Greg Proffit Writing

Tag: learning

Just Because You’ve Read About It Doesn’t Mean You Know About It

Photo by Kelcy Gatson on Unsplash

# 24 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Reading about something is not the same as doing something. Reading a story about Paris is not the same as actually visiting Paris. This applies to every aspect of reading. As valuable as it is, it is no substitute for experience.

The intended audience for this tip is the ardent, imaginative reader. Your mind can trick you into believing you’ve done and experienced something because you’ve read about it. You may convince yourself you’ve learned all there is to know because you’ve read about it. I don’t mean to imply your reading will cause a psychotic break with reality. But the emotional and intellectual engagement stirred by reading good writing creates a world. A real one. And sometimes it’s difficult for the most intelligent to realize that all the things they’ve read about, and therefore felt as if they were present seeing, hearing, feeling, fighting, loving, longing in the scenes and characters is real only in their mind. Perhaps this has happened to you.

I am not being disparaging. Real in the mind is real. There is nothing more “real”. But no one is a trout fisherman because they read a story about trout fishing outside Pamplona. Even if you recall details like the crisp newspapers to wrap the day’s catch in. And regardless whether you can almost taste the dust from the bus ride back to town. Dust you’ll quench with Sangria in the bar in time for the day’s bull running. No, dear reader, reading about drinking red wine won’t stain your teeth or make you drunk. Even when Hemingway is writing the tale.

I always think of two things in relation to this tip:

The first is the scene in Good Will Hunting in which Robin Williams’ psychiatrist character chastises Matt Damon’s ne’er do well savant character. Damon’s Will Hunting receives a dressing down for being so smug. He’s never actually done the things he’s read about. He’s never been out of Boston. Although he could recite all kinds of facts about Michelangelo, gleaned from the books he’s read, he doesn’t know what it smells like inside the Sistine Chapel. Because he’s never been. “You’re Just A Kid”. Williams’ character tells him. He’s never really been in love. He’s merely read about a lot of things. Though he can provide brilliant analysis with his near perfect recall, reading is no substitute for the actual streets of Rome. It’s a fantastic scene.

The second is on a cross-country car trip when I was 20. I had picked up a Frenchman named Dominic hitchhiking from Binghamton, NY, on his way to see a girl in Sterling, CO. After a side-trip to New York City we started west. On the second day, Dominic grew critical of the countryside in his fatigue at seeing the farms and cornfields along the interstate.

As night fell on a long day of driving, my passenger got impatient. He pleaded with me to get out of the cornfields. After seemingly endless miles of nothing but corn, we saw an exit towards a town. Maybe it would be a more suburban, less pastoral view. I could drive forever at that age, but the corn was like a green ocean. I was suffering sensory deprivation. Plus, we were forced to limit our expenditures to fuel and food. We would not waste precious money on a hotel for the few hours of sleep we’d need before heading out again. I either needed to drive on to a rest stop, or find a suitable place.

This is the West

We came off the interstate and I turned off the service road onto a long, wide 2-lane in western Ohio. Mailboxes dispersed on either side marked the corners of front yards as big as baseball fields. Dark, wood-framed farmhouses sat well back from the road. Only occasionally did we see a light in a window. Still, Dom suggested I pull off into one of the front yards where we could sleep. He insisted we could set up my tent beside my Toyota, or sleep under the stars in our sleeping bags.

“What? Right in their front yard?” I said, “Have you lost your mind?”

“Oh, not at all,” he replied in good but broken English, “This is the West, I have read all about it.”

“Oh,” says I, “you’ve read about it. Good. Then you’ve no doubt read about shotguns, too.”

I kept right on driving, headed back nearer the interstate, away from Dom’s temptation to get us shot at or dog bit, and eventually found a dirt farm road leading back into a cornfield where we would be safe and could get a few hours shut eye.

“I have read about it.” I’ll never forget that. Don’t you forget it either.

