For most of us, I would believe that we have this instinctual desire to be right, and to be right all the time. Wouldn’t it be great if we always had the right thing to say at the right time? Wouldn’t it be great if one had an answer to every question possible, just like Google?
On the surface, it seems that having knowledge is a good thing. I am a firm believer of acquiring knowledge, regardless of what field it may be. You never know when you might need a skill or understanding of a particular concept, and it is often that you can apply that knowledge in a drastically different context. An understanding of one subject will complement another to some degree, regardless of how related they are. For instance, Einstein loved the elegance and beauty that he found in music, where because of music he sought to achieve this same beauty in the formulation of his theories.
A general rule of thumb that I have found is that the depth of conversation is usually inversely proportional to the number of people partaking in it. People tend to be more vulnerable in smaller groups, where in a bigger group it is more likely to find someone that you are not comfortable opening up to.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
Anne ritchie
This is an often used saying, in which the oldest English use of this proverb was in a British novel published in 1885. This proverb sheds light on the notion that it is wise in the long run to teach someone how to do something, rather than to do that something for them. It is a plea towards teaching for independence as well as self-sufficiency.
To explain this rather fancy word, a heuristic is basically a ‘general rule of thumb’, being a shortcut for solving problems via the method of trial and error. On the face of it, heuristics are quite ugly and inefficient in solving problems. Thus, a heuristic is very much the antithesis of a mathematical proof – which often is elegant and even beautiful.
Being in an age of much technological innovation, we are inundated by information. Every day YouTube uploads 576,000 hours worth of content every single day. Facebook generates 4 new petabytes of data every single day. In the United States alone, there were 304,912 books published in the single year of 2013. Assuming one reads 30 books a year, it would take about 10,164 years to get through all these books. If we live till 80 and we read at a rate of 30 books a year from the age of 15, that would require 156 lifetimes to consume a single year of all North American Content! In this, we have to be selective of who and what we read – to find the quality amidst the quantity.
I had forgotten how much I enjoyed biographies. Biographies allows us to have an in depth conversation with anyone in the world across time, where we can have a peek in the pivotal moments of their lives. In some respects, a biography is better than a real life conversation because these lives have been painstakingly condensed and carefully synthesised via many drafts for our benefit. Through biographies, we can extract as much as we can of these people in the shortest span of time – all in a small and neat package of a book.
This is the first time that I am doing an annual review since this is blog is still in its fledgling first year. I hope that I would make this a practice to reflect on every year, by God’s grace.
In our everyday conversations, we may be asked about our role models, being the people that we look up to. However, when are we ever asked about our reverse role models – the people in which we study so that we may not repeat the same mistakes as they did?
Throughout high school I have always thought that the fear of failure is a good thing. On the surface I thought that the fear of failing was a no brainer. Why would anyone want to fail and not succeed? Isn’t it a good to have the desire to do a task to the best of your ability?
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