Apologies for being off this medium for a long time. I was really busy. However, the summer holiday is over and the kids I was coaching are off to school again so I have a bit of time on my hands. Today, I wish to consider emotions. Anger in particular.
You know its personal whenever we are on this medium. I will proceed to narrate some experiences I have had with my clients recently. Some event happened that left one of my clients really upset. She was more upset because apologies were not coming from the right quarters, namely me.
Now this client had a friend who was also one of my clients. So after some interactions with her friend, this client of mine told me I was supposed have an appointment with her friend which was earlier cancelled. She said her friend told her, "I should come." Upon getting to her friend's place, I found out it was not true. The previous cancellation still held. Wow! It was sunny that day, I had spent money getting to her friend's place and to make things worse, she was not picking her calls.
That she was probably not with her phone did not come to mind. I just felt so angry and wanted to tell her I was angry. I even felt she did it on purpose. Hmmm....Thank God she did not pick. I then felt like sending a text but thought it would not be wise to do so as I would likely regret my actions later when I would have lost the client.
Moral of the story? Always keep anger in check. If it seems really hot, go through the Count from 1 to 10 therapy or just leave the area completely for a while far from where the source of the anger is located. Anger, when its not well handled can mess a lot of things up. Do not allow anger rest or make its residence in your heart. It wrecks 100% all the time when its not well handled.
Cheers.
Friday, October 2, 2015
Thursday, July 23, 2015
MY FIRST LETTER TO MY FIRST ANGEL INVESTOR
Hey dear reader!
I wish to apologize for updating my blog irregularly. I know...it sounds like the upteenth time I am saying that right? I sincerely apologize!!! [winks*] This as the title suggests is my first post on a new blog I created a long time ago but only started recently posting and I wish to share it. This can also be read at http://gainfullyselfemployed.blogspot.com . The names are real but that does not matter for now. The aim of this blog is to make you see the fulfilment in following your GOD-GIVEN DREAMS to WHEREVER they LEAD! TRUST YOUR DREAMS! Once again, I welcome you on-board this Entrepreneurial journey!
Good afternoon sir,
I hope this mail meets you well. I planned to send this mail earlier in the morning but some events preceded it so I decided to send it now.
This morning I returned to the area where I met the Muslim boys I told you about that were very interested but could not join because they were on Ramadan fasting.
However, I did not meet them. It seemed as if they had packed away from there; I'll keep checking though from time to time. At the same location I met some young boys, Ezekiel and Samuel, brothers who were in Senior class in a secondary school nearby.
I encouraged them to come for classes though they said their school was about to start classes for them in August. I promised them that I would not teach them the same things they were taught but would complement whatever classes they were going to receive from school. So they would get back to me after telling their Mother today.
Prepare for this one....As I got back to the plaza where the classes hold, I just noticed a small girl, smiling and running around the corner I was about to turn at. It didn't strike me to say anything since she just passed me by, but as I entered the complex I noticed she was leaning against the burglary proof on the other side, just smiling endlessly. I quickly started a chat with her and found her name is Favour she was in primary 1, and her Mom used to sell food down the road nearby.
So we both went to see her Mom. After we talked she said she will talk to her husband and that only yesterday they had been considering taking their two children to lessons. On the pricing, she said they could afford N2,000 per child per month. I agreed to that. The next step is to get her husband's consent and we can start.
I am still going round the stores on the plaza itself to see if I could get more interested guardians or parents or even people who have children living around them who could use the holidays well.
I believe strongly we are off to a good start by God's GRACE.
I must confess, whenever, I have a chat or conversation with you sir, ideas I never considered come, but what thrills me more is the way God orchestrates events, people and places to just make the ideas happen. I believe too it is because the ideas came from Him and because of His Mercy.
Thank you for always being available to hear whatever I have to say and to proffer solutions all the time.
Charles.
Thursday, July 2, 2015
Favour Learning Her ABCs: A Strong Case for Intensive Hands-On Education of The Female Child in Nigeria, Africa and the World at Large!
Hi dear reader!
