Educating yourself
You don’t get told how to educate yourself – you have to find it out by yourself.
“What about school, what about university,” you might ask. It’s worth something, of course. It’s just not what you probably think it is.
I always considered myself above average in terms of insightfulness, inquisitiveness and intelligence. I thought highly of myself when it came to understanding the complexities of the world and of life.
How wrong I was, how stupid and arrogant.
I wouldn’t have found out though, if I had listened to what everyone told me to obey: the wisdom of experts, the insightfulness of reporters, the knowledge of educators and the well-intentioned advice of friends and family.
I came to a point where what I read didn’t reconcile with what I had always been told: Experts made stupid predictions all the time; magazine writers didn’t care about the truth if it didn’t fit with their story; there is a difference between good intentions and being good for you.
I paused for a moment and it all came down on me. The idiocy of believing what others tell you to, of accepting the reality others construct for you. There is only one way to grasp the meaning of your life and that is living it true to what you believe in and giving it a meaning by – finding out and then – doing what you were put on this earth to do.
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
Once you recognize that you are responsible for your choices, you start to grasp what responsibility really means. You stop adhering to the opinion’s of others. You stop caring so much about what others think of you. And you start paying attention to the choices you make.
What you read. What and whom you believe. What you do and do not do.
I stopped whining about not knowing how to succeed. It’s not about that. Success will come when you are ready for it. That, you have to prove.
I started by educating myself about my own ignorance.
