Problem is in the root, so is the solution

I’ve noticed that almost all the problems in the world are caused by these three problems.
People’s ignorance of how really the world should work, what really life is and how should you live it, what’s right and what’s wrong morally.
The ignorance of their ignorance and;
Their unwillingness to change (after all how can we agree to change if we don’t there’s a need to change, and right now, not later).
Solving these problems take only one thing. That is I believe one of the most difficult things in the world: changing people’s mind, raising their consciousness, educating them, inspiring them to change to something new and better.
Solve this and you’ve solved almost everything. But how? You might ask. Well, I’ve written a post on how to change the world.

We need a revolution in education

I convinced one of my friend (topper in his class) to came to my home to check out a Ted talk given by Seth Godin on school education. Watch it here before you continue.

But changes are that you will not have enough time to watch the video. So let me tell you what’s in it. Seth starts by telling how and why and for what reason public schools were introduced in the early nineteen century. Then he goes on to talk about the limitation of the education system: what’s wrong with them and what can we do about it. In the talk he reveals 10 things which he thinks are going to change completely in this 21th century. At last he gave us two myths to think about. He want us to ask yourselves what is school for and if we don’t what is school for then he suggests to have a conversation in order to answer the question “what is school for”.

After watching the video, me and my friend had a very short conversation on this topic.

I asked him “So are you convinced that schools are not just silly but too harmful to waste our time in there or you disagree about something Seth said”.

He told me that he was very well convinced. He was among the topper in his class.

Then I insisted  “if you understands the limitation and harmfulness of school why don’t you ditch the school and start your self-education”.

The answer I got opened my eyes.

He said ” There has to be something to back my life on. I completely understand you and I’m aware of the real nature of schools and their defenders but I alone can’t go against everyone even if I am pretty sure that I’m right.

(Now you know why schools strive. The Existence of School is based on only one thing: fear of uncertainty. If there is even a bit less fear in people’s mind they shall come to realize that the theory on which School is based is not just stupid but harmful in the 21th century. Now we are at the crossroad because technology is too here.)

It takes guts to try something new and right. Without much resources with us to make things happen. I think there are more than enough people in the world like my friend who know the right thing but doing the wrong thing only because the people surrounding them are doing the wrong thing. Rather then find their tribe as Seth say in his book Tribe: we need you to lead us they are trying to fit in and compromise.

The best way to complain is to make thing.

– James Murphy

There are two very effective things I learned from Seth Godin first: This isn’t for you, it’s for her. If people didn’t like your art or admired your choices, two things are possible, one, your art suck or, your audience suck (the one you showed your art to). Make better art or change your audience. Second thing which I learned is that leadership is not difficult but if you are trained by school for years to avoid it. You can put almost any word like equality in place of the word leadership, the sentence won’t lose its value.

Thank god (though I don’t believe in God) Gandhi didn’t gave up just because their was less certainty in what he was doing compared to what he might have done: compromise.

Thank god Luther did not gave up just because he had few resources to make things happen compared to what he might have done: compromise.

I firmly believe that the reason people stick to school is not because there is any kind of lack of resources or skills or fear of change or even desire to do something interesting and impact the world and the like. But I think there is only and only one thing which is stopping us from doing something interesting and generous: a hand full of people and their fucking opinions, the jerks.

Be silent and get rid of the jerks. That’s what Bob Tobin says in this PDF.

People will say what you are doing is the wrong thing because they have to justify their own crappy decisions                                                 – Till H.Grob

The Led talk by Till H.Grob. Truly worth watching.

If fear is the obstacle then I have this thing to say:

We don’t have to go it alone as long as we agree to go together and go first.

Into a new habbit

When we are trying to do something new which we think is better than the old, we have to think before we acting in a certain way to remember that we’ve decided to do it our way (the new and better way). Because old is a habit we don’t have to pause to think why are we doing it, unlike when we are trying to grow new habits. The old bad habits are already ingrained in us by, may be, schools or parents (after all they take the responsibility to teach us stuff) or sometimes yourselves.

Couple of years ago I used to use the pronoun ‘he’ to represent any profession or anything except if its a female name because that’s how I’ve been taught for years by my school and community. But as I grew up reading books I observed that the writers also used ‘she’ which was a pretty new habit for me back then. Then I came to know the story behind it. So it very important to pause before acting if we really care about catching better habits. Its about getting better at the old by improving on it or sometimes transforming it completely. The act of getting into the new habits can be seen anywhere including feminism.