I know it has been a long time since we interacted on this forum. I have been busy trying to setup a business and all that stuff. Here is one of the Benefactors of that Business, little Favour. She is feature in the video you are about to watch. You can see she needs a lot of help and assistance. With the right effort, I trust she will get there. Till next time enjoy.
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Knowing What You Were Built For
Some questions just have to be answered for Life to have meaning. The earlier these questions are answered, the better. It is not unusual to find child prodigies expressing raw talent at a very young age.
This inner gifting takes shape as the child becomes a teenager often following a path that was orchestrated by an older mentor or guide.
This process of self-discovery is easier when it is initiated by parents or by a third party with the consent of the parents. However, this process may either be truncated or the environment might just not present the opportunities for the child to discover herself or himself.
The result? A society full of people who are just doing jobs or businesses because they need to be able to pay the bills and put food on the table. A good number of them are dissatisfied with what they call a job. Their daily routine is a grind, yet most of them know deep inside, this is not what they were built for. They struggle with their fundamental chores at work.
Once in a while their eyes light up in excitement when they come across a product or service rendered by someone who has turned a talent that they themselves have into a revenue-generating skill. They tell themselves, "I can do that!" A friend on facebook does an art work and gets 69 likes in less that 2 minutes of posting and they go "meeeeeeeeehn!"
Two things seem to stand in their way. Firstly, their current dissatisfying career does not afford them the luxury of time to develop their talent into a skill that can add value to potential clients. Secondly, they fear that this natural talent of theirs may not be able to bring in enough money to take care of the needs that their jobs manage to cater for.
This article seeks to answer the questions of those who for some reasons other than the one listed above do not know what their talent is. This class of people say stuff like "I enjoy doing so many things" or "There is nothing I do that I really love"
The discovery process will call for a lot of patience and a very observant attitude. Whatever talent it is that answers ALL these questions at the same time is worth pursuing. Yes you may need to save some money from your current job to be able to start small but you need to start. Why? That's because it is the ONLY thing you will enjoy doing. Who does not want stuff they enjoy doing? Okay here are some of the questions that can tell you what you were built for.
1. What is it that once you start doing it, you enjoy yourself?
Time just seems to come to a halt. Even you cannot explain it. It is like piece of cake for you but an uphill task for some others. You encounter challenges while doing it but the solutions seem to be within reach all the time even though it may take a while.
2. What is that You can willingly do even if you were sure you will not get paid for it? Yes this heavily contrasts with your current job where you look forward to the pay cheque at the end of the month or whatever agreed contract period.
3. What value adding activity makes it look like whatever time you spend in doing it is NOT ever enough?
You start on time or even before time but for some reason it looks like The Creator suddenly fast forwards time to ensure the finishing time comes sooner than expected? The illusion that time flies!
4. What exercise can make you forgo food for hours and in extreme cases days? All discomfort seems to vanish and hunger flies out the window once you are engaged in delivering this gift. You need to take note. That is your domain...that is YOUR LAND!
5. What activity leaves you tired but satisfied and leaves the recipients of the benefits of such activity even more satisfied? It is your perfect getaway. You maybe tired from the day's work but once you start, you just go on and on and on that a fully loaded machine gun connected to an inexhaustible magazine of armoury! Someone may have made you angry previously but this activity seems to make you forget in a hurry whatever the issue was!
6. What exercise will you continue doing even after the client insults you midway? You know one of those days when the client is upset and transfers the aggression on you for no reason other than that you were the first person they cam across since the occurrence of the annoying event.
7. Which activity seems to energize you to engage in it and leaves you giving the client more than the value agreed on? You just do not want to stop and sometimes get depressed whenever you have to stop. When your client does not see your passion or shares the same value you seem to get visibly upset. Note this is different from times when the client is not enjoying your mode of gift delivery. At such times you need to find out what it is you are not doing right and fix it for better customer satisfaction.
Now when you find that gift or exercise or activity or skill, follow it! Develop it! One day you will get enough momentum and money to switch to pursuing it passionately and totally neglect everything else that competes for your time. You will succeed. I know it!
Monday, March 9, 2015
What Really Makes People Disruptive?
Here is my pick for today. It from one of my favourite authors on inc.
