Shards of Consciousness

I used to complain about my children's use of cheat codes and game guides when they were playing video games. I thought they took away the challenge, and made it too easy to play the game.

Then I tried to play a few of the games they played. If you have ever done this, even some of the 'easy' ones, you have an idea of how difficult some of these games can be. Now imagine yourself as a ten year old, and you can see how, without some help teaching you how to play the game and get through the hard spots, the game will quickly stop being fun and turn into an exercise in futility and frustration.

Speaking in the context of the difference between productivity and activity Trevor Hampel reminded me of the need for, and the role of teachers in life when he said

While I agree with Chris I would counter his argument to say that, for me, reading other blogs is still quite an important part of my day. I am still very much in a learning curve. Each day I learn more about this thing called blogging. It’s my apprenticeship stage in the craft.

Similarly, just over a decade ago when I started writing seriously I went to seminars, workshops, subscribed to writing magazines and read every book on writing I could get my hands on. That was my apprenticeship in writing.

If a video game is hard enough to require the aid of a guide, how much more so is real life? A game has clear rules and a goal - a way to win. Life doesn't. Every culture defines it's own rules, and these change over time. Many are never overtly stated, and some that are overt are totally ignored by the participants in the culture. Nor does life have a predefined goal. This is something each and every one of us has to define for ourselves.

While you are growing up you don't have much choice in your teachers. Your first teachers, and your most influential role models, are the members of your family. Your innate nature combines with the what you experience in your childhood to create your basic thought and behavior patterns.

As you grow older you have friends, television, teachers, and books. As with your family, you don't usually have much choice in who or what fulfills these roles. They are matter of environment and convenience, but you continue to be shaped by what you experience with them and by your encounters with the wider world around you.

As you reach puberty and young adulthood you reach a new level of awareness and overt control over what behaviors and thought patterns you make a part of your self. You become able to engage in self-reflection, finally achieving the capacity to make conscious changes in who you are and decisions about what goals you want to pursue.

Until this point your teachers and role models were largely outside your control - either thrust upon you by outside forces or by unconscious levels of your own being. Now, though, your development is such that you can assume some control of who, and what, your teachers are. You can make conscious decisions that are not driven purely by unconscious or external forces. Many people don't make these choices. The results in their lives speaks for themselves. You have only to look around at your circle of family and friends or watch the daily news to see the results of not taking control of who and what fulfills the roles of teachers and mentors in your life.

Now is the time to choose wisely. No one of us is perfect. You have a unique set of characteristics that you bring into this life - strengths and weaknesses, good points and bad. Some of your childhood role models, maybe most of them, taught you ineffective or self-defeating ways to work to your goals. With conscious thought and self-reflection you have the capacity to choose new teachers who can help you learn more effective ways to respond to the world in order to reach your goals.

No matter what your goals, there are teachers to help you achieve them. These teachers may be in the form of actual people whom you consciously try to emulate, mentors and coaches from whom you consciously try to learn. These teachers may be workshops, classes, or books that you attend or study to learn new things you can put into practice in your life. You are the one who controls who fulfills these roles in your life.

There are good teachers and there are bad teachers, good sources of information and bad sources of information. When you are young you don't have the breadth of experience to choose wisely between them, but as you get older you begin to gain the skills and knowledge to be able to differentiate between the two. Choose wisely.