Long-form music with video.

There’s a lot of this kind of thing available on YouTube – high quality cinematography with background music and no narration. I’m dating myself here, but there’s no way this would ever have been available in a world of three commercial networks and PBS. And sure, it’s not action-packed, but maybe action wasn’t what you were looking for at the moment.

Study tips.

I listened to an audiobook biography of the guy this study technique is named after, Richard Feynman. If you’re one who assumes geniuses are boring, introverted people, you’d be surprised by him. He was quite the character, and yet a very valuable person.

The earthquake I missed.

I turned on the TV, tuned to the World Series, and left the room for a few minutes. I don’t even remember why. I came back and there was a sitcom on. I think it was Rosanne. There was nobody around who could have changed the channel – how did we wind up going from the World Series to a sitcom in five minutes?

Could you learn a whole new way of reading?

I worked with a guy once who had served at a U.S. Navy base in Japan. He made an interesting observation: as an English-speaking person, if you live in a country where they use the Roman alphabet, you can remember the words you see on streets signs and so forth even if you can’t pronounce them and don’t know what they mean. But in Japan if you’re lost the street signs are of a lot less help because we aren’t used to the characters we see.

There's always something to watch.