Malcolm Gladwell on What Really Makes People Disruptive
The best-selling author says it's not tech, money, or brainpower. Successful disrupters all tend to have one huge precondition that's far more important.
By Jill Krasny
Staff writer, Inc.@jillkrasny
When people talk about what it takes to transform a field or a world, they leave out one crucial component, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell told the audience at the World Business Forum on Tuesday. "What's really behind it?" he said. "What are the preconditions that make that kind of change possible?"
Too often, he said, the list of explanations is short. "We talk about the importance of technology and knowledge and resources, having the kind of money to make it happen," he said, "but we don't talk about frame of mind--attitude. The kinds of attitudes that lie behind provocateurs."
Using the powerful story of shipping magnate Malcolm McLean, Gladwell revealed how having the right attitude is critical to effecting great change. As Gladwell explained, McLean was the sort of guy who didn't show many emotions. He grew up in poverty during the Great Depression and dropped out of school at age 16. But when he went to work at a gas station and learned he could earn $5 a week just for shipping in oil from far away, he volunteered to help his boss, and this changed the course of history.
McLean's fuel-trucking gig led him to become something of a leader in the trucking space. He was the first guy to suggest using diesel fuel and the first guy to find the most efficient driving routes. He was also the first guy to spend 20 years thinking of ways to make shipping more efficient.
Here was the problem: Shipping took forever, and so did loading and unloading the cargo. In fact, it cost so much to ship that many multinational companies that could have gotten rich from expansion didn't even bother with it, said Gladwell. On top of that, docks were often controlled by organized crime or run through unions, and there were problems of theft to contend with.
By the mid-1950s, when McLean was already a household name among American truckers, he decided to switch industries. He sold off his trucking business, and after a few false starts came up with the idea of making the back of a trailer retractable so the cargo could easily load on and off a ship. In April 1956, the plan worked, and the free and inexpensive movement of freight from one country to the next was born.
So what made McLean such a rousing success? He certainly wasn't educated, and he knew next to nothing about shipping. McLean had a background in trucking, which was considered a whole separate field in those days. But McLean did have three things going for him, Gladwell said, something Steve Jobs and other visionaries had in spades.
The Beauty of Being Disagreeable
Everyone thought McLean was crazy. He sold off a successful business, and the idea of using containers in shipping wasn't new--people had been experimenting with them for 30 years and failed miserably. Containers were so heavy they drove up costs, plus they were cumbersome to load. Longshoremen hated the very idea of them. It didn't help matters that McLean had "mortgaged himself to the hilt," Gladwell said, or that shipping was a capital-intensive business, which trucking was not. But McLean, like most underdogs, could not have cared less. He was "completely indifferent to what people said about him," Gladwell said, which is "the first and foundational fact to understand these disrupters. They are what psychologists call disagreeable--they do not require the approval of their peers in order to do what they think is correct."
Reframing the Problem
Everyone also thought McLean wasn't seeing the whole picture. People who worked in trucking, railways, and docks had all kinds of ideas on how to solve the problem. Trouble was, they were the ones who could not see the whole picture. They thought of solutions in terms of how it would make their jobs easier, only reframing individual components. Conversely, McLean wanted to reframe it all. As Gladwell explained, people said he couldn't design containers that were too heavy, so he redesigned the connection between the trucks and the box. People said he needed a crane to lift the containers onto the dock, so he thought of a railway line to help the cranes move up and down the ship.
"Successful disrupters are people who are capable of an active imagination," said Gladwell. "They begin reimagining their world by reframing the problem in a way no one had framed it before."
Removing Constraints
When longshoremen saw what was happening, they went on strike. McLean was fine with that. He figured he could use the time to retrofit his ships and bring in larger containers. However, if he wanted to use heavier containers, he was going to need a stronger crane. So he went to a nearby crane company and asked for one that could carry about 35,000 pounds--also, he would need it in 90 days. The company flat-out told him no.
Undeterred, McLean got to thinking. What if a lumber company's crane maker could help? After all, they used cranes and carried large loads all the time. It seemed like a good idea, so McLean flew to Washington State to find out. "Can you build me a crane?" he asked the crane maker. "Sure," they said. "And can I have it in 90 days?" The crane maker told him he wouldn't even have to wait--they would send one right over that afternoon. "You could see by reframing the problem, that frees him up," said Gladwell. But why insist on getting the crane in 90 days?
