Knowledge

If you've lived life as you should and misfortune hasn't visited you in any significant way, you should know more now than you have at any previous moment in your life. If you've been paying attention as you went, you should also feel the most ignorant.

As a child, we knew everything. Why does the grass grow? To soften our falls. Why does the cat eat off the floor? Because she wants to. Whatever it was, we had an explanation for it and we had no reason to believe that it was wrong or incomplete. Then, we got schooled.

In math, we learned about addition and subtraction. Maybe we even learned about multiplication and division. We plugged these additional facts into our minds and moved on, still confident in our complete knowledge.

Then, structured language was upon us. Grammar and spelling were added to our minds and we learned that a massive book contained a list of all the words known in our language. One way or another, we decided we weren't going to learn it all. Maybe we recognized that learning it all was an insurmountable task. Maybe we didn't care. However it happened, we had become aware of a gap in our knowledge.

Science widened the perception of that gap. The ridiculous number of formulas was more than any of us wanted to shove into our brains. All the complexities of how the sciences interacted was more than we could think of. Furthermore, we had to realize that there were things nobody knew. In order for us to know them, we'd have to wait for someone to figure them out or discover them for ourselves.

Then we got to the infinite timeline of history. The uncountable number of places and events that had existed during all the years that came before us. Worse, even than undiscovered science, was that some of these facts had been lost forever. There were things that no one would ever know, least of all us. And so, the gap widened further.

If you took an interest in knowledge, you may have branched into a more specific field: Philosophy, computer science, psychology, chemistry, or any number of other possibilities. Each new fact you learned raised one or more new questions. As you built your mountain of knowledge you could see more and more of the land you hadn't covered yet.

While it is theoretically possible that a body of knowledge could exist that encompassed "all" of it, it could never be accumulated in the lifespan of a single human being. So, for the entirety of our lives, we must accept that for everything we learn, we will also learn of one or more things that we don't know. Every day, we will discover that we are even more ignorant than we previously thought.

There is an upside to this. An unobtainable amount of knowledge leaves infinite room for expansion. No matter how tall you make your mountain, you can always make it taller. Think about how much you know now and how powerful you are as a result of that knowledge. Now, imagine being twice as powerful and knowing that the potential exists to become even more powerful. That is the reality you face, given that you have have the life left to realize it. For every day you live, you have another opportunity to manifest this destiny. You will always have room to grow. You will always have more to learn.

Introspection

This is going to be a very important post for me as I believe that introspection is the single most important character trait one can possess. Introspection builds the foundation for how you can engineer the rest of the traits you choose to acquire.

It is extremely popular for people to watch the actions of others and make "educated" guesses about those people's intentions. Many people, most in fact, pay little or no mind to their own intentions. Several that I have personally spoken to claim that their feelings seem uncontrollable to them. Fixing this is where introspection comes in. Introspection is the ability to observe and analyze your wants and actions.

Without introspection you cannot grow. I do not mean to say that you cannot change. Anyone can do that. Without introspection, however, you will not be able to change for the better consistently. This is because without introspection you won't know if your changes were for better or for worse and it's more difficult to engineer the changes intentionally. Your changes will usually be random and meaningless. After one change you may say to yourself, "Man, life is going really great right now." Then, after another, everything will be terrible again and you won't even know why.

The best way to start practicing introspection is internal dialogue or "talking to yourself". Talking to yourself ends up on the butt-end of a lot of bad jokes. Worse than talking to yourself is arguing with yourself and further in the pit of self worthlessness is losing an argument with yourself. Not only are those three perceived to be on the wrong end of the good/bad scale, but they're also in the wrong order.

Let's think about what it means to lose an argument with yourself. First, to even have a conversation with yourself means that you acknowledge that you contain multiple parts. Have you ever had part of you that wanted to steal a cookie, but another part of you told you it was wrong? How about one part of you liking another boy or girl, but another that stopped you from telling him or her? These "parts" are some of the different pieces that make up you as a person.

If you are arguing with yourself, it means that two of these pieces have a differing opinion about something. In psychology this is referred to as "cognitive dissonance" and it's a terrible thing to leave unchecked. An internal argument means that the problem has been recognized. This is the first step to fixing it.

If you "lose" said argument, then one of those pieces has learned that it was wrong. If you've been following my logic you should realize that this is a huge success. This is the first step towards positive change. In this situation, it might also mean that the other part of you may know what is right. So, now you know how to change yourself to become better.

That's the first benefit of introspection: Controlled change.

The second part is actually the trickiest: Determining if the change was actually an improvement. It doesn't really matter how confident you are when you make the change. There's is always the potential for a missed detail. Figuring out if the change works or not actually requires a mix of introspection (to make sure you're doing things correctly) and extropection (to make sure you're doing the correct things). Most people are, coincidentally, very poor at extrospection, as well. That, however, is more of a social topic, so we'll discuss that later.

For now, somebody wants to talk to you.