It all goes well if you’re on the right road

But how to know if you are on the right road. Just one thing. Do what you like or care about. When you don’t know what you care about, sit idle or try every different stuff possible, for few days. To see where your mind is going. I’m sure you’ll end up on the right road. Do it as long as you care about it. Change things if you feel there’s a need. There’s no law which restricts us in doing one thing all life. Trust that everything will go well if you do what you care about.

How much does advise matter

An advise is more like a suggestion without much reasoning. It doesn’t take time giving an advise. But it rarely works compared to philosophical reasoning. Now I am giving you an advise that advise rarely works but my advise doesn’t have to be taken too seriously because as I said an advise is something with less than good enough reasoning to convince someone to believe it. But if now I shall start to try to convince you that ‘advise is overrated’ by philosophical reasoning then its worth considering and thinking about. So this is exactly what I am going to do Here.

Philosophical reasoning is something you can find in your daily life. You can check if what I am saying works or not. Or are there any exceptions to my claim. That’s what Socrates used to do. He used to search find exceptions in people’s philosophical claims. Now its a pretty interesting exercise. Find exceptions in whatever people say. Questioning the quotations of great person. The great persons are very good at throwing advises but too busy to disclose their reasoning on why they said what they said. I agree that there are some exception to my claims too. There is something which can only be felt not reasoned.

If Bill Gates recommends you a book without explaining why and for what reason you must read it, whats in there for you not others. For that he has to know what you are looking for, what interests you, what are your needs and the like. Just because Bill gates liked the book doesn’t mean that you will too. In fact changes are that you will not. Just because the decision he took in those circumstances doesn’t mean that its gonna work for you too. But there one way to make advise work. Find people who have almost everything common with you. Then do what they are doing (be as specific you can be. But its an advise so don’t take it too seriously. Think yourself for yourself). Two problems here, one, I have least idea who are you going to find these kind of people. Two, thinking that you are same as the other is insulting yourself. I do agree that it works but I firmly believe that it works right rarely. Its nothing more than a gamble if it’s just an advise without reasoning.

And then comes the scientifically proven stuff. The most certain and reliable in all three. There might be an exception to this also. But again I have little reasoning or evidence to prove that scientifically proven stuff too have exceptions. So the point is ‘assume nothing, question everything’. I read somewhere this quote ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’. I am in the process of exploring more so I have to dig deeper to make sense of my reasoning. No body has a perfect right answer (again a claim without evidence). But at least I don’t have any perfect right answer to any question.

Who deserves more:

The one who figures out what she really want and will love doing, what she cares about, her passion. Does it without any pain or hard work. After all doing what you love is fun, not work.
Or
The one who don’t care about knowing what they are good at or what they like doing. Thinks there’s no need to figure out their passion. But can endure extreme pain and tolerate high and long boredom hours. After all when you are doing stuff you don’t really care about everything is work, real hard but unnecessary work; this is the time when five minutes seem like an hour.
So what do you think:
Who deserves more.

Seth godin’s inspiring words: The tragedy of small expectations (and the trap of false dreams) June 24, 2015

Ask a hundred students at Harvard Business School if they expect to be up for a good job when they graduate, and all of them will say “yes.”

Ask a bright ten-year old girl if she expects to have a chance at a career as a mathematician, and the odds are she’s already been brainwashed into saying “no.”

Expectations aren’t guarantees, but expectations give us the chance to act as if, to trade now for later, to invest in hard work and productive dreaming on our way to making an impact.

Expectations work for two reasons. First, they give us the enthusiasm and confidence to do hard work. Second, like a placebo, they subtly change our attitude, and give us the resilience to make it through the rough spots. “Eventually” gives us the energy to persist.

When our culture (our media, our power structures, our society) says, “people who look like you shouldn’t expect to have a life like that,” we’re stealing. Stealing from people capable of achieving more, and stealing from our community as well. How can our society (that’s us) say, “we don’t expect you to graduate, we don’t expect you to lead, we don’t expect you to be trusted to make a difference?”

When people are pushed to exchange their passion and their effort for the false solace of giving up and lowering their expectations, we all lose. And (almost as bad, in the other direction) when they substitute the reality of expectations for the quixotic quest of impossibly large, unrealistic dreams, we lose as well. Disneyesque dreams are a form of hiding, because Prince Charming isn’t coming any time soon.

Expectations are not guarantees. Positive thinking doesn’t guarantee results, all it offers is something better than negative thinking.

