Nothing You’ve Been Given in Life Will Be Wasted
We all have a lot.
We also have a lot of complaints.
Neither is really anything to celebrate. Stuff is useless. Complaints are draining.
I’ve never been much of a fighter. Outside of the sports field, I’ve been in one real fight. It was quite an adrenaline rush. Honestly, it was a one time guilty pleasure. I’m not looking to throw hands ever again and it was wrong, but it felt kind of right.
Ever since that fight I have been trying to avoid physical altercations. However, I believe we can never completely avoid mental conflict whether it is with others or inside our own head.
Humans naturally have an internal battle going on. We gather information: good and bad. Then, we have to decide to act on it or not. There is the conflict we have with ourself.
Consciousness
“What is Consciousness?” by Kristof Koch in the Scientific American to get a nice baseline of how the brain experiences things. It goes beyond the scope of this entry but is a fascinating explanatory piece.
Our internal battle occurs because we are aware of what is going on around us constantly outside of sleep and anesthesia.
Alison Pearce Stevens breaks down how we determine right from wrong in “What Part of Us Knows Right From Wrong?” In Science News for Students. A key point in this writing is that there is no moral spot in the brain. There is no gateway that things have to pass through to be right and just.
Your brain has a “moral network”. This is a complex system that helps determine right from wrong. In many cases it might happen too quickly to measure, but your brain a has a little debate.
Training
I am a firm believer that just about anything in the body can be trained. It doesn’t mean that anyone can be an Olympic sprinter, astrophysicist, or longshoreman, but it does mean that we can get better at things.
One of my favorite t-shirts I ever saw at a gift shop in a tourist town said “Real Men Don’t Skip Leg Day”. While I ultimately agree with this statement, despite the unpopular play to masculinity, there is something else that “real” people don’t skip - and that’s mind day. There are great benefits in pressing one's mental limits early and often in life. You are training it to handle stress, innovate, be nimble, and efficient.
2 Things, I Think
I see two main benefits from mental training.
The first is simply to understand just like any other type of training. It’s improvement. As you train the brain to think critically it becomes more efficient and as a result, better. An efficient brain is one that can complete its work as quickly and accurately as possible.
A great example is times tables when you were younger. At this point, you probably know that 5 x 5 = 25. You’ve memorized it. It’s actually beyond calculation. You’ll never need to “figure it out” again. However what if you had to multiply five by twenty-five. There’s a 5 X 5 in that equation that you don’t have to figure. You can efficiently figure out five times twenty five because one of it’s elements is at max efficiency (memorization).
In the physical realm we can look to athletics (as usual) for a simple example. Let’s say you actually are an Olympic sprinter (there’s gotta be a few in the impactmaker movement, right?). If you typically run the 100 meter dash in ten seconds flat (that is flying, by the way) and you want to increase your speed, you may want to work on your ability to exit the starting blocks.. If you can make your start more efficient, you’ll consistently have a better time.
The main benefit from mental training is related to habits. I cover habits in great depth in my book, “Personal Finance in a Public World”, because I think habits are important for anything that you want to improve whether it be financial, relationship driven, or part of general mental wellness.
Habits are so powerful because they enable us to not only be effective at things but also give them an expectation that we desire to fulfill. That power can be a great tool but it can also be terrible curse. We must develop habits wisely.
Mental training in the right areas gives us a tremendous ability to habitualize critical thinking and problem solving.
A mind that desires to think and create is something that will never be wasted.
The Bible Brain
This entry is about as scientific and mindful as E-Impact gets. I am a believer that faith and science must coexist. It’s very important that we strive to understand and believe something with conviction. Therefore, our belief stimulates faith and our understanding seeks science.
No specific faith or scientific understanding is needed to be an impactmaker. You just have to have the desire for them. The reality is that we are not intelligent and present enough to understand everything in our world or any other world that exists (partially why we have a long way to go to have hyper-efficient minds).
