Day 1
Motivation
I had finally taken a long break from work after 2 long years. It was my first time taking time off for longer than 2 days, and it was a nice break to reset and to really think more about my life. The main thought that I had was “What do I want to be when I grow up?” I think this question is often asked to people under high school age and not often enough to people above that age. What I find interesting is that no where in the question itself does it stipulate that it cannot be asked to a person above a certain age. People are always “growing up”, and I think part of growing up is to look forward to it as well.
Anyways, I think my current answer is that I want to be a “cool person”. There are 3 important questions here that I should answer in this first post.
- What is a “cool person”?
- Why do you want to be a “cool person”?
- How are you going to become a “cool person”?
What is a “cool person”?
During my break, I had a chance to meet my aunt and to hear about my late uncle. He was a really cool person. Like REALLY cool. It’s unfortunate that he passed away before I had matured more as a person and I had professional experience. The main reason why I thought he was cool was because my aunt mentioned that he knew a lot about a lot of different things. This made me realize that everyone that I look up to has that quality - intellectual curiosity. They just know stuff.
At this point in my time, I think a cool person is someone who has intellectual curiosity and has acted upon it to have a derth of knowledge.
Why do you want to be a “cool person”?
This is a difficult question to answer. Not difficult because I don’t know the answer to it, but because I think I don’t want to admit a part of the answer. I don’t want to admit the fact that I believe that becoming a “cool person” will give me others’ respect. I don’t want to admit that I want to become a cool person to be able to feel superior over the majority of people. Especially so because comparing others’ lives to my own is such a futile effort. Since I don’t like this aspect of myself, I will have to work on it.
The other aspect however, is an intrinsic motivation. I just want to be that kind of person. Someone who knows a lot about a lot of things. There’s no why here, it’s just I do.
How are you going to become a “cool person”?
In order to become a cool person, I needed to figure out what is the biggest gap that I have to fill. I have recently realized that while I consume a lot of knowledge, I had not really internalized most of it. For example, I watched a YouTube video on a certain topic the other day. I then had an opportunity to explain to a friend exactly why I found it so interesting. However, I realized that I could not remember the details nor even the overall framework that the media presented information in that I had found so interesting. All I knew was the end result of the video; The impression that it left on me that I had found it to be interesting. At the end, the only substantial thing that I felt I could communicate to this friend was that “I watched a YouTube video on topic X. I found it to be extremely interesting.”
I have realized that I really only remember two things from an argument presented by someone else that I found to be interesting. The first one is obviously the thesis of the argument, but the second one is how magical the derivation of the result felt when I first encountered it. However, I cannot really remember the why behind the feeling as time passes by. I think this is an issue because this does not allow me to truly understand the argument, enough to take it apart and put it back together. Ultimately, this just boils down to the fact that I am extremely uncomfortable with talking about something that I don’t understand. I believe that the third skill is critical to the understanding part.
In order to improve this third skill, I realized that I need to put in more time into outputting what I have learned. The best study tip that I have ever received is to make the input to output ratio roughtly 3 to 7. I have realized that my ratio has been closer to 9.5 to 0.5, with the 0.5 coming from whatever interactions I have with the few people that I trust would wholly accept me for who I am. In short, the root cause for my inability to keep things in my mind has been that I severely lack output.
Hence This Blog
This blog is an attempt to overcome this deficiency. I want to document what and how I learn things. I hope that I will be able to look back on this blog several years from now and be proud of myself of who I have become through this endeavor. My prelimiary vision for this blog is that I’ll have a post for each day I spend on a certain book or media that I am going through at the moment. It will be a post about what I learned that day from that book.
Here’s to Day 1 of the blog. I look forward to my future self.