Well, that reason is simple. Like a certain entrepreneur who had just seen the graphical user interface at Xerox Parc and wanted to build one of his own, McLean wanted to get it done, now. It had nothing to do with his vision or insight. Not even his brains or resources, said Gladwell.
Like Steve Jobs, McLean believed in his vision. What set him apart was not what was in his head or his pocket--"it was in his heart," said Gladwell. Thanks. I hope you enjoyed the read. Please feel free to drop comments on what we could do here to improve and we will act on them.
Malcolm Gladwell on What Really Makes People Disruptive
The best-selling author says it's not tech, money, or brainpower. Successful disrupters all tend to have one huge precondition that's far more important.
By Jill Krasny
Staff writer, Inc.@jillkrasny
When people talk about what it takes to transform a field or a world, they leave out one crucial component, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell told the audience at the World Business Forum on Tuesday. "What's really behind it?" he said. "What are the preconditions that make that kind of change possible?"
Too often, he said, the list of explanations is short. "We talk about the importance of technology and knowledge and resources, having the kind of money to make it happen," he said, "but we don't talk about frame of mind--attitude. The kinds of attitudes that lie behind provocateurs."
Using the powerful story of shipping magnate Malcolm McLean, Gladwell revealed how having the right attitude is critical to effecting great change. As Gladwell explained, McLean was the sort of guy who didn't show many emotions. He grew up in poverty during the Great Depression and dropped out of school at age 16. But when he went to work at a gas station and learned he could earn $5 a week just for shipping in oil from far away, he volunteered to help his boss, and this changed the course of history.
McLean's fuel-trucking gig led him to become something of a leader in the trucking space. He was the first guy to suggest using diesel fuel and the first guy to find the most efficient driving routes. He was also the first guy to spend 20 years thinking of ways to make shipping more efficient.
Here was the problem: Shipping took forever, and so did loading and unloading the cargo. In fact, it cost so much to ship that many multinational companies that could have gotten rich from expansion didn't even bother with it, said Gladwell. On top of that, docks were often controlled by organized crime or run through unions, and there were problems of theft to contend with.
By the mid-1950s, when McLean was already a household name among American truckers, he decided to switch industries. He sold off his trucking business, and after a few false starts came up with the idea of making the back of a trailer retractable so the cargo could easily load on and off a ship. In April 1956, the plan worked, and the free and inexpensive movement of freight from one country to the next was born.
So what made McLean such a rousing success? He certainly wasn't educated, and he knew next to nothing about shipping. McLean had a background in trucking, which was considered a whole separate field in those days. But McLean did have three things going for him, Gladwell said, something Steve Jobs and other visionaries had in spades.
The Beauty of Being Disagreeable
Everyone thought McLean was crazy. He sold off a successful business, and the idea of using containers in shipping wasn't new--people had been experimenting with them for 30 years and failed miserably. Containers were so heavy they drove up costs, plus they were cumbersome to load. Longshoremen hated the very idea of them. It didn't help matters that McLean had "mortgaged himself to the hilt," Gladwell said, or that shipping was a capital-intensive business, which trucking was not. But McLean, like most underdogs, could not have cared less. He was "completely indifferent to what people said about him," Gladwell said, which is "the first and foundational fact to understand these disrupters. They are what psychologists call disagreeable--they do not require the approval of their peers in order to do what they think is correct."
Reframing the Problem
Everyone also thought McLean wasn't seeing the whole picture. People who worked in trucking, railways, and docks had all kinds of ideas on how to solve the problem. Trouble was, they were the ones who could not see the whole picture. They thought of solutions in terms of how it would make their jobs easier, only reframing individual components. Conversely, McLean wanted to reframe it all. As Gladwell explained, people said he couldn't design containers that were too heavy, so he redesigned the connection between the trucks and the box. People said he needed a crane to lift the containers onto the dock, so he thought of a railway line to help the cranes move up and down the ship.
