Edwin Hawkeswood

I am very lucky to have what I have. Father. Educator. Stage Manager. Canadian.

[AI Panda @AIPandaX]

A guy was ready to drop $1,500 on a new OLED TV because his 3-year-old Smart TV was freezing up and took 5 seconds just to respond to the remote.

He unplugged it. Deleted old apps. Cleared the cache. The lag kept coming back.

He went to Best Buy to get a replacement.

The home theater installer in the blue shirt stopped him: "Before you spend a grand, let me show you something."

He grabbed a remote and shook his head.

"There are 8 hidden tracking settings throttling your TV's processor right now. Manufacturers turn them all on by default. Nobody tells you they exist. Let's fix this."

Here's what he showed him in the next 8 minutes. 🧵

[Edwin Hawkeswood @EdwinHawk]

@dehallstrom @MLBcathedrals @puckandrally Do tell.

[Edwin Hawkeswood @EdwinHawk]

@jjthomas06 It is not called “NHL Finals.”

[Edwin Hawkeswood @EdwinHawk]

@DannyBoySpartan @jjthomas06 ‘68.

[Edwin Hawkeswood @EdwinHawk]

@AutismCapital Shouldn’t it be a ground rule triple?

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A community college professor taught the same study skills lecture for 30 years, and the video quietly became one of the most watched educational recordings on the internet.

His name is Marty Lobdell. He spent his career as a psychology professor watching students fail not because they were lazy, but because nobody had ever taught them how their brain actually works under the pressure of learning something hard.

The lecture is called "Study Less Study Smart." Over 10 million views. Passed around in Reddit threads, Discord servers, and university study groups for over a decade. And the core insight buried inside it has been sitting in cognitive psychology research for years, waiting for someone to explain it in plain language.

Here is the framework that completely changed how I think about effort.

Your brain does not sustain focus the way you think it does. Studies tracking real students found that the average learner hits a wall somewhere between 25 and 30 minutes.

After that, efficiency doesn't just decline. It collapses. You're still sitting at your desk, still looking at the page, but almost nothing is going in.

Lobdell illustrated this with a student he knew personally. She set a goal of studying 6 hours a night, 5 nights a week, to pull herself out of academic probation. Thirty hours of studying per week. She failed every single class that quarter.

She wasn't failing because she lacked effort. She was failing because she had confused time spent near books with time spent actually learning. The 25-minute crash hit her at 6:30pm every night. She spent the next five and a half hours sitting in the wreckage of her own focus and calling it studying.

The fix sounds almost too simple. The moment you feel the slide, stop. Take five minutes. Do something that actually gives you a small reward. Then go back. That five-minute reset returns you to near full efficiency. Across a six-hour window, the difference is not marginal. It is the difference between thirty minutes of real learning and five and a half hours of it.

The second thing he taught destroyed something I had believed about how memory actually works.

Highlighting feels productive. Going back over your notes and recognizing everything feels like knowing. But recognition and recollection are two completely different cognitive processes, and your brain is very good at making you confuse them.

You can see something you've read before and feel completely certain you understand it, even when you couldn't reconstruct a single sentence from memory if the page were blank.

He proved this live in the room. He read 13 random letters to his audience. Almost nobody could recall them. Then he rearranged the same 13 letters into two words: Happy Thursday. The whole room got all 13 without effort.

Same letters. Same count. The only thing that changed was meaning.

The brain stores meaning. Not repetition. The moment new information connects to something you already understand, the retention changes entirely.

This is what the cognitive psychology literature calls elaborative encoding, and it is the mechanism underneath every effective study technique.

The third principle was the one that hit me hardest, and the one almost nobody applies.

Lobdell cited research showing that 80 percent of your study time should be spent in active recitation, not passive reading. Close the material. Say it back in your own words.

Teach it to someone else, or to an empty chair if no one is around. The struggle of retrieval is where the actual learning happens. Reading your notes again is watching someone else do the work.

His parting line has stayed with me longer than almost anything else I have read about learning.

He told the room that if what he shared didn't change their behavior, they hadn't actually learned it. It would just live in their heads as something they had heard once and felt good about.

He was right. And most people leave every lecture exactly like that.

The students who remember everything aren't putting in more hours.

They stopped confusing the feeling of studying with the fact of it.

[internet hall of fame @InternetH0F]

South Park creators gave the greatest lesson on storytelling ever

[Álvaro J @jota_snchez]

En 2019, el profesor del MIT Patrick Winston dio una conferencia legendaria de 1 hora llamada “How to Speak”.

Tiene más de 18 millones de visualizaciones por una razón.

Sus frameworks:

· Tus ideas son como tus hijos
· La regla de los 5 minutos para presentaciones de trabajo
· Por qué los chistes fallan al principio

15 lecciones sobre comunicación:

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

This is an absolute masterclass from MIT on how to speak

[Yasmine Khosrowshahi @yasminekho]

In 2018, Stanford professor Matt Abrahams gave a masterclass on why most people fail to communicate well.

He broke down:

- The structure every message needs
- Why audiences stop listening
- The psychology of attention

15 lessons that'll make your communication unforgettable:

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

Jerry Seinfeld just captured the paradox of artificial intelligence in a single, perfectly timed observation.

[Defiant L’s @DefiantLs]

"How to destroy society without firing a single bullet."

[Edwin Hawkeswood @EdwinHawk]

@TristinHopper @erdocAA *Biblical

[Edwin Hawkeswood @EdwinHawk]

@LeoRautins Andy played great.

[David Perell @david_perell]

Mitch Albom is famous for writing Tuesdays with Morrie, one of the best-selling memoirs of all time.

His books have sold more than 40 million copies, and I dare you to walk through a major airport without seeing one of his books. You can't do it!

He's everywhere... and this interview is a tell-all on what he's learned in 45 years of writing.

Timestamps:

00:36 Serve the story, always
05:56 Slow parts fast, fast parts slow
07:48 Theme first, then the story
12:28 What makes a good premise?
22:34 Building a writing routine
30:24 Mitch's approach to storytelling
44:08 Write for the reader, not yourself
48:10 Finding the story in everything
59:09 Good stories need good rhythm
1:03:39 How Mitch reads
1:12:24 The richness of Biblical writing
1:14:14 A funny story about a rabbi
1:32:55 Loss of life vs. loss of love

I've shared the full conversation with @MitchAlbom below — who is one of the best storytellers I've ever met.

You can watch the full thing here, or if you prefer to watch on YouTube / listen on Spotify or Apple, check out the links in the reply tweets.

[Edwin Hawkeswood @EdwinHawk]

@GuntherEagleman In the teargas section, the author is missing a capital “B.”

[Edwin Hawkeswood @EdwinHawk]

@CEdwardsTSN @RodSmithTSN @rubedirector @Your_Producer Safe travels.

[Wolf of X @WolfofX]

Changing the World One Idea at a Time..

Let's see what y'all feel and say at the end of this thread 🧵👇

1. Concentrated solar power (CSP) plant Cerro Dominador in Chile’s Atacama Desert

[Edwin Hawkeswood @EdwinHawk]

@CEdwardsTSN Fantastic. Good for her. Bravo…be proud.