Brain Dump Weekly #01: Thucydides, Radical Focus, and the Myth of Productivity
In this week’s brain dump: anti-productivity, learning a language like a toddler, and why Thucydides' method of writing war like a plague diagnosis still feels disturbingly modern.
Hi. This is the first real edition of Brain Dump Weekly: where I try to make my scattered curiosity a little less forgettable.
I wrote the concept briefly here. TL;DR: this isn’t about building a second brain. It’s about building a first one that I actually live with.
For week one, I’ve got: a video that made me rethink “productivity”, a woman who learned Norwegian like a toddler, and a historian who predicted modern politics. Let’s go.
Brain Dump Log — from: The Anti-Productivity System That Changed Everything
Watched this one while stuck in TransJakarta, trying to make my brain do something other than scroll. The title sounds clickbaity, but turned out to be a surprisingly grounded take on how real effectiveness isn’t about elaborate productivity setups.
📌 What stuck with me:
“You become the system.”
Notion dashboards, second brains, perfectly sorted to-do lists… He calls them “aesthetic productivity” and says they’re often just avoidance dressed up in good design. I agree.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how easy it is to hide inside “organizing”. The illusion of progress feels satisfying, but at the end of the day, we often organize instead of doing.
He talks about “radical effectiveness” as something you train: not by reading more books on productivity, but by building your cognitive stamina. He swears by dual n-back training (honestly, this is the first time I’ve heard someone recommend that in a non-hustlebro way). It’s brain training that supposedly improves working memory and decision-making. I’m... skeptical, but intrigued. Maybe I’m gonna give it a try.
Interesting point he made: most productivity influencers are full-time content creators. Their “system” is also their product. So of course it looks good. But it might not work for those of us who aren’t monetizing our time-tracking dashboards.
He doesn’t reject tools completely—uses Google Tasks and something called MEM.AI—but he makes it clear: tools are secondary. Skill and clarity come first. He prefers boringly efficient apps, with less maintenance.
You don’t need more tools. You need to get better at showing up. Skill > system. Messy action > polished planning.
There’s also a pro tip he shared that I actually want to try: If you dump a bunch of thoughts or study notes into Google Notebook, apparently you can turn them into a podcast episode you can listen to. While driving, commuting, or spacing out. It’s such a weirdly brilliant low-effort way to review your own notes. I’ve never thought of turning brain dumps into audio, but now I kinda want to test that out for myself. :O
Brain Dump Log — from: The Best Language Learning Video You've Never Watched
Caught this one randomly when procrastinating, clicked it thinking it'd be just another “how to learn X language fast” BS, but it actually good. It's technically about learning Norwegian, but the insights hit anyone trying to learn a language.
📌 What stuck with me:
“If you want those results, you have to go to those extremes.”
No sugarcoating. Just relentless listening, intense repetition. The speaker (Illes) basically treated Norwegian like a full-time job before even moving to Norway. Most people wait until they land in the country and then hope the language will just soak in by osmosis. It won’t. Especially not if the locals speak English.
Also love this: “Kids learn by listening—why don't adults?”
She mimicked the way toddlers learn. Passive input for months. No pressure to speak. Just audio, over and over, till her brain cracked the pattern. Honestly, it reminded me how often we try to "optimize" language learning when we should just shut up and listen more.
There's a line where she goes:
“I didn’t understand anything anyway. I was just listening. All the time.”
That’s not laziness, that’s resilience. Letting the brain stew in a language it doesn't grasp yet, there's something so powerful about tolerating confusion instead of avoiding it.
📌 On memory & vocab retention:
She didn’t use Anki or elaborate flashcards. She just memorized full sentences, over and over. Real context, real pronunciation, real grammar. All in one hit. When you know one passage perfectly, suddenly everything else becomes more noticeable. You can pinpoint what you don’t know.
“You’re not learning the entire language from one text. You’re learning everything you need to know before you go into the jungle.”
Also—reading + listening to the same audiobook? Good idea. Like, truly. She’d read and listen repeatedly till the story lived in her body. Same with shows: watched scenes 3–4 times with diff subtitles, wrote down useful lines, even copied them by hand. Effective.
📌 Motivation = the wind.
“You need to learn when it’s working for you and when it’s not.”
