Is it possible to live an uneffected life? Yesterday I finally initiated my study of Marketing. I stopped in at Barnes and Noble, picked up Marketing for Dummies and commenced to read. My principle concern about my personal study of Marketing was that, unlike French, Microeconomics and Philosophy, Marketing may have no bearing on my real life. I came to find that I was seriously incorrect.
Marketing is the technique by which businesses attract customers, politicians attract voters, singles attract singles, orphaned dogs attract owners, etc. Some Marketing techniques can be more or less effective than others (for example, fresh young men who wander through the park pinching strange women have a pretty ineffective way of attracting mates), but every human alive markets something at some point or another.
And I have something profoundly important to market - Pandidactism. And I feel pretty sure that whatever I have done up to this point to market the concept has been pretty ineffective. So now I'm excited to thoroughly study the art of Marketing.
A similar realizational phenomenon has occurred as my dad has taught me the science of computer programming. I was under the assumption that, much as learning how to create a well-run program may be interesting and enlightening, such knowledge would have no real bearing on my life, as I have no intention at the moment of pursuing a career as a software engineer. How wrong I was! As it turns out, learning and using a programming language is a powerful way to learn the art of logic and discipline oneself therein, for if one submits an even vaguely illogical command, the program will simply refuse to work.
I have never learned anything that has truly had no effect on me. I suppose there is a lesson to be learned in this. It is as impossible to be uneffected by something we learn as it is for the earth's surface to be uneffected after collision with a meteor. Each moment that we exist, we are learning. According to Gilbert Highet, one can never stop having the experience "of watching one's own mind and how it produces new interests, responds to new stimuli, and develops new thoughts, apparently without effort and almost independently of own's own conscious control." So to assume that learning such-and-such a subject would be a waste, that we would emerge uneffected thereby, would be fallacious in the highest degree.
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Well put. I have a friend who wanted to learn a new technology. So did I. But that night, he read two white papers on it, and within a week, he had entirely outstripped me in knowledge of the subject. He started simply by reading two white papers, and his life was never the same. He had stepped up to a different landscape; vistas were open to him that I could not see.
ReplyDeleteLearning does that. It lifts us. And though we do not change the landscape, our journey through it changes us.