The 50th Law - 50 Cent [74]
Keys to Fearlessness
ALL OF MAN’S TROUBLES COME FROM NOT KNOWING HOW TO SIT STILL, ALONE IN A ROOM.
—Blaise Pascal
As children learning language, we all undergo the same process. At first we experience a level of frustration—we have desires and needs we wish to express, but we lack the words. Slowly we pick up phrases and absorb patterns of speech. We accumulate vocabulary, word by word. Some of this is tedious but we are impelled by our intense curiosity and hunger for knowledge. At a certain point we attain a level of fluency in which we can communicate as fast as we think. Soon we don’t have to think at all—words come naturally, and at times when we are inspired, they flow out of us in ways we cannot even explain. Learning a language—our own or a foreign one—involves a process that cannot be avoided. There are no shortcuts.
Learning language sets the pattern for all human activities—purely intellectual or physical. To master a musical instrument or a game, we begin at the lowest level of competence. The game seems boring as we have to learn the rules and play on a simple level. As with learning language, we feel frustrated. We see others play well and we imagine how that could feel, but we are locked in this mode of tedious practice and repetition. At such a point we either give in to our frustration and give up the process, or we proceed, intuiting the power that lies just around the corner. Slowly our ability rises and the frustration lowers. We don’t need to think so much; we are surprised by our fluency and connections that come to us in a flash.
Once we reach a certain level of mastery, we see there are higher levels and challenges. If we are disciplined and patient, we proceed. At each higher level, new pleasures and insights await us—ones not even suspected when we started out. We can take this as far as we want—in any human activity there is always a higher level to which we can aspire.
For thousands of years this concept of learning was an elemental part of practical wisdom. It was embedded in the concept of mastering a craft. Human survival depended on the construction of instruments, buildings, ships, and more. To build them well, a person had to learn the craft, spending years as an apprentice, advancing step by step. With the advent of the printing press and books that could be distributed widely, this discipline and patience was then applied to education—to formally gaining knowledge. Those who posed as people who possessed learning, without the years of accumulating knowledge, were thought of as charlatans and quacks, to be despised.
Today, however, we have reached a dangerous point in which this elemental wisdom is being forgotten. Much of this is due to the destructive side of technology. We all understand its immense benefits and the power it has brought us. But with the intense speed and ease with which we can get what we want, a new pattern of thinking has evolved. We are by nature creatures of impatience. It has always been hard for us to want something and not have the capacity to get it. The increased speed from technology accentuates this childish aspect of our character. The slow accumulation of knowledge seems unnecessarily boring. Learning should be fun, fast, and easy. On the Internet we can make instant connections, skimming along the surface from one subject to the next. We come to value breadth of knowledge over depth, the power to move here or there rather than digging deeper to the source of a problem and finding out how things tick.
We lose a sense of process. In such an atmosphere, charlatans sprout like weeds. They offer the age-old myth of the quick transformation—the shortcut