One of the most common conversations I remember from sitting in high school classrooms is the “Why should I remember this?”-debate.
“Why should I memorize where carbon is in the periodic table of elements, if I can just look it up any second on my phone?”
“Why should I remember when the Vietnam War started, if it’s on Wikipedia?”
“Why should I…”
It’s true that memorizing facts simply for the sake of memorizing facts has become useless.
Except for the one case where it hasn’t:
Being interesting.
tl;dr: I created a free, 14-day email course that’ll help you build a daily reading habit. You can sign up here.
Back in July, I asked the people on my Four Minute Books newsletter what their biggest struggle with reading was.
Here’s the unanimous answer:
It doesn’t get much clearer than that.
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In October 2016 I started a Master’s Degree program at the Technical University of Munich, which is widely ranked as one of the best universities in the world.
This semester, I’m taking a class about strategies of global organizations.
Basically, it’s supposed to teach us how to think like the CEO of a global company, which I expect a rare few of my fellow students to become (don’t look at me, I wanna do my own thing).
Today, I’d like to start an experiment by sharing what I learned from the first of six chapters of that class. If the feedback is good, I’ll turn this into a series.
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Minions is the third installment in the Despicable Me series.
If you haven’t seen or heard about the movie, you should. Because Minions is the 10th highest grossing movie of all time.
Do you know how hard it is for the third movie in a trilogy to outshine its predecessors?
It’s the reason why Avengers 2 is behind Avengers and why the first of the Hobbit movies was the most successful of them all.
So how do you go from not being on that list with the first movie, to spot number 26 with the second, to the top 10?
You double down on what works.
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Trampelpfad.
Want me to say it again?
Tram-pel-pfad.
Want me to actually say it?
The first half of the word “Trampel” comes from the verb “trampeln” which means to stomp.
As in “When we told the kids they weren’t allowed to watch TV, they ended up stomping up the stairs in frustration.”
The second half of the word “pfad” simply means path.
Therefore, a Trampelpfad is a path, which has been created by people stomping along the same trail.
You can most often find a Trampelpfad in the woods, and it looks like this:
Why am I telling you this?
One, because Trampelpfad is an awesome word and there’s no proper English word for it and two, because it will help you remember what I’m about to say next.
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