The best example of this state comes from a year long journey of mine.
The Guinness Book of World Records estimates that more than 5 billion copies of the Bible have been printed.
The best selling text of all time is the Bible. I have heard this numerous times and I don’t know the exact numbers but the sheer length of times that the Bible has existed gives it a pretty good situation to top the list.
An additional reason for the Bible’s great sales record, I believe, is the fact that you can’t really read through it like other books. It’s depth, variety of authors, translations, prophecies, parables, and commandments just don’t allow for a quick read. The actionable steps, which we love at E-Impact, are seemingly endless.
With all of the above said, I decided to read the Bible cover to cover in one chapter per day at a time. I didn’t want to use a plan. I wanted to just ready it without any direction-just let it take me where it does. A person of Christian faith might say, “where the Holy Spirit leads you”.
Reading the all-time bestseller from the first verse to the last was the mental version of me running a marathon around a track without training. The accomplishment and challenge were important to me. And while there is room for criticism for my methods I don’t believe the time was wasted.
As a point of comparison, I would sign up for the marathon again in a heartbeat over reading the Bible in the fashion that I did. It took about three years. There are 1,189 chapters and 365 days per year. The marathon lasted six and a half hours, and the pain lasted a few days. The reading was three years and the hours of mental anguish cannot be overstated. It was the hardest mental obstacle I ever voluntarily addressed (you could argue that it wasn’t completely voluntary as I felt some sort of calling or obligation to complete, not just start, the journey).
The faith lessons that I learned by my reading will be with me forever. I have a better understanding of how the beliefs I subscribe to developed and spread. My favorite book was Acts. If you must know, I found the most struggle with Isaiah.
In addition to the spiritual learnings, I also developed a mental fortitude that I’ve never known. My ego driven, “power through” approach to the run, the reading, and even my cancer battle (See Speaking of Impact episode 1 and 25) humbled me, but also built something. It creates habits.
In my three years of consistent reading (there were very few days that I did not read and in those cases where I knew it would be challenging to do so, I read ahead days before. That consistency made my mind expect and want a challenge every day. I have since and will no doubt continue to read scripture because I’ll never understand every piece completely, but that grave detail grew to be habitual.
Critical but Not Wasteful
My mind now seeks critical thinking opportunities on things much less significant to me than holy scripture. Admittedly, it creates some problems at times but I am learning to suppress the need for analysis in times where it is just not appropriate. But, the vast majority of times it is highly appropriate and very helpful. I don’t find myself thinking or saying often, “Oh, I don’t really care. That’s too hard to figure out.” I jump at the chance to decipher something.
I do my best to think critically but not waste time or brain power.
The Life We Have, The Impact We Make
Much of this blog is dedicated to stories and actions about making a positive impact in the world. It is by nature inspirational because of the subject matter but it is not a motivational effort. I write under the assumption that you are already motivated to make an impact. There may be times that you are discouraged. Yet, it always turns around because you are an impactmaker. It’s in your blood. It’s a calling and it’s habitual.
This entry might hit you a little differently though. It is to tell you that even the toughest challenges we take on, physical and mental, are completely worth the effort regardless of your or anyone else’s evaluation of the effort. The reason is that the good intentions of an impactmaker make any training or self improvement a positive experience. Your own improvement is in fact progress in your impact project.
You being better at figuring out a way to feed the homeless is good for feeding the homeless.
You being better at problem solving is better for anything you try to do that has problems to solve (just about everything save maybe the 5 x 5 times table).
Haste Makes Waste
The old saying is that “haste makes waste”. This is true and it’s why you don’t rush through things.
You don’t do “half squats” on leg day. You might as well skip it and not be a “real” man or woman like the shirt says.
You don’t avoid half of the mental machinations of critical thinking. There would then be no lesson regardless of the outcome. You might as well not even think about it.
You are an impactmaker. No opportunity that you have been given will be wasted.