LIFE 101
Everything We Wish We Had Learned About Life In School -- But Didn't

PART TWO
ADVANCED TOOLS FOR EAGER LEARNERS

Life is, if nothing else, a persistent teacher. It will repeat a lesson over and over until it is learned. How does life know we've learned? When we change our behavior. Until then, even if we intellectually "know" something, we haven't really learned it. School remains in session.

The good news is that we learn all we need to know--eventually.

For some, however, eventually is not soon enough. If there's something they can learn that will eventually make their lives happier, healthier, and more productive, why not learn it now? That brings happiness, health, and productivity to us sooner--and it avoids a lot of (perhaps painful) lessons along the way.

Others aren't content with learning only what they "need" to know. "Getting by" is not enough. They want more. They are the "eager learners" who read books with titles such as LIFE 101.

Someone once said that the only two things that motivate an enlightened person are love and curiosity. I can't speak for my state of enlightenment, but I can say that, considering my level of curiosity, it's a good thing I'm not a cat.

Anatole France pointed out more than a century ago, "The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards."

But what if we have questions that seemingly can't be answered? When faced with this quandary, I like to comfort myself with this thought of Emerson: "Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy."

"Life was meant to be lived," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her autobiography, "and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life."

This section of the book contains a series of tools designed to keep curiosity alive and thriving. These same tools can also be used to find satisfying answers to the questions you may be curious about. These techniques are designed to accelerate the process of learning.

All of these tools, by the way, are optional. To learn the necessary lessons of life, no one needs to know or use any of them. So there's no need to struggle--thinking that if you don't master them your life will be a failure. Experiment with these techniques. Play with them. Have fun.

Also, there's no need to teach these techniques to anyone else--much less insist that people relate to you as though they've already mastered them. These skills are electives in the school of life. If you choose to use any or all of them for your accelerated learning, that's fine; but please don't expect--and certainly don't demand--that others accelerate their learning too.

Before we start, let's take a look at why human beings spend so much time struggling against learning; why we, as a species, seem so opposed to the exploration of new things.

Haven't you been curious about that?

Why Do We Resist Learning?

If we're here to learn, and if we have this seemingly in-built desire to learn (curiosity), why do we resist learning? The classic example is the argument: "Listen to me!" "No, you listen to me!" "No, you listen to me!" And so on.

It seems that somewhere around eighteen (give or take ten years), something in us decides, "That's it, I've had it, I'm done. I know all I need to know. I'm not learning any more."

Why?

Let's return to the idea of the small child being taught about life by his or her parents. Parents are like gods to little children--the source of food, protection, comfort, love.

Also, parents are BIG! They're four to five times bigger than children. Imagine how much respect (awe? fear?) you'd have for someone twenty to thirty feet tall, weighing 500 to 1,000 pounds.

Let's imagine a child--two, three years old--playing in a room. The parents are reading, the child is playing, all is well. After an hour or so, CRASH! The child bumps a table and knocks over a lamp.

Where there once was almost no interaction with the parents, suddenly there is a lot--almost all of it negative. "How many times have we told you." "Can't you do anything right?" "What's the matter with you?" "That was my favorite lamp!" Shame, bad, nasty, no good. This verbal tirade may or may not be reinforced by physical punishment.

What does the child remember from an evening at home with the folks? Does the child remember the hours spent successfully playing (i.e., no broken anything) while Mommy and Daddy read, or does he or she remember the intense ten minutes of "bad boy," "nasty girl," "shame, shame, shame," after the fall?

The negative, of course. It was loud and it was frightening (imagine a pair of thirty-foot, 1,000-pound gods yelling at you). It was, for the most part, the only interaction the child may have had with "the gods" all evening. (Especially if being put to bed early was part of the punishment.)

When a child's primary memory of the communication from his or her parents ("the gods") is "no, don't, stop that, shouldn't, mustn't, shame, bad, bad, bad," what's the child being taught? That he or she can do no good; must be alert for failure at every moment, and still will fail; is a disappointment, a letdown, a failure.

In short, a child begins to believe that he or she is fundamentally not good enough, destined for failure, in the way. In a word, unworthy.

There is very little in the traditional educational system to counteract this mistaken belief. If anything, school etches the image even deeper. (If we learned all we needed to know in kindergarten, it was promptly drummed out of us in first grade.) You are taught you must perform, keep up, and "make the grade," or you aren't worth much. If you do work hard at making the grades, some authority figure is bound to ask, "Why are you studying all the time? Why aren't you out playing with the other children? What's wrong with you? Don't you have any friends?"

Catch-22 never had it so good.

Naturally, we can't go around feeling unworthy all the time. It hurts too much. So we invent defenses--behaviors that give the illusion of safety. Soon we notice that others have not only adopted similar defenses, but have taken their defenses to new and exotic extremes. The school of limitation is in session.