July 20, 2021
Try Not To Learn Anything New Today — It’s Harder Than It Looks

How I imagine my mind. (How’d that girl with the vinyl backpack get in here?) Photo by Darwin Vegher on Unsplash

# 18 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: ”Try to learn something new every day,” is often included on lists like this. Instead, try not to. By trying not to, you’ll become aware of how much you learn everyday without even trying, you just have to be awake enough to catch it.

I enjoy “life-tips” lists. Invariably, they advise us to try to learn something new each day. I read those words and hear Yoda in my head, “There is no Try! There is only Do or Do Not!”

Still, my tip condenses to this: Try not to learn anything new today. I’m a professional non-conformist. I’m not plagiarizing that usual worn-out tip. Instead, we’ll try the opposite.

I’m sure I must have let some days pass without learning anything new. The likelihood of that seems like a reasonable assumption given a span of some 15K days. But I’d be stunned if I’ve failed to learn something in more than 1% of them. The other 99% of the time, new facts and information falls on me, follows me home, and piles up.

If you’re awake, you learn without trying. If. You’re. Awake.

I’m not going all woo-woo metaphysical here. You don’t have to be the Dalai Lama, or Buddha himself. You’ll learn stuff if you remain just reasonably alert and half sober.

But, I’m contradicting my tip, which is to dis-courage your attempts to learn. Here, I’ll put it in bold letters.

You’re supposed to try NOT to learn

A confession. This is the only rhetorically facetious tip of the entire 99 on my list. How’s that for some purple adjectives? (ProWritingAid and Grammarly are gonna love that). And it is the only one I don’t practice regularly. In fact, I’ve never practiced this one at all. I’ve never made the active effort not to learn something for even one day.

And see, I just proved the point of my tip. You just learned several things in that one paragraph without trying. You learned some things about me. And you gained the bonus knowledge that even pro writing software doesn’t have a sarcasm or satire mode. See?

Comic Relief

I’m curious about all kinds of things. One of my favorite comics of all times is a scene in a doctor’s office. In the office, we see a serious looking doctor wearing a lab coat, stethoscope draped around his neck. He is peering intently at a chart and and standing beside his patient, who is seated on the exam table. The patient is a worried looking cat, brow knit with anxiety. Tension is etched on both faces. The doctor speaks, “I’m afraid it’s curiosity.”

Cute, huh? I’m curious to know. I’ve got a motor to learn. I’ve got more questions than answers and the more answers I get the more questions they breed.

As a writer, I’ve heard of an affliction called writer’s block in which the writer is stuck and has nothing to write about. It’s hard to imagine. That must be the same feeling as having nothing to live about. I have way more ideas than time. Way more time than talent.

Most likely, I’ll just keep on learning and letting ideas and information pile up in my mind where all the rooms look like an episode of Hoarders. See, my advice is not for everybody. It just won’t work for me.

But your mileage may vary. So, you go ahead and try not to learn anything new today. Feel free to return and comment below with all the ways your efforts failed. Other readers may learn something. Oh, shoot!

July 17, 2021
Read for Sheer Joy—The Ultimate Call To Action

Photo by Kate Hliznitsova on Unsplash

# 17 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: Read for the sheer joy of it. If you cannot read due to time constraints, look for time leaks to plug so you can make time to read. If you still cannot get the time to sit with a book or good magazine, listen to audiobooks at every available moment: when walking, when commuting, or on a drive of any distance.

I count reading as the cornerstone of all my acquired skills. It is the skill that informs and makes possible all the others I possess other than those that I’ve picked up by observation and practice. (I learned to drive nails with a hammer by hitting my thumb a lot—reading would have been less painful, but not as good a teacher).

Reading Is What Makes Writers Immortal

The whole concept of reading amazes me. Graphical communication supposes the creation of information in the present to be recorded for impartation and consumption in the future without a loss of meaning. Whether a book, an article, an essay, or a note, written words bring the author’s mind to the reader, whether or not the author is still physically alive.

For those who wonder about cryonics to achieve immortality, I say, try writing. Via reading, the author’s mind is as alive and fresh and real as the day he chiseled, or penned, or typed the words.