Expectations that don’t match what’s possible are merely false dreams. And expectations that are too small are a waste. We need teachers and leaders and peers who will help us dig in deeper and discover what’s possible, so we can push to make it likely.

Expectations aren’t wishes, they’re part of a straightforward equation: This work plus that effort plus these bridges lead to a likelihood of that outcome. It’s a clear-eyed awareness of what’s possible combined with a community that shares your vision.

It’s easy to manipulate the language of expectations and turn it into a bootstrapping, you’re-on-your-own sort of abandonment. But expectation is contagious. Expectation comes from our culture. And most of all, expectation depends on support—persistent, generous support to create a place where leaping can occur.

There are limits all around us, stereotypes, unlevel playing fields, systemic challenges where there should be support instead. A quiet but intensely corrosive impact these injustices create is in the minds of the disenfranchised, in their perception of what is possible.

The mirror we hold up to the person next to us is one of the most important pictures she will ever see.

If we can help just one person refuse to accept false limits, we’ve made a contribution. If we can give people the education, the tools and the access they need to reach their goals, we’ve made a difference. And if we can help erase the systemic stories, traditions and policies that push entire groups of people to insist on less, we’ve changed the world. 

       

Exception in school

People think that bad experience in school is an exception- they think that their kid has some problem inside her brain or she is unfortunate enough to have bad performance in school but precisely the opposite is true.

This kind of thinking changes when people expect more from their kids. If kids are able to find what they really care about (only if schools let them to) they’ll break all the rules to master in it and make impact. But what if they can’t find it. They’ll shall keep seeking until they do. Its like everything or nothing.

But its a risk. Isn’t it? I think poor people have better chance of getting rich than middle class, a person who don’t settle at something she hates have a greater chance of finding meaning in life than something who do.

Its a choice between preferring risk less life and remain a sleep (which to me seems more unsafe) or the risky life of never settling (or settling at where you really want to be). So when you are finally settled where you like to be people around you expect the best from you.

What do we want to expect from schools: level every kid to an average standard or help as many kids as they can find their passion, what they care about.

No reason to regret and envy

Its so easy to regret the past and envy the future. Isn’t it a stupid idea to think about the past and the future the same way as we think about the present. Past will always be a bit more stupid, careless, and worthless than the present, that is why its the past, not the present. If we are able to decide if what we did or what happened in the past is not worth continuing in the present then we have done the best we can to improve from the past. And if the past is worth continuing then will be the present or sometimes the future too.

The same can be said about the future. The present will always be a bit more stupid than the future, that is why its the present not the future. To make sure that we will try to improve from our present future has to be a bit more perfect than the present. If we reach our goals now in the present then it won’t be worth living anymore to see the future. I am going to incorporate a quote I read somewhere “Don’t compare your beginning with someone’s middle.”

The advantage of my disadvantage

I was lucky enough to find this interesting title from a book named David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell. I am also going to incorporate one example from the book in my writing to explain this concept. First let me tell you something about the title itself “The advantage of my disadvantage”. Take the example of Dyslexia. I think you know the meaning of Dyslexia but in case you don’t here’s the definition from the dictionary: a learning disability in which a person finds it difficult to read and write.

I read about the pros and cons of dyslexia embedded inside truly interesting and engaging stories under the subtitle Desirable Difficulty in the book David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell ( I recommend reading all his books, really all four of them). Firstly I will write about what Malcolm wrote about the not-so-talked-about part of dyslexia in his book then I will tell you the advantage of my disadvantage. He explained about the upside of Dyslexia through his engaging stories with strong lessons embedded inside them. I will incorporate them very briefly as the real stuff in this blog post is following it.

Consider this: There was a man named Gary Cohn suffering from Dyslexia, in the 1970s, at a time before dyslexia was routinely diagnosed. I want you to imagine what happens to someone with Dyslexia, the disadvantage of the disability in reading and writing. When you know the (more talked) downside of Dyslexia I will tell you the (less talked) upside of it. I can’t tell you the whole story but here’s some key points:

Suffering from Dyslexia, Gary never did well in schools.

He was disconnected from his parents and friends.

He couldn’t gets good jobs because of his poor reading and writing skills.

So he had to find another way out.

Meanwhile, he had many other things to learn about (not related to his disabilities) like people skills, shameless self-promotion, risk taking, pretending to be a normal intelligent guy which other normal people are so afraid to even think about.

