The Benefits of Failing at French
20th July 2014
Every now and again, something in the New York Times is worth reading. This is one of those rare events.
In the last few years, unable to hold a list of just four grocery items in my head, I’d begun to fret a bit over my literal state of mind. So to reassure myself that nothing was amiss, just before tackling French I took a cognitive assessment called CNS Vital Signs, recommended by a psychologist friend. The results were anything but reassuring: I scored below average for my age group in nearly all of the categories, notably landing in the bottom 10th percentile on the composite memory test and in the lowest 5 percent on the visual memory test.
And yet he is paid to write for the New York Times. ’nuff said.
Seriously, this is yet another recommendation for the position staked out by Scott Adams in his life-changing book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. I recommend it wholeheartedly.