Scott Young

“Always have a challenge,”

Start speaking the very first day. Don’t be afraid to talk to strangers. Use a phrasebook to get started; save formal study for later. Use visual mnemonics to memorize vocabulary. What struck me were not the methods but the boldness with which he applied them. While I had timidly been trying to pick up some French, worrying about saying the wrong things and being embarrassed by my insufficient vocabulary, Lewis was fearless, diving straight into conversations and setting seemingly impossible challenges for himself.

Studying for Jeopardy! might feel like an impossible task, as you would need to study almost every conceivable subject. Craig’s solution, however, was to rethink the process of acquiring knowledge itself.

“You can practice haphazardly, or you can practice efficiently.”

be ruthlessly analytical about how he acquired knowledge.

start off by downloading the tens of thousands of questions and answers from every Jeopardy! game ever aired.

aggressively quizzing himself on the questions full-time.

applied text-mining software to categorize the questions into different topics, such as art history, fashion, and science.

He used data visualization to map out his strengths and weaknesses. The text-mining software separated the different topics, which he visualized as different circles. The position of any given circle on his graph showed how good he was in that topic—higher meant he knew more about that topic. The size of the circle indicated how frequent that topic was. Bigger circles were more common and thus better choices for further study

he started to uncover hidden patterns.