Always Be Better

Hello, and welcome to "Always Be Better" with Mel Windham. This week, we're going to return to the 7 Habits  book and start with the easiest and shortest habit, Sharpening the Saw. Out of the seven, it's probably the most important habit. What does that mean -- to sharpen the saw? Well, imagine you're in the woods sawing trees down. You're getting tired, and it's taking forever. Your friend comes to check on you, and then he says, "Let me see that saw. It looks dull." "I know," you say. "I've been at this for days." And he answers, "Well, wouldn't it go faster if you sharpened your saw?" Most people are likely to answer, "I don't have time for that." After all, it would take time to walk that saw back to the shop and run it through the sharpener. But on the other hand, wouldn't it be time well spent? Sure, it may take a couple of hours to take care of the saw, but then you'd quickly get...

Hello and welcome back to "Always Be Better" with Mel Windham. This week I'm going to go over another of my favorite books that changed my life:  Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid  by Douglas R. Hofstadter. I first came across this book in 8th grade during one of our TAG sessions. This was the Talented And Gifted program in Georgia that got me out of regular classes to pursue higher learning pursuits, which evidently meant playing high-brow games and reading interesting books. We even planned out the beginnings of a musical based on football. Those were the days! So, in this program, our teacher decided to introduce us to this book, and I latched on to it. It always got my brain thinking. In a nutshell, the book takes an approach similar to what I'm doing now in this series -- in its first half, it hits you with a whole bunch of interesting random topics, but then surprisingly brings it all together to explain how Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem works, w...

Hello, and welcome to "Always Be Better" with Mel Windham. Today I'm going to talk about success and the Windham Establishment Principle. Just to give you a quick preview, take a quick look at this typical exponential growth graph. In order to succeed in anything, we need to get all the way over to the right where growth is going up like crazy. Keep that in mind as we proceed. Let's start with this video series. Maybe you feel things are progressing very slowly, especially with all the introductory material. But believe it or not, there is a reason for each of the videos that I've presented so far. I'm building a foundation.  It's much like from the Karate Kid . Wax on, wax off. You may not immediately see the benefits, but as we progress further, you will start to see how it all comes together -- much like when Mr. Miyagi attacks, Daniel is able to instinctively block his punches. Wax on and wax off turn into actual applied techniques. But to get there, D...

Hello, and welcome back to "Always Be Better" with Mel Windham. After so many introductions, this week I'm actually going to teach something -- an introduction to classical logic. Hmmm ... wait ... does this make this another introduction? Well, let's go ahead and dive in. We'll start with a simple statement. If Sam is human, he has a face. That makes sense, right? Can you think of a human who doesn't have a face? In classical logic, statements can be assigned a value of True or False. We can look at this statement and determine that this particular one is True. Let's add another statement. Sam is human. This is a simpler statement. You can probably look at Sam and tell if this statement is True or False. For now, let's say that we've examined Sam and have determined that he is indeed human. So, now we're up to two True statements. With the information given to you, can you think of another third statement that automatically follows from these...