If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging, my grandfather said. I had been quite overwhelmed again at school, and I recalled him muttering these words while he worked on a tractor engine. He stepped back from all of the disassembled pieces, and then had some bright epiphany and began filing down on one piece and reassembled them, magically (to me) fixing the tractor. His little sayings often bounced off my skull. Like most kids, I shut my ears to advice but opened my eyes to an example when it appeared; then, his words would emerge from some hidden vault in my brain. At school, I had been having trouble understanding the long solutions being taught in my trigonometry class. When the teacher became frustrated with me, and had me repeat it again and again, but on repetition, my errors seemed to increase rather than decrease. It felt like I was digging a deeper hole, so finally I stopped. Raising my hand, I asked if it helped that I could already answer the problem. The teacher sneered, The answer is useless, if you dont know how you arrived at it. You must master these specific solutions in order to move on to the next higher class. Gingerly lifting my hand again, the teacher frustratingly glared at me awaiting my next question. I cautiously approached the chalkboard, Since I cant seem to get the gist of this formula, can you help me understand how Im arriving at the answers without it? It seems like a short-cut to the formula if you just do it a little differently this way, I said as I began to put chalk to board with my idea. JUST STOP! He erupted, Go to the Principals office NOW, Scott! Youre not disrupting my class with these silly notions any longer! My head swam with insults at myself for not being able to just keep my mouth shut and just memorize what he was teaching. Another day of detention and Im going to get a suspension, I lamented, thinking of how disappointed my mom would be. She wasnt. And she encouraged me to come up with any idea I wanted. Many will be mistakes that others have already made, but if you use that noggin of yours, youll come up with down smart way to figure it out for yourself, she said and her confidence seeped into my cells. This week, I am finishing the design of a new program module: to retain and grow muscle, mobility and movement at middle-age. We lose about 1% of muscle mass per year starting around age 45, if we dont strength train. Add the stress of travel, work, finances and sub-optimally timed recovery and that muscle mass loss accelerates. The typical approach to this problem is to try to solve it by: lifting more - eating more. But, looking at this problem from a multi-dimensional perspective, both exercising and eating are received in the body as stressors. So, increasing them, (seemingly counter-logically) results in more rapid muscle loss. The reality is: if you lift more + you eat more = you lose more (muscle.) In the past few years, Ive been working with units comprising more seasoned personnel, who come to me because I travel as much as they do. So, instead of digging a deeper hole using the conventional approach to fitness, I began sharing my alternate route to climb out of the hole we dig accelerating this phenomenon of middle-age decay. Using a silly series of innovative strategies, my approach became universally successful across the demographic of individuals that I was asked if I would release it to the public so it could be shared with colleagues and fellow units. When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you do is stop digging; the second thing you do is to find an alternative way to climb out. Education has improved in the 35 years since my trigonometry class. Yet, even today the most difficult challenge children face does not regard a failure to memorize, but the loss of confidence in their ability to see a problem, experience dissatisfaction with the current solutions, and explore their ideas for finding creative alternatives. Yes, they will make mistakes, but why rob them of that journey; and why rob ourselves of the creative solutions they might discover for us? Creativity compels us to explore a problem; yet requires that we make mistakes. Art intuits which mistakes to keep, investigate and magically stimulates radical ideas. Science then applies the lessons we learn through that journey. What is science without creativity and art? Memorization. Yes we need to memorize solutions, but when the problem is getting worse - not better, when we are digging ourselves into a deeper hole, memorization should be paused. When you find yourself in a hole, consider my grandfathers simple wisdom: first, stop digging. Then, look around. The litter of debris we find surrounding us may assemble into a ladder for us to climb out. We are Legion, Scott Sonnon A Mountain Stands: Confessions of a Suppressed Genius AMountainStands
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 11:05:27 +0000
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