Students should be made to think like scientists, be open-minded, curious, and especially, to doubt.
I had a curious mind when I was growing up. I'm still growing, but I mean when I was very young.
I asked a lot of questions and I learnt a lot way beyond kids my age.
Our mind is a magnet for information. If you plug it to the right source you'll lift weights and perform amazing exploits.
It is transformational when someone teaches you how to be purposeful about your thoughts, how to take charge of your life and your brain.
Generally humans are copycats. We learn from each other. You learn from the people ahead of you and the people around you.
This way of learning was essential for you because you had to learn how to navigate the world and survive.
But survival is not the point of life.
My mission in life is not to merely survive, but to thrive ; and to do so with passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.” — Maya Angelou
Beyond a certain point in your life, your mind should switch from the survival mode and latch onto something more meaningful and worth pursuing.
You have to switch from the default goals you were assigned by society. You need self generated goals.
Different from the default:
- go to school
- get a decent job
- save some money to get by
- retire EARLY at 60
Have a clear Vision where you want to be. Spread it into GOALS.
Set a 10 year goal. Break it down into stages and work it back.
What you want in 10 years, 5 years, 1 year, 6 months, weeks, days to achieve those goals. If you have no idea what to pursue — your life’s work, your purpose, your passions — you must start experimenting.
Ask yourself questions.
7 years ago I was fed up with the progress I was making, I asked myself one question, "How can I make my life better?"
The answer came when I wasn't looking.
I spent 6 months to learn high Value Skills.
Today we are helping a lot of people gain practical skills to land high paying jobs or even start their own businesses.
In one year, you can:
- master a specific skill.
- build productive habits.
- broaden your knowledge base.
- improve your overall quality of life.
- earn your first dollar on the internet.
- connect with like-minded individuals.
- gain clear insight into your vision and goals.
- create thousands of different opportunities.
Life is about experimentation. Learning what you like and don’t like.
Seeing what works and what doesn’t. Slowly making small upgrades in the traits, skills, and wisdom that your character holds.
A Changing World
We are living in an interesting and strange time.
Most economics and social scientists would agree that the world is changing around us.
We are in the midst of an economic revolution that will radically alter our society in the same way that the industrial and agricultural revolutions did.
Technology continues to penetrate all areas of the economy which inevitably influence what skills you need to acquire to stay relevant in the job market.
The pain of keeping up with rapid technological changes and the struggle to stay relevant has become a huge topic of discussion and issue to address.
Many people:
- feel overwhelmed by rapid technological advancements.
- struggle to stay relevant in an evolving job market.
- have uncertainty about which skills are most valuable to acquire.
The issue with situations like these is that they are stressful. If you go back a hundred years and look at diaries from the industrial revolution, you'll see people freaking out about how the world is changing and feeling utterly unsure.
What Question Do You Ask Yourself?
And at the heart of these shifts are generally disputes about the meaning of productivity and meaning of work.
- Is it more productive for me to just generate reminders, or is it more effective for me to think and come up with a fantastic idea?
- Is it more productive for me to spend time with my family and be happy?
- A debate about productivity is taking place now in a way that our parents and grandparents did not have to deal with.
And it's quite fine for people to be concerned about it. They should not feel terrible about their anxiety. It's merely a feature of the time, but there is a solution.
The solution is to figure out how to drive yourself to think more, to focus on the right goals, to create to-do lists correctly, to become an innovation broker, and to construct mental models so you can focus better.
Going Headfirst At The Problem
For the first time, we have a good enough understanding of how the brain works to be able to control our thoughts and become more effective.
Teaching yourself to think more helps to alleviate anxiety. Because once you have power over your thoughts, there is nothing you can't accomplish.
"You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength." — Marcus Aurelius
Making a decision that gives you a sense of control makes it much simpler to engage the areas of your brain that govern motivation, which works extremely well for little activities.
Making Your Thought Process More Intentional
I believe there is a basic lesson here, which is that we are living in a time of rapid change and it is all too easy to become so distracted that you stop being productive.
And you might get so preoccupied that you lose the ability to focus on what is truly important.
When we say that understanding how to think is just as important as knowing what to think about, we're talking about lessons on how to structure our thinking and create routines that help us to stay focused on the most important things.
Routines that we build essentially give us the space to think about the right things.
The thing that differentiates the most productive individuals from everyone else is that they have these routines that force them to think about what's happening a little bit more.
So, in addition to every morning, one of my major contemplative habits is to write down my thinking process, record thoughts that come to me, and subsequently put it somewhere I can see it and think about it a little bit more.
I've discovered that writing down my thoughts helps me comprehend why I have that idea; it forces me to think a little more thoroughly, such as, "why did I believe this method was right?" And while they might be difficult at times, they have proven to be the most significant.
The Common Difficult Desire
You know, one of the major difficulties in modern life is that we all want to think more, right?
Nobody says, "I wish I was thinking less about the essential things each day," but one of the problems is that we frequently get so caught up that we forget to think.
Not because we dislike thinking, but because there are always a thousand items on your to-do list before you can think about the matter at hand or your priorities.
Many times, we learn things but do not retain them.
The most productive people have a check-in mechanism. Where they will regularly set aside two hours on certain days and say, "For these two hours, I'm going to look at what occurred in the past week and I'm going to plan the future week," or they will have a regular lunch once every three weeks with one of their greatest friends.
And during that dinner, they always do the same thing: they speak about what's happened in the past three weeks, the finest ideas they've been exposed to, and they explain those ideas.
Then they talk about what they're looking forward to in the following three weeks.
We conceive of those as things we do in our social freedom, right?
That we share ideas with our friends in order to educate them. But what's really going on is that we're educating ourselves. We're recalling the most important ideas.
You are rephrasing that concept in such a manner that it pushes you to make sense of it, to understand how it connects with your life and how you might apply it.
Intentionally pay attention
People who understand the repercussions of their acts, who understand how to control their own thoughts and actions, are the ones who participate in these meditative routines the most.
They have routines, habits that drive them to consider what is truly going on.
And it's a strategy that pays off in the long term.
Thanks for reading.
-Patrick