"Successful disrupters are people who are capable of an active imagination," said Gladwell. "They begin reimagining their world by reframing the problem in a way no one had framed it before."
Removing Constraints
When longshoremen saw what was happening, they went on strike. McLean was fine with that. He figured he could use the time to retrofit his ships and bring in larger containers. However, if he wanted to use heavier containers, he was going to need a stronger crane. So he went to a nearby crane company and asked for one that could carry about 35,000 pounds--also, he would need it in 90 days. The company flat-out told him no.
Undeterred, McLean got to thinking. What if a lumber company's crane maker could help? After all, they used cranes and carried large loads all the time. It seemed like a good idea, so McLean flew to Washington State to find out. "Can you build me a crane?" he asked the crane maker. "Sure," they said. "And can I have it in 90 days?" The crane maker told him he wouldn't even have to wait--they would send one right over that afternoon. "You could see by reframing the problem, that frees him up," said Gladwell. But why insist on getting the crane in 90 days?
Well, that reason is simple. Like a certain entrepreneur who had just seen the graphical user interface at Xerox Parc and wanted to build one of his own, McLean wanted to get it done, now. It had nothing to do with his vision or insight. Not even his brains or resources, said Gladwell.
Like Steve Jobs, McLean believed in his vision. What set him apart was not what was in his head or his pocket--"it was in his heart," said Gladwell. Thanks. I hope you enjoyed the read. Please feel free to drop comments on what we could do here to improve and we will act on them.
Thursday, February 19, 2015
20-Year-Old Hunter S. Thompson’s Superb Advice on How to Find Your Purpose and Live a Meaningful Life
by Maria Popova
As it appeared from Brain pickings website.
“It is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it.”
As a hopeless lover of both letters and famous advice, I was delighted to discover a letter 20-year-old Hunter S. Thompson — gonzo journalism godfather, pundit of media politics, dark philosopher — penned to his friend Hume Logan in 1958. Found in Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience (public library | IndieBound) — the aptly titled, superb collection based on Shaun Usher’s indispensable website of the same name — the letter is an exquisite addition to luminaries’ reflections on the meaning of life, speaking to what it really means to find your purpose.
Cautious that “all advice can only be a product of the man who gives it” — a caveat other literary legends have stressed with varying degrees of irreverence — Thompson begins with a necessary disclaimer about the very notion of advice-giving:
To give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania. To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal — to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction is something only a fool would take upon himself.
And yet he honors his friend’s request, turning to Shakespeare for an anchor of his own advice:
“To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles…”
And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you’ve ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don’t see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect — between the two things I’ve mentioned: the floating or the swimming.
He acknowledges the obvious question of why not take the path of least resistance and float aimlessly, then counters it:
The answer — and, in a sense, the tragedy of life — is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you.
Touching on the same notion that William Gibson termed “personal micro-culture,” Austin Kleon captured in asserting that “you are the mashup of what you let into your life,” and Paula Scher articulated so succinctly in speaking of the combinatorial nature of our creativity, Thompson writes:
Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.
So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?
The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all, or not with tangible goals, anyway. It would take reams of paper to develop this subject to fulfillment. God only knows how many books have been written on “the meaning of man” and that sort of thing, and god only knows how many people have pondered the subject. (I use the term “god only knows” purely as an expression.)* There’s very little sense in my trying to give it up to you in the proverbial nutshell, because I’m the first to admit my absolute lack of qualifications for reducing the meaning of life to one or two paragraphs.
Resolving to steer clear of the word “existentialism,” Thompson nonetheless strongly urges his friend to read Sartre’s Nothingness and the anthology Existentialism: From Dostoyevsky to Sartre, then admonishes against succumbing to faulty definitions of success at the expense of finding one’s own purpose:
To put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.
But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors—but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires—including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.
As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal) he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires).
In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life — the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.
Noting that his friend had thus far lived “a vertical rather than horizontal existence,” Thompson acknowledges the challenge of this choice but admonishes that however difficult, the choice must be made or else it melts away into those default modes of society:
A man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance. So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life. But you say, “I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.”
