|
For proof of your own potential genius, just look around you
Sunday, 12 March 2006
Fossil evidence suggests human beings appeared on Earth between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. For most of that time, we essentially lived like animals - hunting and gathering for a living. Of course, we also painted caves and told stories, but day-to-day existence was a struggle.
It was only about 10,000 years ago that agriculture began to appear in the Middle East, making the development of modern societies possible.
So what is the difference between you and a person struggling to scratch out a living from nature 50,000 years ago? Biologically nothing. You are essentially identical.
You just got lucky in the draw of history and were born into the modern world. Imagine instead that your places were swapped and you had to spend your days hunting and gathering, always at risk of injury, violence and disease. If you were transported back to when life was nasty, brutish and short.
Fortunately for you, that will never happen.
How this modern world was built from such humble beginnings must be the greatest story ever told. There we were, a few thousand generations back, dropped naked in the dust with nothing but rocks, animals and trees available to us. And he we are now, flying into space, building the internet, and destroying deadly microbes.
Have a look at the place you live. The cars, the roads, the airplanes the television, the buildings - all of these were built by us out of an unforgiving natural environment.
It's a bit like dropping a group of people on a desert island without any hope of rescue, then finding that their grandchildren managed to get back to civilization by building a helicopter out of the palm trees.
What ingenious creatures we are!
And there's more to it than that. Even things we see as so ordinary that they are mundane - chairs, glasses, spaghetti, light bulbs - all of these are the products of our minds. None was given to us. We had to discover how to make them out of the natural resources around us.
It's an astonishing feat, yet few people ever take the time to think about it.
We're so busy complaining there's nothing on TV - we forget just how amazing it is that we have TV at all. How did we go from banging rocks together a few thousand years ago to where we are today?
There is no one genius to thank for our good fortune. The tale of our ascent is one of ordinary people finding extraordinary ways to use the limited resources they'd been given. Sure, some people made bigger contributions than others, but it is the work of millions that has got us here. And we're still on the way up. In a hundred years, we will almost certainly have built up an even more astonishing array of knowledge and skills.
All of this creativity came from inside us. It is something that I have inside me, and you have inside you. It's the ability to find better ways of doing things, and to discover wonderful new things that have never existed before.
The proof of our genius is all around us - in our computers, our pianos, our languages, and our skyscrapers. It's in our music, our poetry, our paintings, and our stories.
What unbelievably creative creatures we are. It boggles the mind to think of how much we have come up with. Think of all the websites, the books, the songs, the movies, the plays, the dances, and the recipes that are out there. None of these fell out of the sky. The are the result of our own inventiveness and hard work.
If you want proof of your own inner genius, you don't have to think of famous people in far away places. Instead, simply look around you. The evidence of your own potential is abundantly available.
 | Learn the skill of resilience | | I saw a very interesting TV documentary a couple of weeks back on the issue of happiness. It was asking what makes us happy and what makes happy people different from those who aren't. | | It's hard to appreciate the emotional impact of something until you experience it | | When I was a young adult, the father of a friend of mine passed away. My friend had a very close relationship with his father, and was devastated. He went into a deep depression for a number of months. |  | Seven simple ways to ruin your friendships | | I've met a lot of lonely people over the years - quite a few of whom I've gotten to know well. Often, they claim to have real trouble establishing friendships. Usually, they're making simple mistakes that virtually guarantee to ruin most of their chances. Here are some of the main ones. |  | Operate in the real world | | I grew up in a somewhat academic family. Many of my parent's friend are academics, and I've spent a lot of time socialising with such people. My own career has been mostly in the business world. What strikes me is how different their world-view of how things operate is to what I've experienced. | | Three good tricks for catching out liars | | The world is filled with liars. We all tell porkies to some degree in order to get what we want. Of course, some people lie more often than others. | | Self-esteem has to be earned | | It seems obvious to anyone who thinks about it for a moment, that sound decisions must be based upon good information. If we say that good information is basically "the truth" and look at decisions as those that are made to improve our lives, it seems strange that a modern semi-religion has grown around encouraging us to lie to ourselves. The lie I'm talking about is, of course, building up our "self-esteem". |  | Collect some achievements you can be proud of | | We all go through difficult times in our lives. When things don't turn out as we might have wished and the world seems to press violently down on us from all sides. We all have times when we feel terribly alone. | | My favorite productivity tools | | Most of us want to get more done. The tools we come up with often help us to achieve this goal. Here are my favorite productivity tools. | | Play out in the real world, not imaginary ones | | One of the blessings and the curses of modern life is the endless potential for us to get lost in imaginary worlds. Television, books, games, the internet, magazines and many other fantasy environments beckon us from every direction. |  | How to develop more sophisticated taste | | We live in an impatient world. Technology has given up unprecedented control over what we consume. If you don’t like what you’re watching on TV, there’s a hundred other channels just waiting for you to flick over to them. |
New articles are being added all the time, so make sure you bookmark Paul's Tips and come back.
|
|