So much of spoken language is thankfully ephemeral. It passes on the same wind that carries its vibrations to the ear of the hearer. And sometimes it goes in one ear and out the other just as rapidly.

As a test, list how many speeches you know about as compared to how many book titles you’ve read. Any famous speeches that predate radio and television have survived and made it to us because we can read them. How sad if we only had oral history to learn from and to pass on to our progeny.

Written language is an archive of saved thoughts. Expecting the existence of a reader, the writer writes. She supposes that what she records will be relevant and helpful to some reader who comes along in five minutes, or five years, or five millennia.

Reading Is A Kind Of Magic

With these ideas in mind, reading anything is a joy to me. It is a kind of magic. I feel sorry for those who only read of necessity. One of the mind-blowing experiences missed by those who find no pleasure in reading is the opportunity to try on a new life, or a new world in your imagination, to time travel, either by re-living the past or rocketing into the sci-fi future.

If you read the words pink elephant, you cannot help but see it. How did I put it in your mind? I wrote it and you read it. Amazing. If you think that was cool, try to escape the knowledge of that happening with every word you ever read. A writer somewhere cooks up a thought, pecks it out in abstract shapes, squiggles, and lines, posts it somewhere and the reader’s internal interpreter assigns meaning to all the gibberish and makes it real in the reader’s mind.

And while there is something precious and sensual about holding a book in your hands, of feeling the paper as you turn the pages, digital formats and audiobooks are a fantastic way to get many of the same benefits, and they’re convenient in a pinch. Go ahead, read for sheer joy.

July 17, 2021
The Modern Benefits of a College Education—2 Important Considerations

The Old Well at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Photo by Dan Sears.

# 69 on my 99 Life Tips–A List is: A college education is a useful context for exposure to knowledge you may not be familiar with. You may just discover your cup of tea.

It’s important to remember many successful persons never completed college. Not that they weren’t intelligent. Foregoing college didn’t prevent them from furthering their knowledge, skills, or education. They gained these from non-traditional methods and paid no tuition to do so.

My college story

Full Disclaimer: I didn’t complete a degree. The University of my choice accepted me as a student. It was the only school I applied to, and I received a half-ride scholarship. At 17, going to my favorite University felt like I’d achieved my only life goal. I was excited to attend. But I was ill prepared to regard college as the means to a greater end. I arrived filled with questions about life. But I couldn’t get the answers in the classroom. They weren’t even asking the same questions. So, I left after 2 years.

My lack of a bachelor’s degree only bothers me when I contemplate a normal life. Thankfully, this is rare. It is a glaring omission on my resume. But I haven’t been resume dependent, so that’s never been an issue. Despite the lack of a degree, I’m well read. I’ve always been curious, with an insatiable appetite to learn new things. These traits factored in to my decision to leave college. The rigid structure left me cold, impatient with the pace of the process. I was curious and hot to know everything—now—prerequisites be damned!

I owe what education I have to my continuing curiosity and acquisitiveness. My education isn’t the formal kind, but then my living isn’t the normal kind.

But I encourage and urge my college-age kids to get a degree (one of whom just did—with honors, I might add). I stress college as a means to some end they will need to choose for themselves. I hope they will see college as a useful stepping stone on the path of life. My rationale is mostly for the reasons I touch on in this brief piece. So I suppose I’m one of those do as I say, not as I did, parents regarding a college degree.

Success stories without degrees are exceptional today

Non-degreed success stories represent the exception in modern times. Especially so in a knowledge based economy, more and more dependent on novel technologies, and those trained to use them. The pursuit of a degree provides opportunities for exposure to technologies and skills acquisition, making the degree holder more marketable, all other factors being equal.

Even mediocre students should go to college. Especially if they remain unsure of their skill set, talents, or career interests. A college degree today is what a high school diploma was in the early 80s when I graduated from high school.

It is an entry-level requirement for a satisfying job. Yes, the value of the degree has decreased in inverse proportion to its necessity and ubiquity. Yes, many undergrads with degrees today have potential adjusted earnings no greater than their high school graduate counterparts of 40 years ago, as discussed in this Forbes article.

