Space - The ever changing ability to change

“If the ability to change is part of who you are, then you are liberated from worry about weaknesses or defects, because you can adapt and improve whenever you like.”

Gaining knowledge is futile on its own. If all you do is read books and talk to people and keep gathering knowledge and keep it all in your head and do nothing with it, it all goes to waste. It's vital that we take time to convert the knowledge gained into wisdom.

Wisdom = Knowledge + Analysis

If you have to narrow down the differences between a Great man/woman and a normal person, you can come down to just one point:

Great men/women are open to change.

Becoming a better thinker involves changing our thinking patterns.

To adopt new habits, you have to change old ones.

Change is frightening to most of us. But even before that, comes the main villain of an average man's story. Confidence.

Do you know any incompetent person who think they are amazing?

Yes, I know you are thinking of someone. 😁

This concept is called the Dunning-Kruger Effect:

• Tendency for people to misjudge their abilities
• People with less than average abilities tend to overestimate their true abilities
• With very early levels of competence, comes a very high spike of confidence. 
• This miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self.
  
• This point can be seen in the picture below, referred to as Mount Stupid.  

How do you know where you are in this chart?

• If you feel 
• you just naturally understand and 
• know about something with very less effort, 
• you are most probably climbing the mount Stupid.

The more a person learns about a subject, the more he or she is able to see just how complicated it really is and the confidence dips sharply.

Fortunately, though, confidence begins to grow and a person climbs up the Slope of Enlightenment he or she gains mastery of a subject.

Climb the slope of Enlightenment:

• Ask yourself
• “How would an expert learn it?” 
• what a skilled professional would bring to the table to learn this idea? 
• What kind of perspective does he have on the idea that would allow him to grasp the materials better?
  
• What strategies and concepts will make learning the original idea easier in the long run?
• Learning additional perspectives and context about an idea before learning it might seem like making the task unnecessarily harder. 
• But that is not the case!
  
• When amateurs learn a subject, they tend to memorize concepts like disconnected puzzle pieces.
• This strategy might work well to take a pen and paper test. 
• When it's time to put the skills to use, these amateurs will be limited to the pieces of information that they can remember. 
• They will struggle to apply concepts. 
• They will be afraid to try new things, and 
• they cannot take a question outside of their comfort zone, let alone generate new ideas. 
• The expert contextualizes every piece of information. 
• They see the evolution of ideas so they doesn't have to be dependent on his memory. 
• In other words, experts perform a fundamentally different task

 

-  Read India Lead India