Leisa Michelle

Nerdy Monologues of an Autodidact

The Great Courses on Audible Are the Best Thing to Happen for Autodidacts

by 2 Comments

If you’ve ever tried to teach yourself something outside of school, you’ll know it’s pretty tricky. Obviously, new things are hard to learn. It’s also hard to have the discipline to stick with your new project. But the most difficult part of all often comes before you even embark on your learning adventure: deciding which materials to use.

Let’s say you’re curious about DNA. You took a biology class or two once upon a time, but it’s been a while. The only thing you really remember is that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. So where do you start?

Keep reading…

Life Lessons Learned from the 20th Century’s Greatest Physicist

by Leave a Comment

Richard Feynman was one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. He worked on the Manhattan Project during WWII, helped uncover the cause of NASA’s Challenger tragedy, and received the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum physics. A set of his lectures are available on Youtube – and they’re extremely approachable even for non-physicists.

I first heard about this dude while listening to the Great Courses’ Particle Physics for Non-Physicists. His name kept coming up, so naturally I had to Google him. I discovered that he had published an autobiography based on some conversations he had with a friend. The book is called Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, and I ended up downloading it on Audible.

Keep reading…

38 Books in 12 Months

by Leave a Comment

When I moved to Poland on August 30th, 2015, I decided to make a list of goals for myself. One of them was to read 15 books within the following year. It turns out that I read 38 books. That comes out to 7,942 total pages read or 209 pages per book on average.

Just… why? Why did you do this?

I dropped out of college in January 2015. Lots of factors played into my decision, but the biggest problem I had with university was that I wasn’t learning enough and I wasn’t learning what I wanted. So since dropping out of school, my education has been exclusively in my own hands. If I want to learn new things, I have to consciously set aside the time to do so. It happens that books are my favorite way of learning. Reading is awesome. I do a lot of it.

So without further ado, please enjoy the fun graphs and master list of all the books I read (with the link to the review I wrote of each book, if applicable) presented below.

Keep reading…

Being Like Water – Reflections on Dylan Thomas, Lao Tzu, and Hermann Hesse

by Leave a Comment

This post is a part of my Personal Development Project for May 2016.

Usually when I finish a good or truly awesome book, I’m immediately gripped by the need to write about it. I have to spend a couple hours just pouring out my thoughts and feelings in an Evernote document before I’m able to feel any sort of peace. And actually, it’s not uncommon for me to have to go through this process multiple times before I even finish the book. It doesn’t matter whether the book was a treatise on economics or religion, or was a Shakespearean play or a YA novel. I always have something to say or note or think about afterward.

But most unusually, when I finished Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, I didn’t have anything to say. I didn’t have anything that I actively wanted to write about. I felt the weight of the work and was consumed in simply remembering it for days on end, but I didn’t actually feel that prickling need to write about it or record my thoughts. It was bizarre. But I just trusted myself and went with it, assuming I would never write anything about Steppenwolf and how much it affected me (I wanted to say “how it changed my life”, but that’s a bit too dramatic).

While on a walk the other day though, I realized there is indeed something I really want to say. And the novel Steppenwolf is largely responsible for the insight that I had:

We can’t alter or control the world as much as we would like to.

It’s just not possible. And it’s okay. Good, even. If we were all-powerful, if we had the insight or ability to make everything “just work right”, then we’d miss out on a lot of beautiful things in life. We’d miss out on community and camaraderie and love. These things require trust, vulnerability, and a lack of control.

Keep reading…

Who I Am in the Words of Others

by Leave a Comment

This post is a part of my Personal Development Project for May 2016.

Thomas Aquinas famously said, “The things that we love tell us what we are.”

Below is a collection of 5 of my favorite quotes and sayings. Or rather, here is who I am in the words of others.

Thus those are not termed 'contemplatives' who merely contemplate, but they who devote their lives to contemplation.

-- St. Thomas Aquinas

This quote comes from Thomas Aquinas’s On Prayer and the Contemplative Life, one of my favorite books.

The reason this saying resonates with me so much is because it deals with one’s essence or one’s being. Here there is a distinction between raw action and consuming action.

Often times I get a bit frustrated when I hear people say, “I just love psychology. It’s so fascinating!” And when I press further about what they’ve read or what they know or what exactly they find interesting, the person turns out to not know a thing about psychology. So it’s clear to me that they don’t love psychology itself, but the idea of psychology.

Keep reading…