Cal Newport

He's a university student, struggling academically.

He gets involved in competitive memorizing.

So there's competitions you can go to where you memorize a deck of cards and stuff like this.

It's memory competitions.

The techniques he learned, so he's doing this in his memory competition.

This helps him, right?

This helps his general ability to focus and sustain concentration.

And what happens to his schoolwork?

All of his grades go up.

And when I talked to him, he was on his way to like a prestigious Australian graduate program.

And so I use it as an example of like, hey, you can train your brain to be better at focusing and get all sorts of general benefits.

And memorizing is like the type of thing you can do to in general make your brain stronger, to get more cognitive fitness.

So that's interesting what you're doing there, Evan.

Other things you can do to actively strengthen your concentration muscles.

The three things I talk about a lot on this show is read, write, self-reflect, right?

Reading has a unique value to your brain because it's not just practicing using your brain.

It actually rewires your brain in a way that you can make more areas of your brain work together to produce smarter thoughts.

So reading literally makes you smarter, not just from the content, but by the way it rewires your brain.

Writing is where you reverse those circuits and actually produce original thoughts using them.

You get better at actually focusing these circuits to producing new things of value in the world.