And there’s the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don’t know—is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by DECIDING TO LOOK, you go a long way toward making the choice.
He ends by returning to his original disclaimer by reiterating that rather than a prescription for living, his “advice” is merely a reminder that how and what we choose — choices we’re in danger of forgetting even exist — shapes the course and experience of our lives:
I’m not trying to send you out “on the road” in search of Valhalla, but merely pointing out that it is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. There is more to it than that — no one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life.
Both reflecting and supporting Usher’s heartening echelon of independent online scholarship and journalism at the intersection of the editorial and the curatorial, Letters of Note is brimming with other such timeless treasures from such diverse icons and Brain Pickings favorites as E. B. White, Virginia Woolf, Ursula Nordstrom, Nick Cave, Ray Bradbury, Amelia Earhart, Galileo Galilei, and more.
As it appeared from Brain pickings website.
“It is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it.”
As a hopeless lover of both letters and famous advice, I was delighted to discover a letter 20-year-old Hunter S. Thompson — gonzo journalism godfather, pundit of media politics, dark philosopher — penned to his friend Hume Logan in 1958. Found in Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience (public library | IndieBound) — the aptly titled, superb collection based on Shaun Usher’s indispensable website of the same name — the letter is an exquisite addition to luminaries’ reflections on the meaning of life, speaking to what it really means to find your purpose.
Cautious that “all advice can only be a product of the man who gives it” — a caveat other literary legends have stressed with varying degrees of irreverence — Thompson begins with a necessary disclaimer about the very notion of advice-giving:
To give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania. To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal — to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction is something only a fool would take upon himself.
And yet he honors his friend’s request, turning to Shakespeare for an anchor of his own advice:
“To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles…”
And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you’ve ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don’t see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect — between the two things I’ve mentioned: the floating or the swimming.
He acknowledges the obvious question of why not take the path of least resistance and float aimlessly, then counters it:
The answer — and, in a sense, the tragedy of life — is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you.
Touching on the same notion that William Gibson termed “personal micro-culture,” Austin Kleon captured in asserting that “you are the mashup of what you let into your life,” and Paula Scher articulated so succinctly in speaking of the combinatorial nature of our creativity, Thompson writes:
Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.
So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?
The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all, or not with tangible goals, anyway. It would take reams of paper to develop this subject to fulfillment. God only knows how many books have been written on “the meaning of man” and that sort of thing, and god only knows how many people have pondered the subject. (I use the term “god only knows” purely as an expression.)* There’s very little sense in my trying to give it up to you in the proverbial nutshell, because I’m the first to admit my absolute lack of qualifications for reducing the meaning of life to one or two paragraphs.
Resolving to steer clear of the word “existentialism,” Thompson nonetheless strongly urges his friend to read Sartre’s Nothingness and the anthology Existentialism: From Dostoyevsky to Sartre, then admonishes against succumbing to faulty definitions of success at the expense of finding one’s own purpose:
To put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.
But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors—but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires—including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.
As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal) he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires).
In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life — the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.
Noting that his friend had thus far lived “a vertical rather than horizontal existence,” Thompson acknowledges the challenge of this choice but admonishes that however difficult, the choice must be made or else it melts away into those default modes of society:
A man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance. So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life. But you say, “I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.”
And there’s the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don’t know—is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by DECIDING TO LOOK, you go a long way toward making the choice.
He ends by returning to his original disclaimer by reiterating that rather than a prescription for living, his “advice” is merely a reminder that how and what we choose — choices we’re in danger of forgetting even exist — shapes the course and experience of our lives:
I’m not trying to send you out “on the road” in search of Valhalla, but merely pointing out that it is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. There is more to it than that — no one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life.
Both reflecting and supporting Usher’s heartening echelon of independent online scholarship and journalism at the intersection of the editorial and the curatorial, Letters of Note is brimming with other such timeless treasures from such diverse icons and Brain Pickings favorites as E. B. White, Virginia Woolf, Ursula Nordstrom, Nick Cave, Ray Bradbury, Amelia Earhart, Galileo Galilei, and more.
