Honor/Struggle

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I began with my obsession with constantly looking for ways to improve some time after I graduated from college. I found it strange that my thirst for knowledge and growth came after I left the institution that symbolizes a journey for academic growth.

However, I don’t think that I am alone in this. I began to think differently about a lot of things once I left school because I was no longer being corralled into thinking a certain way. I don’t think that this way is necessarily bad. Just not how I want to think.

I wanted to learn how to learn initially because I was struggling in college to keep up with my studies and my study habits weren’t good enough. I aspired to go to medical school so I knew that I needed to improve my skills in order to succeed in the way I always envisioned myself succeeding.

So I started researching on Google the proper ways to study, reading books about learning and even took some free online courses about the subject. I have done this on and off for almost two years. I think that I have researched enough to feel confident to structure my future studies in medical school better than I did in college.

But one of the things that I learned in my research, is that constant reflection is vital to finding new ways to improve ourselves. I believe that this is called Metacognition or “thinking about thinking”. Since first stumbling upon this concept, I have made it a habit to ask myself, “What am I missing? What don’t I see?”. This way, even if I don’t have an answer right away, I can have my subconscious working on the problem.

I rarely have an answer the first time. I think the point is to have your subconscious working on the problem because if we had the answers then we wouldn’t have to ask the questions, now would we?

Initially I thought that this was the only reason to ask these questions. However, in reflection, this was simple minded. Another side effect of asking myself what I am blind to, is to begin struggling with the information. Going through the discomfort of consistently realizing that my present self isn’t up to par.

Struggle, is a vital part of learning. This is something that I have more recently discovered. I forget what book is was that I first learned it from. I think it was either Deep Work by Cal Newport or Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer.

This isn’t anything that ever occurred to me in my previous 24 years of living. Purposefully letting myself struggle with something that I am learning to help myself learn the material better? It sounded paradoxical. I always thought that I learned something well if it was easy for me and I used the least amount of effort to remember or do a problem.

Fortunately for me, I was able to connect the dots a little bit the more I thought about it. If we were to use a mental model of the human body, we know that stress is vital to growth. If we don’t break down our muscles when we workout we’ll never grow bigger muscles, make more capillaries, etc. In order for vaccines to work we need to introduce a stressor (dead or part of virus) to our bodies so that they can learn to fight it in the future.

We can apply the same to learning and the brain. In order for our brain to understand that we want to keep certain information, we need to attach importance to the information. One way we can do that is by actively struggling with the information. (Another way is to engage as many of your senses as you can when trying to remember the information. This is one reason why you can visualize the streets you need to take to get to your friends house after going their once but you might struggle remembering a list of those same streets.)

I remember in Ultralearning, Scott Young recalled a study of West Point about students that had professors that were notorious for being more difficult that their peers. The students that had these professors in Calculus 1, ended up doing better in the more advanced Calculus courses compared to the others students that had more highly rated professors.

Scott Young talked about how they believed this is because the professors made the students struggle with the information. Often asking them to solve problems and think about the information in different ways to gain a deeper understanding. This decreased their short term performance but increased their performance in the future.

And that folks, brings us to one of the main ideas/questions that will guide this platform and its content: _How can I honor the struggle in order to seek the growth I desire? _

_What can I do to accept the fact that life’s most important lessons often on the other side of a dark tunnel?_

It seems that there is some serious wisdom in the saying “No Pain, No Gain”. I think it’s important to apply that same mindset to self improvement on our journey to become the future self that we desire to be. We have to be willing to mold our current self into what we want to be. The clay will be disfigured through the trials that journey itself will bring, but that is exactly what we want when we view life through the lens of honoring struggle. For it is these deformations that allow us to shape ourselves and thus our destinies.

We as humans are capable of great change and this is often what we want. We want a better job, to be in better shape, to get better grades, etc. But in order to make “better” the normal, we have travel down the path of struggle and hardship. This path has many different forms and anyone that walks its path is worthy of respect. As it takes great bravery to dare to dream to be greater than we currently are.

We must always dare to be greater than we currently are. We must walk the uncomfortable path as it is the only way to achieve anything worth having in this world. Anything that is worth having does not come easily.

Accepting our struggles is to honor our future knowledge.

“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul” -William Ernest Henley: Invictus

_Kenzo Cotton_