Don't Ask People For Advice

• Culture is a way of perspective and identity, and people speaking the same language immediately bond and form a connection.
• If an English speaking person learns Spanish, the underlying culture that emphasises ‘passion’ or ‘enjoying the experience’ is a more important cultural value in the countries who are natively Spanish.
• The culture of a certain place may include cuisine, history, music and notable personalities, but language becomes the salt without which the culture is tasteless.

The local language is the preferred route to understand the culture due to 2 reasons:

1. Most people don’t speak English very well, due to their learning it as a second or third language. These people do not represent the real sampling of the country's population, just being the better-educated cosmopolitans who speak a global language.
2. Most translations are poor substitutes for the real cultural essence, and a person needs to learn the original language to fully understand the context and culture.

When you have countless open loops in your life, you will never be able to relax.

• Define exactly what you need to do. In blogging, it could be getting a certain traffic volume or sustaining a certain posting rate.
• Define exactly what you will commit to. There will always be more to do. Close the ends by defining the amount you are willing to commit to.
• Define exactly the tasks that need to be done. Make a to-do list for each day and week.
• When you've finished, stop and enjoy your time off.

Once some people complete their to-do list, they add more work. This is a dangerous move that can sabotage your productivity.
Sources of open loops:

• Studying. Do you have a specific list of learning activities, or do you just "study"?
• Exercising. Do you follow a workout, or do you just exercise?
• Work. Do you work from 9-5, or do you finish a list?
• Writing. Do you write in hours, or number of words?
• Communication. Do you speak when it's important, or just of fill dead air?

There are two ways you can write down your speech:

1. How you want to say it;
2. As an outline or a skeleton.

When you've written it down it's going to take more than several times to figure out what you're trying to say and this is the sculpting process where you edit, add, or delete parts of your speech to make it sound better.

• The key to memorizing a speech is to memorize it hierarchically. You begin with the broad chunks, moving to specific paragraphs, phrases, up until the intonation and your timing with the words.
• When starting with the chunks you simply write out the main points of the speech then cover them up and recall them.
• Moving up to the small points you can expand your bullets to represent each idea with one or two key words and quiz yourself until you have it memorized.