It's amazing how trying to explain something often makes you better understand that same thing you are trying to explain. Just like teaching a subject makes you learn more about it. I used to help my friends prepare for exams in high-school and college. I got asked a few times how did I manage to get such good grades without studying myself... I shrugged.
I'm convinced now that the best way to understand a subject is to explain it to someone else. It's active vs. passive learning. For a system to learn there needs to be action, tinkering action. We like to think we are like sponges, just absorbing information around us. Yes, if we are sponges, we will absorb information, but the data will be incomplete. Complete information means getting feedback from action, experiencing a re-action to your action. One-sided information is flawed, we need an information loop to truly understand stuff.
I was thinking about this last night at dinner. My wife and I were talking about life and our approach to it. I was telling her that I see myself as myself within a group of people, never as myself alone. I like to improve the life of people around me, and that includes me, of course. I like to improve my own life, and that does not exclude the people around me. I want to improve the life of my family, my neighborhood, my customers, my community. Make a better world, my world. It is a loop, me and my community, never one-sided. It's not about me giving or receiving, but rather a system. I am both myself AND my community.
It's not rational. The need of me wanting to improve the world I live in, I mean. I can come up with rational explanations to it, but I won't, because it's not rational, and doing so will show a flawed description of the cause. What causes me to be this way is bigger than me, older, ancient, archaic. Instead of trying to figure out the reasons for things in our minds, better to live the reasons in your mind and test them constantly. Make your thoughts be a result of your actions, not your actions a result of your thoughts. If you really want to learn, go out and do things, try things, small, super small, large, anything. There is no such thing as a waste of time when you are a person of action.
I spent many years in my youth making excuses for myself to avoid this feedback loop that true life is... being a sponge. I made all kinds of excuses. I often thought that I was in a huge disadvantage against my friends and people around me in school because my parents didn't have money. I had great excuses, very rational and well thought. I felt my life was like playing poker with no chips left to play with. No leverage. But that was not the right approach. That is a passive approach, like seeing yourself as a potato, a sponge, or a rock. And we are not potatoes, or sponges, or rocks. We are human beings, and human beings are beings of actions, we make things around us better.
Thoughts are merely a consequence of action. Same goes for words, actually. Don't look at what people say, look at what people do. Our actions come from a deep place way beyond reason. I like to tell my wife that actions come from our heart, and that we need to open our hearts to life, to have confidence in people, to truly live. I love Jerry McGuire, one of my favorite movies if not my favorite.
That's how I live my life at 40 years old. That's how I'm building my company today. True value comes from improving people's life. Creating a system that improves people's life will never get old, will always add value.
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