The factors affecting the value of a degree from one generation to the next are beyond this advice and opinion piece. But, if you’re interested in further reading, the aforementioned and linked Forbes article is a good place to start.

Regardless of generational valuations, exposure to knowledge is valuable in its own right. And college is a fantastic means of exposure to varied knowledge if nothing else.

Degree holders earn significantly more

But… setting aside the generalized devaluation of a degree comparing successive generations, the potential earnings of today’s bachelor’s degree holders compared to only high school diploma wage earners is stark. This article from Northeastern University published a year ago shows the scale of expected earnings. This salary advantage for degree holders adds up to serious money over a career.

2 important considerations for the undecided

Setting aside salary considerations, the value in a college education is two-fold:

1- Earning a degree keeps doors from closing.

A degree is not a passport to open all doors. Depending on the degree field and the industry, a degree won’t automatically guarantee a job or career. It is easier for companies to find at least nominally talented workers from the larger pool of degree holders, and even to pay them less because of the glut. But, if you have a degree and the labor market requires a degree, at least you haven’t locked the door to your options. Companies can buy more talented labor at a cheaper rate than ever. This makes it easy for companies to bar entry to those with no degree.

2- Going to college keeps your options open and provides exposure to ideas, interests, and perspectives you may not bump into otherwise.

This 2nd part of the college benefit equation should never end. No matter what you do about college or career, be a lifelong learner. For many, college is the introduction to subject material they’d see nowhere else.

Expose your trip wire

Most 1st through 12th graders don’t get a lot of opportunity to study neurophysiology. I suspect high school science labs rarely map genomes. Even advanced STEM students may not study the calculus of wing design, or aeronautical engineering for a spacecraft capable of lift off and re-entry. College can introduce these specialized fields of study and the career paths available. It can uncover a latent interest or undiscovered aptitude.

So that exposure may be the trip wire for your entire future. College may be the place where you discover what floats your particular boat. If the opportunity is available for you, avail yourself of it. Do so as inexpensively as possible. It may be a useful means to uncovering your talents and purpose.

Though “professional students” exist, for most, college isn’t the end. In at least the ways discussed, a college education is valuable as a means towards future benefits. As long as you can afford the cost, and there are some excellent guidelines to follow to determine those ratios (this is the best one I’ve found), a degree will be cheaper to buy now, than the expense you’ll incur by not having one.

July 2, 2021
Invest In Yourself Without Apology – 4 Simple Ways

Invest in Yourself and get the greatest possible ROI (Adobe Stock image licensed to author)

# 52 on my, 99 Life Tips – A List is: Invest in yourself without apology by reading, exploring, learning, exercising.

True wealth does not consist in possessions that can be listed on a will or a homeowner’s insurance policy. True wealth is not a medium of exchange in the typical sense, the way mere money is. Nevertheless, to acquire riches that don’t tarnish, that aren’t subject to the vagaries of ”market forces”, and that keep supplying a return, you must invest in yourself without apology. Here are four simple, yet effective, ways to do that.

1- Read

I count this as life’s most important skill. Unless you read, you only get to try on and live one life. By reading even mediocre writing, you can use your vast imagination to inhabit another world. By reading you meld your mind, with its limited, finite table of contents, with the minds of every writer you sample. You become multi-perspectived.

This is of incalculable worth. For if a person can never see beyond themselves; that is, if they can never see the world from another’s viewpoint and ”put themselves in another’s shoes”, how can they ever see other people as anything but objects to be used?

2- Explore

Reading is a type of exploration, but by this head, I mean that a person should explore their surroundings in a state of awareness that allows for the possibility of unexpected discovery. One aspect of exploration is to see or to experience a common thing in a new way. I try, as much as possible, to go through each day, and even to move about my house, or walk the streets of my neighborhood, as if I’ve never seen them before.

Here’a a tip to help with this mindset. You have never lived this particular day before. And you never will again. Explore it. Mine it. Extract all of the beauty and pleasure and knowledge and appreciation out of it you possibly can. Become an explorer of this day, and find all there is to be found.