And adjust accordingly. That metaphor is gold. We always expect motivation to carry us, but it’s not a boat. It's just the wind. You still gotta steer.
There’s a meta lesson in here too: She didn’t multitask her methods. No over-customized planners. She picked a few intense strategies and stuck with them. Repetition. Input. Emotional engagement.
and she said:
“Learning full sentences by heart helps you finally speak without stopping every 3 words.”
This really exposes a flaw in how most of us practice speaking—always hesitating, hunting for words. Memorizing sentences = smoother delivery = eventually, fluency.
Honestly, made me question how much I’m actually willing to commit. If I want fluency, am I really giving it enough time and intensity? Or am I just dipping my toe and hoping to swim?
Might have to steal her strategy and go full immersion. No apps, just one story, and listen till I dream in it.
Brain Dump Log — from: Thucydides & Scientific History (Logos x Foreword Library Webinar)
Lately, in an attempt to rebuild my sense of curiosity, I’ve been carving out time each week to watch the Logos x Foreword Library webinars. It’s become a kind of small ritual: laptop on, late evening, at home. Surprisingly calming. And the topics? Way more thought-provoking than I expected.
This week’s session was on Thucydides. Yeah, not exactly light material, but it pulled me in.
📌 What stuck with me:
“Thucydides approached war like a physician describes a plague.”
That line? Wild. The speaker made this compelling parallel: Thucydides didn’t just narrate events—he diagnosed them. He studied human conflict like Hippocrates studied fevers. Political crisis = societal disease. Symptoms, patterns, causes. No divine explanations. No fate. Just human error, endlessly repeated.
And he wrote during a literal pandemic too. Dude was observing both biological and political collapse at the same time. His historical method wasn’t just rational, it was experimental. Full of observations and deductions.
📌 On myth & objectivity:
One thing Thucydides hated? Myth-making. He stripped away all the Homeric glamor. War wasn't heroic. It was chaos, fear, bad decisions. He was brutal about it: no gods, no destiny, just the raw consequences of power and ego.
You can see the DNA of modern realism here, especially IR realism. Power defines truth. States act in self-interest. The Melian Dialogue? Still quoted in defense think-tanks and UN seminars today. Which, honestly, makes me a little uneasy. Because…
📌 History as justification?
Someone raised a good point during Q&A: does this approach risk reducing history into a manual for state power? When you filter out emotion and morality, you end up with a version of the past that's dangerously efficient. Clean logic, no soul.
It reminded me of Nietzsche’s warning about monumental history: when we use the past to glorify power, not understand it. Thucydides wanted to educate, not flatter. But in the wrong hands, his work can become a weapon.
📌 Memory & narrative bias:
Loved this: “We remember the past not as it was, but as it hurt.”
Thucydides was deeply skeptical about human memory. He questioned even eyewitnesses. That alone makes him feel more modern than half of today's pundits. He wrote like someone who understood that history is not just what happened, but how we choose to frame it.
📌 Methods > Morals?
One thing that hit me: he often presented conflicting speeches—opposing viewpoints—without telling the reader which one is “correct”. That’s bold. No editorializing, no moral cue cards. Just: here’s what they said. You decide.
It forces the reader to think. No passive consumption. It’s like a philosophical trap disguised as historiography.
📌 Also: dude predicted us.
He saw how democracies fracture from within. How war erodes language, how truth becomes tactical, and how people justify anything when afraid. Sound familiar?
No idea yet if I’ll write something more structured out of this. But it reminded me why history still matters. Not as nostalgia, but as a way to detect patterns. To read the present like symptoms. Will probably show up again next week. Never thought I’d say that about a Friday night Zoom lecture on a Greek war historian, but here we are. :D
I don’t expect all of this to stick. If they sparked something in you, cool. If not, no worries. This is mostly just me, trying to notice more. See you next week! :D
from Runnilune, still learning.
Written by Raihan Khairunnisa.
Thank you for reading.
If this sparked any useful overthinking, quiet epiphanies, or narrative spirals you didn’t ask for, feel free to fuel the next one with a cup of caffeine. Preferably overpriced. At a café where I pretend to write but mostly observe human absurdity.
No pressure. Just deeply caffeinated gratitude. :D
tags: brain dump weekly, english.