Saturday, February 14, 2015
The Secret to Learning Anything: Albert Einstein's Advice to His Son
Hey dear! You want to know what I just discovered? Read it below in this interestingly revealing article by Maria of Brain pickings blog. Do not forget to make a donation while you are there too. Cheers!
“That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.”
With Father’s Day around the corner, here comes a fine addition to history’s greatest letters of fatherly advice from none other than Albert Einstein — brilliant physicist, proponent of peace, debater of science and spirituality, champion of kindness — who was no stranger to dispensing epistolary empowerment to young minds.
In 1915, aged thirty-six, Einstein was living in wartorn Berlin, while his estranged wife, Mileva, and their two sons, Hans Albert Einstein and Eduard “Tete” Einstein, lived in comparatively safe Vienna. On November 4 of that year, having just completed the two-page masterpiece that would catapult him into international celebrity and historical glory, his theory of general relativity, Einstein sent 11-year-old Hans Albert the following letter, found in Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children (public library) — the same wonderful anthology that gave us some of history’s greatest motherly advice, Benjamin Rush’s wisdom on travel and life, and Sherwood Anderson’s counsel on the creative life. Einstein, who takes palpable pride in his intellectual accomplishments, speaks to the rhythms of creative absorption as the fuel for the internal engine of learning:
My dear Albert,
Yesterday I received your dear letter and was very happy with it. I was already afraid you wouldn’t write to me at all any more. You told me when I was in Zurich, that it is awkward for you when I come to Zurich. Therefore I think it is better if we get together in a different place, where nobody will interfere with our comfort. I will in any case urge that each year we spend a whole month together, so that you see that you have a father who is fond of you and who loves you. You can also learn many good and beautiful things from me, something another cannot as easily offer you. What I have achieved through such a lot of strenuous work shall not only be there for strangers but especially for my own boys. These days I have completed one of the most beautiful works of my life, when you are bigger, I will tell you about it.
I am very pleased that you find joy with the piano. This and carpentry are in my opinion for your age the best pursuits, better even than school. Because those are things which fit a young person such as you very well. Mainly play the things on the piano which please you, even if the teacher does not assign those. That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes. I am sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget about the noon meal. . . .
Be with Tete kissed by your
Papa.
Regards to Mama.
“That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.”
With Father’s Day around the corner, here comes a fine addition to history’s greatest letters of fatherly advice from none other than Albert Einstein — brilliant physicist, proponent of peace, debater of science and spirituality, champion of kindness — who was no stranger to dispensing epistolary empowerment to young minds.
In 1915, aged thirty-six, Einstein was living in wartorn Berlin, while his estranged wife, Mileva, and their two sons, Hans Albert Einstein and Eduard “Tete” Einstein, lived in comparatively safe Vienna. On November 4 of that year, having just completed the two-page masterpiece that would catapult him into international celebrity and historical glory, his theory of general relativity, Einstein sent 11-year-old Hans Albert the following letter, found in Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children (public library) — the same wonderful anthology that gave us some of history’s greatest motherly advice, Benjamin Rush’s wisdom on travel and life, and Sherwood Anderson’s counsel on the creative life. Einstein, who takes palpable pride in his intellectual accomplishments, speaks to the rhythms of creative absorption as the fuel for the internal engine of learning:
My dear Albert,
Yesterday I received your dear letter and was very happy with it. I was already afraid you wouldn’t write to me at all any more. You told me when I was in Zurich, that it is awkward for you when I come to Zurich. Therefore I think it is better if we get together in a different place, where nobody will interfere with our comfort. I will in any case urge that each year we spend a whole month together, so that you see that you have a father who is fond of you and who loves you. You can also learn many good and beautiful things from me, something another cannot as easily offer you. What I have achieved through such a lot of strenuous work shall not only be there for strangers but especially for my own boys. These days I have completed one of the most beautiful works of my life, when you are bigger, I will tell you about it.
I am very pleased that you find joy with the piano. This and carpentry are in my opinion for your age the best pursuits, better even than school. Because those are things which fit a young person such as you very well. Mainly play the things on the piano which please you, even if the teacher does not assign those. That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes. I am sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget about the noon meal. . . .
Be with Tete kissed by your
Papa.
Regards to Mama.
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