“Why oh why are human beings so hard to teach, but so easy to deceive.” – Dio Chrysostom, Greek philosopher, 2nd Century
Humans have been making mistakes for thousands of years. Learning from our mistakes and those of others are key for our ability to make progress toward any purposeful pursuit.
Even as parents, we need to know how to teach our kids, which is not much different than how we teach and train our colleagues, employees, or clients.
“Do not train boys to learning by force and harshness, but lead them by what amuses them, so that they may better discover the bent of their minds.” – Plato
While our modern world today is infinitely more complex, we humans are not much different.
In the 17th Century, Rene Descartes knew the value of talking to dead people. “The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest minds of the past centuries.”
From Dio to Plato to Descartes, Benjamin Franklin was constantly learning from those in past centuries. He was actively working to improve himself through reading and self study.
In trying to develop his 13 virtues, he quickly realized the error of trying to practice too many new skills at once. Multi-tasking is a myth. It is a way to be mediocre at many things.
“But I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined. While my care was employ’d in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another.” – Benjamin Franklin
Instead, he changed his approach to successively work on one virtue each week. Not only did he practice one virtue a week, but he ordered them in his practice so that each new habit or virtue made learning the subsequent one easier.
How often do we get stuck in our ways? We get stuck in a decision. We become an immovable force. But we are not in a fixed position.
We can actively make decisions. When the situation has changed, we can change our plan.
Our pursuit of wisdom should be never ending. We should not fool ourselves with the allure of multi-tasking or randomly trying to predict future outcomes.
Warren Buffet calls it the Noah Principle:
“Predicting rain does not count; building arks does.”
Beware of your misjudgements. Beware of your decisions. Beware of who you learn from.
In the end, we can all get better by pursuing wisdom, adapting and adjusting along the way.
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