in the course of reading there is described some problem, stop and try to find the solution before continue reading. (A preferable technique of John Kennedy).
5. Best solutions often come from unrelated areas. Try to ask yourself as often as possible if there are any analogies or other hints for realization of your priority tasks and solving problems. The more unrelated a book is to your task, the better the results.
6. Be a visionary. After finishing reading a book, go ahead and think out it’s sequel. Or, propose alternative versions of plot starting from some point.
7. Do a content analysis. What trends does the book speak about? What new business possibilities may be found there? What ideas you can adapt to your business?

And finally, an Einstein’s advice. “Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”

There is a strange phenomena in the art of writing. On the one hand, every writer wants her writing to find response among the readership, i.e. to be universal. On the other hand, you can only write well about things unique to you — things you are interested in, belonging to your inner world (which no one else fully understands). Looks like, contrary to habitual opinion, personal is the most universal.

We don’t fully know how exactly we are unique. In a sense, one is unique rather with the vector of her growth than with something she already has, so, an objective knowledge of what your uniqueness consists in is impossible.

Looks like the bridge between personal and universal is interest. The more interesting, i.e. emotionally engaging, is the matter to the writer, the more exciting may her writing be to the readers. (If, of course, one is of sound mind :) So, emotions, a deeply personal and irrational thing which is so often considered as standing in the way of objectivity, turns out to be a criterion of universality and, therefore, verity.

But there are different kinds of excitement. A cops and robbers films produces an intensive but low-quality excitement, especially if you already passed the teen age. By the way, as I reread adventure books from my childhood, I find that I almost don’t recall the plot. My memory kept only things (or states of mind?) which were unrelated to the plot. And by some strange occurrence exactly those states of mind are still exciting and still productive for me now.

A plot, however dramatic, is but a mean to manage reader’s attention. It just makes the transition to a productive reality easier. It is just one of many possibilities, yet often misused as reality’s substitute.

Malevich’s Black Square is a declaration of radical rejection of object/plot in painting. In literature, an example of similar attitude is Proust’s work where through an objectless plot constantly shines author’s mind and emotions, provoking reader’s emotions as a deep inner resonance which is totally different from the plot adrenaline.

Through a habit, which is born out of plot-dominated art, we sometimes even imagine our own lives as such a stories, trying to deduce their meaning from plot details. That is where empty hopes and naive adventurism, as well as most of business storytelling come from.

But reality is different — only our dreams are real, only emotions speak, and only our path exists, with its beginning and end hidden from our eyes :)

Now, I’m going to explain this blog’s concept.

David Galenson came up recently with an interesting theory about creative people. Briefly, he divides them into conceptualists and experimentalists.

«What he has found is that genius — whether in art or architecture or even business — is not the sole province of 17-year-old Picassos and 22-year-old Andreessens. Instead, it comes in two very different forms, embodied by two very different types of people. “Conceptual innovators,” as Galenson calls them, make bold, dramatic leaps in their disciplines. They do their breakthrough work when they are young. Think Edvard Munch, Herman Melville, and Orson Welles. They make the rest of us feel like also-rans. Then there’s a second character type, someone who’s just as significant but trudging by comparison. Galenson calls this group “experimental innovators.” Geniuses like Auguste Rodin, Mark Twain, and Alfred Hitchcock proceed by a lifetime of trial and error and thus do their important work much later in their careers. (Wired).»

David Galenson surely has a point. At least, my observations fully adjust with this theory. As for me, I am a definite experimentalist. Not that my age doesn’t leave me a chance to be a conceptualist, it just reflects my method of learning :) When I start doing something, I rarely know exactly what will happen, in spite of all my efforts to figure out the outcome. It’s just an unknown, deep, beautiful dream I follow. Then it starts growing and developing, and I start getting the outcome vision. And then I adjust the process and get the result, which isn’t the end, but rather a path to a bigger dream.

I think this approach reflects the way a lot of other people learn, too. So, Second Sight is a blog about personal development and lifetime learning, in the spirit of experiments and constant search for better.

Then, there is a second reason for this name. I believe that one of the most needed skills in life is the skill of seeing through current patterns of perception and thinking, which I conventionallly call second sight. So, this blog is about real as opposed to apparent. This is where the name of this blog came from. So, Second Sight is a blog about the art of discerning real as opposed to seeming and about the ways of learning this art, with main themes like vision, motivation, creativity, productivity, lifehacking, and so on.

Another reason for Second Sight’s name is that in fact, I already do have a blog, so, Second Sight is really my second blog. By the way, my first blog is an a-lister, the only trick is that it’s in Russian. After people started translating my posts into English (thank you, Alex), I realized that there is a chance to be heard by a wider audience.

And, finally, the reason is you, the reader. Because it’s a blog, not a sermon. Discussion helps sharpen the vision and broaden its horizons. Feel free to join in and share your views and experiences.

As far as I know, nobody reads first posts. What a pity — some of them are worth reading or otherwise meaningful. Here are the first posts of blogs I read most. Although long forgotten, they are symbolic in a way.

Gapingvoid’s first post — titled “Contact” (isn’t it symbolic, with the focus on conversation his blog has?)

37signals — titled “Warm Idea” (isn’t their blog about user friendly ideas, after all? :)

Douglas Bowman’s first post is titled “Something New”, very modest for Bowman’s famous website, and is an interesting reading, especially in time perspective:

It’s with great humility that I hammer out this first post. Humility, because I enter the game way after many others. Humility because others have been practicing and polishing their writing on a daily — or somewhat daily — basis for x years times 365 days. The sheer size and breadth of some of their blogs makes me feel like I’m sitting down at a table full of experienced high rollers with only $5 of tokens in my pocket.

I sign to that.

Then, Seth Godin’s first post, back in 2002, strangely titled “Boring”. Perhaps that’s exactly the fight with boring things that makes Seth’s blog so interesting :)

And finally, what about Jeffrey Zeldman, the pioneer of the web? I don’t know how to find his first post, as blogs didn’t even exist when he started publishing his famous site, but here is the first page saved at the Wayback Machine, back in 1996, when I first started reading his site.

By the way, there even was a blog about first posts, alas, silent since 2005 (to much first posts or too few important ones?)…

My own first “post” was my entry in my guestbook, which one can consider as a blog prototype, in my homepage at Geocities Soho I created in 1997, in happy times of Web 1.0. It was a phrase of Meister Eckhart, a medieval German preacher, about life that just lives to live and doesn’t need any other reason. When I find the English translation, I’ll put it here.