Yesterday I was watching this TEDx video by Mark Rober about something he called “The Super Mario Effect”. It is a great sharing of tricking your brain (and others’) into learning (hard) things, by “Focusing on the Princess and not the pits, to stick with a task and learn more”. I’d recommend everyone to watch the video to learn more about this “effect”, but this post isn’t supposed to talk about it. What I want to point out from the video is this experiment that Mark showed at the beginning of his talk.
Though I am not a hard-core Manga or Anime fan, I’m a big fan of Naruto. When I was a kid, I could only watch a few episodes that were broadcast-ed on TV, and that was one of my favorite shows at the time. Unfortunately, the show was cut off (from Vietnamese TV) after about 200 episodes, so I could not watch the rest of Naruto and the whole Naruto Shippuden. I tried reading some manga online, too, but my English was pretty bad, so I could not understand everything.
A few days ago, while we were having dinner, my wife suddenly told me:
“You know, almost everyone I know has some sort of talents. It’s just me that don’t.”
As you may have imagined, I didn’t expect to hear anything like that at all, so I responded with a question:
“What kind of talents are you talking about?”
“Well, all those kinds of arts or science things: some are good at singing, some at drawing, others at math, etc. I just don’t feel like I’m really good at anything.”