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Face some moments of truth
Thursday, 20 September 2007
What leads us to want to improve ourselves? Where is it that we can even find out how such an improvement can occur? The answer, generally is in moments of truth.
Most of us aren't born naturals at virtually anything. Heck, we can't even stand, walk and talk until we've had years of practice. Reading is such a difficult skill that billions of people world-wide never learn it. And yet you can become so skilled at some things that you almost forget you were once completely hopeless.
It's by facing moments of truth that such realisation and improvements come about.
Try to think back to when you first saw a page of text. It probably just looked like gobbledygook to you. All those weird symbols and line after line appeared on the page, but to you it was meaningless.
You faced a moment of truth - reading is something lots of people can do, but I can't. I'm hopeless at it.
And so you began the long, slow journey of learning the written alphabet. You picked up how to spell words and how they formed grammatically correct sentences. You worked out what all the strange little dots, strokes and squiggles at the end of a bunch of words meant. You managed to read. Now, you probably don't even think about it, but once all this probably made you very hot and bothered. Your own weakness stared you in the face and you realised you had a long, hard journey ahead of you.
When we're children, our skills and experience are so poor that we can't help but face all sorts of moments of truth. We know we can't drive, earn money, cook, tie our own shoelaces and so on. Every day we were faced with our own inadequacy.
But as adults, we can shelter ourselves from these unpleasant times. We can pretend to ourselves that we're more skilled and experienced than we are, simply by cocooning ourselves from the consequences of testing ourselves on reality.
And so, you meet people all the time who are sure that attractive colleague is in love with them, even without bothering to ask them out. Or who believe they're highly skilled artists, even though they never expose their art to public critique. Or that they're smarter than everybody else, even though their success in reality is limited and never really put to the test.
In order to grow, we need to let the world take us down a peg or two. We need to see that we're completely hopeless. That red hot feeling of inadequacy must be faced.
Yes, moments of truth are unpleasant, but they're also great sources of information.
If what you're doing isn't working in reality, this can hurt your feelings. But it also provides valuable feedback. At least now you know your approach is wrong. And you know how to test out different approaches to find one that's right.
Have the guts to face moments of truth in your life. Get out there and do things to test out your skills in the real world. You're likely to get some nasty surprises when you undertake such a journey. But you'll also discover that in the pain of inadequacy, lies the seeds of expertise.
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