It’s never too late to reinvent yourself.

Imagine someone holds a gun to your head and demands that you tell him what you really wish you were doing in your life. Now imagine he tells you that if you don’t start taking steps toward making that happen, he’ll kill you. He knows where you live, and he’ll be watching.

That scenario is one my favorite scenes in Fight Club.

And thanks to the overwhelming new brain research, we now know that it’s virtually never too late to reinvent yourself. To start something totally new. To learn, even master, something completely different from what you’ve been doing for the past five, ten, forty years.

From my current favorite brain book,The New Brain, Richard Restak puts it this way:

“As recently as only a few years ago, most neuroscientists believed that brain plasticity largely ceased by adolescence or by early adulthood at the latest. At this point the brain became fixed in its structure and function–at least that was the prevailing assumption. But this assumption, too, turned out to be wrong.”

He goes on to talk about how people–regardless of age–can still achieve superior, even expert-level performance in things they haven’t done before.

The more we lear

…excerpt from: headrush.typepad.com…

How I Learned French in One Year || kuro5hin.org…
Riding on the coat-tails of an earlier article about emigrating to other countries, I present to you a small summary of my experience rapidly learning French to pass a standardized test for Canadian immigration. Since I live in the middle of the US, far removed from anything resembling a Francophone environment, I had to resort to various online and offline resources to accomplish my goal, managing to learn enough to score as “advanced” in several categories in just 10 months. Even if you don’t wish to emigrate, this article may be useful, as I go into full detail describing the techniques and methods I used. Or, at the very least, read and be amused.

Apparently, we’re no closer to escaping the age-based generalizations of the pre-Internet age. Despite that, some good info herein.

Creating Passionate Users: If you’re over 35, do you have a clue?
How well do you know your younger audience? If you’re under 35, perhaps pretty well. You share a common trait–having grown up in a world where video games are pervasive. If you’re over 35, though, it gets tricky. (And of course those aren’t hard boundaries, but they’re a good starting point.) If you’re over 35, and you do ANYTHING that could possibly be related to those *under* 35, you might want to make reading Got Game a new year’s resolution.