I’ve just returned from a trip to Europe (which is why we haven’t had any updates, sorry). I highly recommend that you visit Trier if you happen travel around western Germany or Luxembourg in summer—the green hills just make you feel as if you had ventured right into the heart of Hobbiton; and the home of Karl Marx and Emperor Constantine offers a tranquil break from the hustle and bustle of the bigger European cities. I’m still in travel mode, but I’ll stop before this whole post turns into a crappy travel guide. Now let’s switch the topic to discovering your passion.
What we’re talking about is the discovery of an activity (such as a skill) that you have a burning desire to pursue. Not every activity should be sought for the purpose of accumulating riches, but earning a living from something that you love to do and are passionate about can grant you both time and the necessary resources to keep pursuing that passion.
Studying at school and studying by yourself are like the yin and yang of education (terrible cliché, I know). The government takes you to school, and makes you learn a bunch of things, mostly related to subjects that are of no interest to you. But this raises a huge problem. Many of us didn’t like studying in school, especially in junior high school, and that impression about education has developed into a mess of negative emotions that flare up whenever we face the need to learn something new.
Your boss might tell you to get an additional certificate, and for this, you need to invest your free time in studying the materials for the exam. Or you might be thinking about going to college because it will bring you more job opportunities, but a bachelor’s degree is quite difficult to earn without studying. When we are forced to study, it naturally makes us resent studying.
When you let your ego handle the talking, it’s easy to start exaggerating and bragging. But it’s a huge mistake if you ever want to gain authority and credibility. This happens a lot when you’re still unknown and trying to impress someone. Remember your last date?
But how will you sound when you’ve told someone that you’re a professional therapeutist and she finally realizes the truth—that you’re a bus driver, and your therapeutic expertise consists of reading Teach Yourself Zen Therapy in 21 Days (fictitious title) and half a dozen more volumes on health and zen. Don’t get me wrong; many teach-yourself courses out there are packed with valuable information that you can absorb for professional benefit. The problem is that you’re claiming to be someone you’re obviously not.
I hope you read my last Tuesday’s post on measuring true skill through improvisation, because today I will be sharing some tips on how to develop the ability to spontaneously apply your knowledge. To summarize, improvisation is the ability to take what you’ve learned in theory and put it into use with minimum effort. So to get started with improvisation, try to follow some of the following tips.
“Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.” ~ Roman proverb
Do you remember how we, as students in high school, tried to impress our teachers with big long, Latin- or Greek-based synonyms? Even though we were trying to adopt new words into our writing style, it actually brought quite the wrong effect. The lack of focus on content lowered the grade because not only were we overly concentrated on big words instead of writing quality content, the words themselves were often incorrectly placed. Now, I admit that I’m still a beginner when it comes to writing, but I learned a valuable lesson when my English teacher finally smeared my stack of turn-in papers with red ink during my sophomore year in high school.
The same thing applies to every skill in the world. When you flaunt your mediocre skills as if you were a master, the reception will be cold. We humans have an innate ability to detect pretenders. Some people are good at deception, and rightfully so, since they are masters of deception. But most of the time deception fails, and the loud talker only ends up proving how little he knows.
Self-Learner is a blog about self-education and self-improvement based lifestyle design. Goal? To become the best "version" of yourself, and feel excited to jump out of your bed every morning.