While reading "the rule of 10,000 hours" from Malcom Gladwell's "The Outliers" this morning, I realized something very small but significant about how our mind works on conviction and constructing belief.
It is not the set of "truth" that we are convinced about are the truths or happenings or facts, it is the whole process of conviction that generates confidence in certain things and our mind helps us recognize them as belief! I also realized that like guilt, belief is a construct. A construct that we make for ourselves and hold on to. There is nothing like absolute truth or false, or blind faith or cynic doubt. It is our mind that plays the game with us and through the gradual processes conceived by situations and circumstances, our mind cultivates theories, constructs a box of belief and registers them as facts in mind.
I keep telling this sometimes, don't play with mind, there is hardly anybody who can stand a chance when mind plays back on you. I can start conceiving how mind plays using us as pawns. It is a very slow and latent realization and far beyond the grasp of my expressions or words yet.
Similarly, intelligence is a sheer way of letting your mind play to the best of it's extant on one particular thing and generate a visual perception of it. For instance, as a child, my perception and understanding of some things were as quick and effortless as being extra-ordinary. At the cost of modesty I can claim that I could analyze, interrelate, understand and perceive things so quickly at times that I used to believe it is so with everyone. In my 4th standard I could write long essay type answers to history questions which some 10th standard students wouldn't be able to write. I could do so because I used my mere 4th grade knowledge along with common sense and could analyze the significance of historical events. In my 6th or 7th, I used to help my sister and her friends write long answers of economics, based on what I have heard my sister reading out from textbook one odd morning. In my 11th, I attended a seminar only for last 10 minutes during the Q/A session on a fascinating topic (on human cloning) completely new to me (missing the 80 minutes of lecture preceding that) . I could still write an impromptu surprise essay on the talk which required us to write about our opinion of the relevance / advantage / disadvantage of cloning. I happen to be the youngest and only school kid winning a prize for that essay, the other 4 being MS and PhD students in that field. During my Bengali classes, I always surprised my instructors and almost became a school whiz kid of literature just because I could interconnect what I have read, felt, seen or heard to any given topic that I was asked to write about. Surprisingly though, I never did very well in math. I never understood why! I guess, it didn't have much room for imagination, creativity, and letting the mind play - it was either you get it or you don't. For all the other cases I cited so far, I know how much my mind worked to fetch the answers, although I didn't realize it then because I that was very natural and effortless of me. In all the cases, within few seconds I could visualize the answer or scenario so crisply that I could pen it down very well.
Now that I am at a very low period of confidence and success, I can realize that these days, I don't let my mind take over on work, use my strengths and visualize solutions. I am NOT using my mind and thereby feeling low and dumb about my ways. For all I know about myself, I could have been a good researcher with the ability to perceive, interrelate, analyze stuff so well and apply knowledge gained from something to something entirely new. I didn't yet become that, because I have let my mind wander wild. I haven't used even a good amount of the power of my mind. Why did I become this - that's something that happened over years and I am not getting into analyzing it. But, I can surely feel how I have always been a bright kid who failed to bridge the gap between intelligence and success, and how that gap is magnifying with time.
It is not the set of "truth" that we are convinced about are the truths or happenings or facts, it is the whole process of conviction that generates confidence in certain things and our mind helps us recognize them as belief! I also realized that like guilt, belief is a construct. A construct that we make for ourselves and hold on to. There is nothing like absolute truth or false, or blind faith or cynic doubt. It is our mind that plays the game with us and through the gradual processes conceived by situations and circumstances, our mind cultivates theories, constructs a box of belief and registers them as facts in mind.
I keep telling this sometimes, don't play with mind, there is hardly anybody who can stand a chance when mind plays back on you. I can start conceiving how mind plays using us as pawns. It is a very slow and latent realization and far beyond the grasp of my expressions or words yet.
Similarly, intelligence is a sheer way of letting your mind play to the best of it's extant on one particular thing and generate a visual perception of it. For instance, as a child, my perception and understanding of some things were as quick and effortless as being extra-ordinary. At the cost of modesty I can claim that I could analyze, interrelate, understand and perceive things so quickly at times that I used to believe it is so with everyone. In my 4th standard I could write long essay type answers to history questions which some 10th standard students wouldn't be able to write. I could do so because I used my mere 4th grade knowledge along with common sense and could analyze the significance of historical events. In my 6th or 7th, I used to help my sister and her friends write long answers of economics, based on what I have heard my sister reading out from textbook one odd morning. In my 11th, I attended a seminar only for last 10 minutes during the Q/A session on a fascinating topic (on human cloning) completely new to me (missing the 80 minutes of lecture preceding that) . I could still write an impromptu surprise essay on the talk which required us to write about our opinion of the relevance / advantage / disadvantage of cloning. I happen to be the youngest and only school kid winning a prize for that essay, the other 4 being MS and PhD students in that field. During my Bengali classes, I always surprised my instructors and almost became a school whiz kid of literature just because I could interconnect what I have read, felt, seen or heard to any given topic that I was asked to write about. Surprisingly though, I never did very well in math. I never understood why! I guess, it didn't have much room for imagination, creativity, and letting the mind play - it was either you get it or you don't. For all the other cases I cited so far, I know how much my mind worked to fetch the answers, although I didn't realize it then because I that was very natural and effortless of me. In all the cases, within few seconds I could visualize the answer or scenario so crisply that I could pen it down very well.
Now that I am at a very low period of confidence and success, I can realize that these days, I don't let my mind take over on work, use my strengths and visualize solutions. I am NOT using my mind and thereby feeling low and dumb about my ways. For all I know about myself, I could have been a good researcher with the ability to perceive, interrelate, analyze stuff so well and apply knowledge gained from something to something entirely new. I didn't yet become that, because I have let my mind wander wild. I haven't used even a good amount of the power of my mind. Why did I become this - that's something that happened over years and I am not getting into analyzing it. But, I can surely feel how I have always been a bright kid who failed to bridge the gap between intelligence and success, and how that gap is magnifying with time.
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