Enjoy the painful process of learning
“Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca
There is nothing more fascinating about the human being than our ability to learn, knowledge is power, learning, therefore, is our ability for power attainment. You say you want to be powerful, let that phrase sink in.
I’m not going to lie, learning something, really learning something is hard. You may think that you just have to put in a few hours of work here and there and that should do the trick. But Honestly, I’ve spent several hours “learning” German and haven’t got anywhere.
Learning requires undivided concentration and strenuous effort, to give you an example, when you are reading in another language to learn it, you may have already experienced this before, you have to be constantly on the lookout for the words that you do know so they can give you a hint as to the words that you don’t know so you can start conceiving some coherence out of the text and decipher the meaning of the words that you do not know and the whole text in general. Attention and effort are mandatory.
Attention and effort are a rare commodity these days. I’d argue, honestly, that they are your most valuable commodity. We are being constantly bombarded by information. It seems as if everything is fighting against us when we try to work on something. Youtube will always, trust me, always have some video that you think is “productive” like TED or something, but in reality, if that video cuts your attention span from the actual work, it really just hindered you as you just lost time you could’ve spent in undivided attention for your work.
I can imagine Benjamin Franklin working on his book, or really, any other person before our cellphone and internet era, even though they didn’t have as much information as we do now, they had way much more time to work and to learn.
Today, this can be used as an advantage or as a disadvantage.
If you go through the pain of sitting down, turning your phone off and actually getting to work and learn what you love, you will get very far. This is because everybody is too busy watching cat videos and inspirational TED talks. Use it to your advantage, you will get ahead, fast.
Our age is the age of happiness. Everybody wants to be happy and comfortable all the time and as soon as we are not, we run as fast as we can for some comfort, be it in food or in scrolling down Instagram for a while. The pursuit of happiness is illusory. There is more fulfillment in mastery.
Do something that makes you proud, not something that makes you comfortable.
Knowledge is power, learning is the attainment of power.
You can complement this article with learners and non-learners which treats on another fundamental part of the process of learning.
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