Dyslexia- in the best case – forces you to develop  skills that might otherwise have lain dormant. It also forces you to do things that you might otherwise never have considered doing.

Today he is the president of Goldman Sachs.

My disadvantage

So now, here its is- my disadvantage and its advantage.

I write blogs. I write about many new ideas worth thinking about. I rarely write what’s already been written by other great authors with their excellent presentation ability. As It will be a waste of time to just copy other stuff. But who knows whats already there and what is not, but it can’t stop anyone from writing of course like I wrote in my last blog. I try to write about new and disruptive ideas which as far as I know are not written about before and I hope I am right most of the time.

The problem is I am not so good with English writing skills. I am a slow writer. I mean I don’t think I can even call myself a writer. I can hardly even try to write long interesting stories to get my message through like many other writers do. They can write thousands of words filled with stories, questions, answers, conclusions etc just about a small concept in order to make it easy for others to not think much by themselves to understand things. But I can’t. I always wrote some basic things about the idea which I want the people to think about, good enough for people to understand it, And expect them to imagine more stuff ( questions, answers, relate things to other things etc) in order to find more clarity. I never ( actually I can’t) give people to read everything there is to know about a particular topic only to read today and forget tomorrow but to think about it and imagine their own views and share them with the world. That’s the first advantage of my disadvantage. Secondly, everyone has a different worldview.

We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.

-Anais Nin, author and diarist

I have more than one example to explain this which happens rarely. Consider this: In my last blog post I wrote a quote not once but twice ” Life is too short to do things which anyone else can also do “. I am pretty sure that when you read it you saw something different than I did when I wrote it. Some readers ignored it. Some readers took it seriously as it was written twice unlike what normally writers do. Some waited and thought about it for few seconds to know what really the author is trying to say. Some thought the same thing as I do, and I believe mostly every readers saw something different.

I give my readers something to think about, to remember and to keep thinking about it, while trying to relate it to their daily life, to change the way they think about the world rather than giving them everything (which I can’t because of my poor writing skills and my not so great mind that can imagine every possible thing). I can only write a fraction of what I want to write maybe because of laziness or my writing problem but it has an advantage which we both know now. I know that there are a lot of downside of poor writing skills and laziness but I believe the world knows them very well. As I said I only write new stuff. You see I found an advantage in my disadvantage.

what to do when its already been done: try the untried

Life is too short to do things which anyone else can also do

read it again, this time with more seriousness

Life is too short to do things which anyone else can also do

Its all about being different. By different I don’t mean wearing your underwear outside your pants or trying to live inside water for an hour without breathing etc.

I have heard a lot of time that we are the average of five people we hangout with. For instance take this- students sharing same school, same city, same language, same religion, same classroom, same age, same neighborhood, same middle-class parents, reading same books in school are most likely to have same believes, feeling and thinking. That is what the problem with schools is, they are I can say the other name for factory. And I believe you know what is the meaning of factory. I was inspired by Seth Godin’s Video on school education to use the word ‘factory’ to describe characteristics of school.

College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.

-John Cage, self-taught writer and composer

See and try to understand that its all about combinations. There are I will say infinite different and unique combinations in this world. What is the probability of two people thinking alike with same country, same religion. I guess not much. But what might be the probability of people thinking and feeling similar with same country, same religion, same income family, same neighborhood, same school, reading same books, and hanging out with similar friends. You see its all about combinations. There will be some exceptions to be found out. Now read the first sentence of this post. Remember, we are searching for a way to be different,to be unique and have our own new and untested (or tested) concrete opinion about the world but you can see that school is completely against us.

We are not here to write whats already been written.

We are not here to do whats already been done.

We are not here to think the way already been thought.

We are not here to copy others.

We are not here to worship whats there but to question it.

It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.

-Jacob Bronowski, writer and presenter of The Ascent of Man

We have to think different. We can’t keep thinking and trying to solve things the same way and expect different result.

Discovering are often made not by following instructions,but by going off the main road, by trying the untried.

-Frank Tyger, political cartoonist and columnist

Discovering the discovered is itself a discovery for an individual. As long as she don’t know that what she is trying to discover is already been discovered.

So keep thinking different and keep discovering worth taking about stuff, don’t feel uncomfortable thinking what if its already been done because let me tell you that no one can do it better than you.

comments and suggestions welcomed!

 More Later.

 luck!

my favorite title

It is the title of an autobiography by Kiran Bedi, the first woman officer in the India Police Service.

the title is

” Its always possible”