Development

Life is learning and learning is development.

Develop is a verb that means to build up, grow, or improve gradually over time.

vocabulary.com

The keyword here is “gradually”. In order to develop your mental and physical capabilities, you need to first accept that you’ll need to be patient. Basically you won’t see your learning progress the next day.

Learning is simultaneously a luxury and a necessity for survival.

You can’t not learn and at the same time, you can not learn. Depending on what level it is your desire for learning (or self-development) is.

Usually the fundamentals of each field you learn are the essentials in order for you to make do with. The rest is already a form of specialization. When you start to specialize, you’ll notice that it demands a lot of extra effort, time and resources. The more you progress, the more luxurious your development in it becomes as a process.

Sadly, sometimes you simply can’t afford the time, energy and resources to do the specializing part of the developing process. That’s why making education free for everyone is such a necessity. On top of that making the way we educate each other more efficient as well. We can shorten our learning period from 17 years by learning the fundamentals on time. If societies would focus more on their school systems they could increase its efficiency. Decrease unnecessary school debt and increase the chances of empowering people to find their purpose and specialization-desire. There wouldn’t be such a high burnout and depression rate anymore. This idea is only going to help both citizens and the economy alike!

We lack the time, as a race, to waste it on inefficiency. Becoming a 100 years old may no longer be a rarity anymore but ain’t nobody interested in wasting it due to crappy old systems! We should have achieved more by now! More than half the planet are adults. Why is it that most of us can’t seem to behave as such and solve dire problems? Starting with the education system for one!

Rather than expecting everyone to make do with outdated tactics, societies should focus in empowering people to keep growing. Growth leads to innovation, yet to this day education still aims for complacency. The irony. You’re not going to come far as a nation with complacency. At some point rebellion takes its place.

I’m talking to you, next generation of humans

We might be whiny millennials and Zennials and what not, but the truth is, we will be the ones having to deal with these crappy old systems. There’s no use in blaming Boomers for not having been able to predict the future. The millennials are already dealing with it and they’re severely under-specialized and understaffed! Not to mention that the next generation already started complaining about the previous one, simply because they now know better! That’s kind of what we’re aiming for as a race so please bare in mind that if you have the time to complain, you also have the time to do something about it. That’s the adult thing to do.

It comes down to this generation and the next to protect current children from adulting too quickly (let people have their childhood please!). While simultaneously growing up themselves into stable, self-educated adults (because our educations are lacking). No longer is it sufficient to simply go to school and pass in order to fix the issues that are present around us on a global scale. In fact, this was never the case! Those who make it, are literally those who were able to invest the most in their intellect OR invest the most in other resources but their intellect!

We need to stop finding reasons to be angry at one another, causing more division and actually make shit happen and yes, it does start with you. We need to use that anger to increase our cooperation. Stop using labels because “the other one is being difficult” and stop pointing fingers. We’re no longer children, nor are we just our society’s citizens. We’re global citizens now and we better all be adult about it and take accountability for the world we’re living in.

When developing, purpose matters

It’s necessary to talk about purpose. People tend to think purpose is something that falls into your lap. In fact some of our societies actually brainwash their citizens into believing that (I’m looking at you North-Korea). It doesn’t, it requires a lot of work and self-knowledge. Two things that requires a certain amount of mental freedom. Mental freedom that you can’t have if you have to focus on silently surviving the whole time.

That’s why it’s necessary to find out what exactly you believe your purpose is in life. Preferably as soon as possible before investing time, energy and resources in self-developing skills you might not even need! After all once you’ve invested your time, energy and resources into something, you’re not getting it back! You can’t survive on knowledge and experience unless you can use it for trades and for real life applications.

To make matters more complex: humans are everchanging and so does their purpose, and guess what? That is okay, as long as it happens organically. Usually this happens after a big change such as the realization that we were stuck in a sunk-cost fallacy reasoning.

Remember: we’re adaptive creatures! Changing is what we do! But that’s also why time matters!