3- Learn

If you read and explore you will gain knowledge. The accumulation of knowledge is like a person who, by reading and exploring, notices and collects puzzle pieces. Eventually, the learner accumulates enough pieces to see patterns emerge. Some of the pieces fit together exactly. In some places there are gaps. By arranging and linking and connecting the tidbits of stored knowledge, one begins to see recurring themes.

At some point you will have pieced together enough related knowledge to be Competent in that area. Continue adding pieces on the way to Mastery.

The other benefit is the humility and even the mild melancholia that comes to the one who realizes that his puzzle may never be finished. There is no clear, absolute picture to go by. There will be sections with no pieces that seem to match. The yearning sadness is the unavoidable flip side of gratitude for having learned so much, yet the recognition that there is so much left to know, that may never be known.

Nevertheless, the Learner would never trade what he knows for a trifle like a car, or a house, or another of life’s accessories. If knowledge suddenly became the medium of exchange, he would not give away a single piece of his puzzle.

4- Exercise

I used to believe the most valuable commodity in life was Time. We’re all on the clock, after all. But a shift in my perspective makes me believe that the most valuable commodity is actually health. I would not want to live an innumerable number of days, sick. You may feel differently but consider, if health became the basis of your paycheck, and not hours, how much health would you trade for your pay?

To this end, exercise is the single most important thing I can do to help. Well, that and consuming only as many calories of the highest quality I can afford to sustain life with the energy requirements of my body and lifestyle.

Start by walking. Healthy humans are ambulatory. We walk upright on two legs. I’ve made the incalculably rich discovery that walking is both means and end. It is perhaps the most spiritual physical practice a person can undertake.

In Summary

Invest in yourself without apology. We need you at your absolute best. I’ll try to be at my best for you, too.

June 8, 2021
Other People Affect What You See, Hear, and Say

“I was blind all the time I was learning to see” ~ Grateful Dead, Help On The Way

I’m listening to the Audible version of The Overstory during my daily walks. Yesterday, I heard the Bullhorn of Truth in the dialogue of two characters on page 430:

”What keeps us from seeing the obvious?”

Douglas puts his hand to the brass bull’s horn. ”And? What does?”

”Mostly other people.”

[Before proceeding with my remarks. Here is a fun tidbit. I just pulled a bookmark randomly from a pack I received from Amazon a couple days ago. Each has a quote from a famous person. The one I selected (without peeking) to mark the passage I quoted above, says:

”Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice.” ~ Steve Jobs]

These aren’t exactly the same ideas, but are next of kin. Other people influence what we pay attention to, and therefore what we see and hear. Their opinions hold the power to silence and shelve our own opinions.

I could spend a month searching the psychological literature to find supports for those sentences above. I’m not going to do that. They are self-evident to me. I’m sold. I just wanted to package it up for your consideration.

To look below the surface, you have to know there’s more to see

None of us can see everything. We have to be selective. And we are constructed in a way that we cannot simultaneously see what is in front of, and behind, us. Unlike an owl, which can spin its head around, or a fly, with eyes that allow 360° vision, we can look in only one direction at a time. And often, we don’t really know what we’re looking at. To truly see a thing requires some idea of how much there is to look for, does it not? Who decides where we look? Who tells us how long to look, or much to look for? Who tells us what to pay attention to? Where do these impulses come from, if not other people?

(For God’s sake do not get me started about the algorithms Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms use to restrict what you see and hear about in order to capture your attention for sale to advertisers. The truth asserted above is the basis of their business models, by virtue of which, they are the richest companies in the history of the world.)

Who have you permitted to determine what you get to see? And who decides what you get to say about it? There is more going on friend, than the carefully curated world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth. (with my tip of the cap to Morpheus’ quote in The Matrix.)

April 10, 2021
What Is Your One Question?

As a kid, I asked questions non-stop. I have early memories of car rides during which I looked out the windows and posed a non-stop litany of one question after another to my bedraggled mom as she tried her best to answer.

