Effortless English Complete All 5 Courses Free Download

[Fisseha Aranda]

Findingliterature is not difficult these days. It is much more difficult to find the RIGHT literature. If you are reading this newsletter for a while, you might remember the posts I made about literature discovery:

In a nutshell the ideas proposed there use tools (e.g. Litmaps) to investigate the reference network of a few seed publications. From there we can find any paper that is related to the subject matter.

If you are not yet a follower, check out my friend Mushtaq Bilal on Twitter to get new ideas on how to use AI in your academic writing. I really admire how quickly he understood and adapted these technologies into his academic environment. Definitely worth a follow!

It took me about 5 years to tap into this desire. I spent my early 30s bouncing off Ashrams and Shamans, trying to build different businesses and pursue ideas. A time as unrelated to my current life as it could possibly be on the surface, but it taught me to identify desire.

The diagram at the beginning is there to motivate to think of academia as a PROCESS rather than an accumulation of knowledge. And the different skills involved as steps in this process. Research is not learning - it is sense making.

To change this I created the Effortless Academic\u2019s Manual a workshop that takes 8-12 hours to complete and will teach you the HOW of becoming a more successful academic. Hint: It\u2019s note taking with Obsidian.

The research \u201Cloop\u201D starts at learning or collecting relevant information continues to making sense of it, writing it down and then adapt (in a personal way: i.e. respond to critique, draw conclusions etc or in a more systemic way: i.e. adapt new methods, ideas and tools).

This \u201Ccurse of summaries\u201D is what makes it so difficult for students to learn. Proper note taking shortened my academic career by years (in a good way!). And it all rests on a single realization:

This is what I hope to transmit with The Effortless Academic\u2019s Manual, the course will go deep into the theory of how to split information, organize our notes, use Obsidian to structure it and become a better researcher.

I found that processing what you read into a \u201Cwriting ready\u201D format helps immensely. This older article contains ideas on how to set up my notes to be \u201Cmore ready\u201D for publication.

Autonomy comes from a feeling of purpose. And purpose comes from your true desire to do something. This is the bottom line of my life\u2019s philosophy that could fill pages to express fully.

I think the answer is our culture. We value having over doing. More information, more summaries, more in a shorter time is better. But \u201Cmore\u201D often kills creativity. A creative chef can make a meal out of any ingredients.

I usually don\u2019t do discounts - but this course is much bigger and more expensive than my other courses so I decided to give a 21% discount to the first 20 people using the code: \u201CEffortlessNewsletter\u201D.

(Email me if you are from lower/middle income countries to get individual discounts)

The key to success comes from going through a carefully designed step-by-step process of learning by doing. You need to install the right habits for your music, in the right order.

Ultimately, you want to select the habits that are most important for your situation. That allows you to carve away the inessential, double down on what matters, and achieve your goals effortlessly through simple repeated actions.

By the end of this section you will have a complete step-by-step system for identifying the right new habits to add, designing them to be effective, and implementing so that they stick.

So...has anyone here tried Mr. Werner's method of meditation, affirmations, imagery, and relaxation to improve their piano playing? How dedicated to the method are you? How easy or difficult is it for you to use the method in your piano playing? Have you noticed a difference? Was the difference "meh" or "magnificent"?

Yes, but what does it mean to "get rid of your ego"? Kenny Werner suggests when you "get rid of your ego", there are no bad notes. As someone who spends about half of my piano practice time playing classical music, I most certainly play bad notes, so it would seem getting rid of my ego requires giving up playing classical music. Indeed, I think Mr. Werner is telling me my ego is driving me to desire to play classical piano music correctly, instead of accepting the music my fingers can play right now.

I suggest Mr. Werner is putting forward a very definite method which he describes in Chpt. 16 as four distinct steps: 1) mediation to "attain inner balance"; 2) moving your fingers abstractly on the keyboard while in a meditative state; 3) moving your fingers musically on the keyboard while in a meditative state; 4) a process of change and growth. This process of change and growth is where Mr. Werner says you begin actually working to improve the capabilities of your fingers to say, play correctly a piece of classical music. But Mr. Werner advises such work can only come when one is in that meditative and presumably egoless state.

That's a valid point...I don't recall if he ever explicitly states it, but that book and his overarching measage is inherently geared towards jazz and improvisational music than classical music. His whole point is that only our own ego and fabricated expectations allow the concept of "wrong" notes to exist...to your point, that doesn't really work if your performance is literally meant to reproduce a written work as closely as possible as in classical repertoire.

With that said, I do think the book is a worthwhile read and can help reshape some unhealthy mental blocks. I, like most people I would bet, read the book and found value in the theme, even though I never actually started doing the meditations.

I should be the resident expert on this subject because I've taken two of his courses, the first on Steps 1 and 2 in Summer 2021 and one on all Four Steps that just finished last month (he gave those of us who did the steps 1 & 2 course a discount on the second course but we got something out of going through steps 1 and 2 again for sure).

His teaching has evolved through experience since writing the first book and he has written a second book. It covers some of the changes and updates but the basics are still the same. I really like this book, maybe more than the first.

One of the things he focuses on when teaching the four steps is what you might call Step Zero. As he likes to say, "it's so easy, an American can do it, with a chicken leg in one hand and a drink in the other. All you have to do is watch yourself breathe for twenty seconds. All the crap that you might be worried about, 'I'm no good', 'my kids don't listen to me', 'my wife doesn't love me', 'I don't have money for the rent or the mortgage', whatever it is, let it go for twenty seconds. You can have it all back after the twenty seconds. Go."

This step is fundamental to practicing the other four steps. You return to it again and again to get whatever it is in your mind (your ego? your father? that teacher that whacked your knuckles with a ruler?) out of your head and let your fingers (or embouchure or voice if that's your instrument) do what they already know how to do.

The fourth step, where you really apply the method to learning and practicing, is completely applicable to classical and other "fixed" styles of music. The beauty part of the method is that it's deeper, instead of being wider ("there is already too much to study and practice"). In other words, as you get better on the one little thing you focus on in your effortless mastery practice, you're training yourself to be better overall and you'll see the results in your other practicing and playing. The fourth step has you practicing without ego. You are even told to be excited when you play something wrong, because then you know there's something to work on. In the book, he talks about the learning diamond, and that's really important for this. When you're learning something, you can't play the whole example, 100% correct, at tempo, from the space. You might try to see what happens, then when it's not played right, you say, "oh, cool, I need to work on that part" and you break it down like we are all supposed to when we practice, small segments, as slow as you need to in order to play it correctly and remain in the space. And you work on it, staying in the space, and take breaks if you need to because you're slipping out of the space.

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