Adam Wik's Blog, page 4
March 14, 2015
Learning Swedish – A Segmented Approach
How much Swedish can we learn in 3 months using a new method we’ve never tried before?
In a way, this is equal parts both a personal challenge and also an experiment. We’ve wanted to learn Swedish for a while now, mostly because of my ancestry (I’m told ‘Wik’ comes from the same Swedish root as the ‘vik’ in ‘viking’, and one of our family historians insists that there’s some evidence ancestors way back of ours were vikings).
It’s no fun if you can’t make it a challenge though, so I’ve been co...
March 9, 2015
How to Stay Productive with Block Schedules
Block scheduling has proven to be the most effective to keep me on track without causing too much pain.
For the longest time, I found myself stuck in a bit of a quandary.
On one hand I really needed a schedule to keep me on track. Call it ADHD, general flightiness, whimsy capriciousness, whatever – if I didn’t have a schedule keeping me on track I would derail and do a thousand different things that weren’t actually the things I needed to do that day.
On the other hand when I created a rigid sch...
March 1, 2015
Video Games, Process, & Success Dependence – How to Set Better Goals
Europa Universalis IV players are often good examples of process driven individuals.
In general, people tend to fall into one of two categories in their approach to accomplishing a task. Either they’re result driven, or they’re process driven.
In my experience, of these two the process driven people tend to have more long term success when it comes to achieving the more difficult tasks. It seems to take far less willpower, or mental fortitude if you want to call it that, to tackle more difficul...
February 22, 2015
Conquering Your To-Do Lists Before They Conquer You
Compartmentalizing your tasks can make them much, much easier to handle effectively.
Caroline and I are both severe to-do list addicts (Caroline perhaps even a little more than me).
This can be both a blessing, and a curse. On one hand it makes it very easy to organize our tasks and have a good plan going forward for what we need to be working on. It gives a nice shape to conquering our goals, like a step-by-step quest list in a video game, and takes a lot of the uncertainty and nebulousness aw...
February 16, 2015
How You Can Help Us
You can now become our patron on Patreon!
We love writing for Road to Epic. We love seeing all your comments, and getting your e-mails, and knowing that we’re actually helping people to make their lives better. It is basically our dream job.
The thing is it takes a lot to support it. We put a lot of time and effort into the researching and writing of our articles. Add to that the cost of maintaining the servers, upgrades as the site grows, and all the other expenses that come along with running...
February 12, 2015
GoBadass: A Guide to GoRuck, the Toughest Day of Your Life
What, never carried a telephone pole around?
If you’ve done obstacle course races you might have heard of GoRucks before, but if not then allow me to summarize it for you: it’s the most rewarding, tiring, mentally tough fitness-y “event” you’ll ever do.
It’s torture, but it’s so much fun. You may find yourself with your face nose-deep in a stranger’s rear-end, but by the end of the day you’ll be friends and comrades. You’ll be dirty, ache all over, and have sores on your feet, but a huge grin o...
February 2, 2015
Learning to Think in your Target Language
One of the biggest obstacles in moving from the beginner or low intermediate levels of a language into more advanced stages is the problem of constantly translating in your head. This is a problem that effects everyone and is a common place for people to either give up, or just accept that it’s the way things are when you learn to speak a second language. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be that way.
The Problems with Translating
Even if you don’t have the lofty goal of becoming simultaneous inte...
January 26, 2015
Lessons from the Routines of Famous Creators
I’m a big believer in routine. I think that a lot of what contributes to determining whether a person succeeds or fails in their endeavors is whether or not they have a routine in place – a system – that acts as a benefit or detriment to their progress.
So I was excited to find this visualization of the daily routines of 25 famously creative individuals by Podio and the one below from Infograph We Trust. Let’s take a look and see what learn from them.
Sleep
I’ve said before, sleep is super impor...
January 20, 2015
Why Behavioral Change is Hard and What You Can Do About It
Want to make a big change in your life? Maybe you want to get fit or commit to learning a language or instrument, or even to start meditating.
At some time or another, everyone sets goals they hope to attain someday that will require significant changes to their lifestyles. Unfortunately though, most will fail to achieve those goals.
Every new year, gyms are crowded with well-intentioned “resolutioners” who want to become healthy, perhaps lose some pounds, and be a better version of themselves...
January 6, 2015
How Mindful Meditation is a Workout for Your Brain
You don’t need to be a monk to meditate, nor do you need a huge time commitment.
For the longest time the idea of meditation always conjured up images monks sitting cross-legged on mountaintops, cliffs, under waterfalls or some similar wilderness space all while being completely silent for hours on end. I thought it was a spiritual thing and the benefits were all just myths or pseudoscience.
However a growing body of studies caused me to take a second look at it and since experimenting with it...