Being an early reader eventually helped to quiet some questions. I could read STOP signs and such. But it opened up other questions. I must have been about five when driving along one night, we passed a large, brightly lettered sign that I sounded out, ”T-o-p-l-e-ssss G-g-rrr-ll-ss”. ”Mom,” I asked in alarm, ”why don’t the girls in that place have tops?” My five year old imagination was distraught that the poor girls were cut in half.

My firstborn was quite precocious, and also very inquisitive. She did something unique among her siblings. She created a catch-all word for any object that she didn’t know about. Her word was ”pumen.” When she used it she would scrunch her shoulders up around her little ears. This was her physical question mark to punctuate her inquiry.

Pointing at something she didn’t know about, she would ask, ”What’s that pumen?”<<scrunch>> For a while we lived in a world chock-full of pumens…and shoulder-scrunches.

Funny, right?

And Beth tells the story of her firstborn asking so many questions that after answering her for hours on end, she would finally have to tell her, ”Questions are closed” just to get her to quiet down a moment and take a breath.

I find that level of curiosity delightful!

You may have been the same. Or maybe your children, or grandchildren, are similarly filled with curiosity about the world, and they want to know EVERYTHING, right now!

But what about you? Now? Are you still curious to learn new stuff? Do you have any burning questions?

It is said of lawyers that they try to never ask a question in court they don’t already know the answer to. Surprise and court are not a good mix. Most of us don’t have that luxury.

What I’m wondering is this:

If you could know the answer to only ONE question, what would that question be?

That may be worth taking some time and pondering, because if you can nail down that question, you’ll learn what is REALLY important to you.

If you decide to figure out what your question is, pay attention as well to what it isn’t. I’m guessing if you’re anything like me, a lot of clutter that consumes your mental and emotional energy just isn’t that important in the grand scheme of things.

If you feel like sharing your question, feel free to do so in the comments. Not that any of us will have the answers, but we may all benefit from the questions.

March 3, 2021
You Ain’t Gonna Learn What You Don’t Want To Know

Grateful Dead ~ Black-Throated Wind

Learning takes courage. It is humbling to admit that you do not know. And it is impossible to learn what you don’t want to know. Learning affects the ego with the possibility that you have been mistaken about a subject you thought you knew, or, it can introduce facts and concepts you’ve never heard before. Uncomfortable, unfamiliar, challenging truths make us confront our biases. Since it is the accumulation of knowledge and experiences that make you, YOU, a metamorphosis akin to an ego-death might be needed to emerge as the new, more enlightened version of YOURSELF.

Learning also requires intelligence, which can be defined as an aptitude for grasping truths. The greater this aptitude, the greater the chance that learning occurs even without specific intentionality. To be sure, there are very smart people who use their intelligence, not in pursuit of truths to grasp, but in devising systems for denying truth and for creating, protecting and propagating lies. To me, using intelligence this way is the essence of evil.

Rather, a good life is built around using intelligence to pursue and discover truth, and once found, to act on it. If a new discovery forces a change of belief, or a change of direction, so be it. How many ideas in your life are you absolutely certain about? How certain are you that you’ve been exposed to all the truth you’ll ever need? It is written that, “Every man’s ways are right in his own eyes.” But that verse is a warning that absolute certainty is a luxury reserved for a very limited handful of truths.

Seeking out, learning, and acting on truth sounds good until you realize it forces you to act like an intellectual nomad. Your concept of self must be fluid and dynamic, as new facts overturn previously staked out beliefs. So, the learner lives in an intellectual tent that can be quickly taken down, moved, set up elsewhere, maybe enlarged, maybe subtracted from. Brick and mortar rigidity is unhelpful here.

There is a kind of false security that comes from past knowledge. But tradition must never become a replacement for truth. Truth can move with us into the present and will guide us into the future. So let those who claim to be learners be courageous and determined to tear down any house of lies they encounter. Ruthlessly reject untruths, falsehoods, and biases as soon as new facts and new information is discovered. Pitch your tent upon newly learned truth.

February 13, 2021