“Make the most of yourself…for that is all there is of you,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once said.
I’ve always believed that what separates humans beings from beasts is our ability for self-reflection and self-improvement. You take in the world through your little peepers, process, organize and analyze it the best you can and then you have a choice: do you use it? And by “use it,” I don’t mean do you spit out the facts you’ve memorized onto a scantron only to forget them 10 minutes after an exam; I mean do you make a habit of taking what you learn and experience and using it to improve yourself as a person?
I may not pony up the $8 to watch Netflix every month, but I fork over dough for daily brain exercises on Lumosity. Why? Because I want to get smarter, be better and improve upon the only existence that I know.
Exhibit A: I am notoriously bad at directions. Since I was a kid my dad would always tell me that I am “lost in the time/space/distance continuum”. I hear many girls say that same thing so, let’s just blame it on the smaller region of the female brain that details with spatial reasoning, right?
Wrong.
Through my brain training subscription, I play an incredibly frustrating game designed to improve my sense of direction; as dumb as it seems to spend time leading a little penguin through a ever-changing maze each morning, think of what I’m gaining as opposed to using that time to scroll through a mind numbing newsfeed.
You have the choice every time you get into the car to plug an address into the GPS and be guided safely to your destination no thought necessary or you can accept the challenge. Do you want to be better?
While I spend at least 20 minutes every single day trying to improve upon my internal weaknesses, can you say the same for yourself?
I stress the word internal, because our culture facilitates the need for external self-improvement to the point of obscenity. As college students, think of how much of your time energy and effort is dedicated to making sure your body matches the standards of our society, making sure your clothes help you fall into the social bracket that you want, making sure your hair and make up are always looking better and better. Could you possibly compare the number of hours spent in the gym to the number of hours you spent working on your true self?
The lack of willingness (and surprising lack of desire) for people to improve themselves, leads to an even scarier notion: that independent thought is dying.
I can’t recall the last time I truly had to figure out how to do something. I mean, sit there and think incredibly hard and try different options and make changes to my plan of attack and eventually volia! figure something out due to my own ingenuity and natural effort. Our problem solving skills have degenerated into typing into the search bar of Google.
We have become so incredibly dependent on instant gratification and infinite access to information that instead of technology helping us get smarter, it is eradicating our need to think for ourselves and, essentially, we are mentally devolving.
You don’t have to commit yourself to playing memory games online if that isn’t your cup of tea. The good news is you already pay for a means of improving your mind.
You spend your money to attend a brand name college, The University of Florida, and yet do you consider yourself educated? I have heard many students say that they don’t feel any smarter having attended 3, 4, 5 years of college and shockingly enough, many have said they actually don’t feel as if they are as intelligent as they used to be. If you haven’t figured it out yet, there is a major difference between school and education.
Apply the concepts you study in class to your life and when something in your courses ignites even the slightest spark of interest in your brain, don’t let it fade away. Use that same technology that has the power to dumb you down, to sharpen you up. Learn more about it, ask questions, see if your brain can look at it in a way that nobody has before. Pythagoras got his rocks off on triangles, Adam Smith was giddy over economics, Galileo tripped out on the stars and Bill Gates fell in love with operating systems. The subject doesn’t matter; what matters is the independent thought applied to it. How could you ever expect to make discoveries or invent new theorems or truly innovate if all you do is recycle and reuse the thoughts of others? Take the effort you use rewording and summarizing something you found online to avoid getting caught for plagiarism and put it towards creating insight of your own.
If you’ve committed to being a business major or a doctor (or both) and the classes you must take just genuinely don’t excite you, again, you can use technology to fill the void. ITunes U (I’d like to think the U stands for University), give you access to free classes from all grade levels from all over the world. No, I don’t have room in my schedule to try and take beginning Chinese at UF, but I can hop into a class in Hong Kong and learn the basics any time I want, no strings attached. I’ve always been fascinated with what makes people happy, but can’t find a single class at school that even touches on that. Boom: The Psychology of Happiness on iTunes U by the people who produce TED Talks. I’m currently subscribed to about 6 classes via this amazing invention, and no, some of them I never look at and some of the them I delete after watching one lecture, but that’s the beauty of it. I can watch an incredibly thought provoking talk on the philosophy of death by a professor at Yale University and then head out to good ole Midtown. It’s okay to complain about your education and wish it was better or want to study something different, but it’s not okay to let those reasons be why you aren’t constantly learning and growing as person.
Regardless of the topic, problem or situation, before you impulsively consult your parents or friends, open a book, or, more likely, turn to Google, think about it yourself. Think independently. I repeat, think independently.
In the words of Albert Einstein, “Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.” Have you accepted your limits? Are you perfectly content with mental stagnation? Or are you ready to go beyond them and fully embrace what it means to be a human being?
Photo courtesy of: Wikimedia Commons
