Tag: Learning

No more burnt offerings

Posted on by philipdodson

I heard on the radio today that there is a ‘smart’ oven available now that knows what type of food is in it, wow, and therefore how long to cook it for, thus avoiding future burnt offerings. Also, it is linked to Amazon’s Alexa, perhaps to order another whatever the oven is cooking, and has a camera so that you can watch your food cook, in fact, one person sent the stream to his sister on the other side of the world, who clearly must have an exciting life.

Great! Well, not really.

The quest for ever more technology by removing learning or the need to develop any skills in cooking, for example, is destroying everything that is human.

These kind of tech advances are not just for cookery, they are for almost everything in life now. The search for convenience and removing risk is killing the very essence of life. Soon we will be almost vacuous bodies, chipped and connected to the web like a dumb router for others data.

Burning the dinner leads to learning and keeps us human, sitting watching a smart oven cook it is the beginning of the end for human learning and life. And watching someone else’s dinner cook…WTF.

Keep burning the dinner.

Going back to the easy stuff

Posted on by philipdodson

When we come across hard things we habitually tend to look for easy things to do instead.

We’ll convince ourselves we need a break, or that would be better tackled later when we’ll be ready. The thing is there never is a time called ‘ready’.

We will talk ourselves out of the hard challenges as it requires putting ourselves at risk and it is uncertain. We opt for easy. Easy is comfortable and brings instant gratification, a chemical feel-good fix inside.

The thing is when we opt for easy whenever we encounter hard things in the future we have conditioned ourselves to search for easy. It becomes a habit that leads us to shy more and more from risk, from challenges and it leads to the search for certainty and avoidance.

If we tackle the hard things, we create a different habit that starts to look for hard things and then we learn and get even better. Initially, it is tough, although 99% of the time the things are never anywhere near as hard as our mind will imagine them, however, like all habits it gets more rewarding and therefore sustainable.

We can always go back to the easy stuff afterwards when we’ve done the hard tasks. However, more often than not the easy becomes less and less appealing the same way the hard things do when we avoid them.

Going back to easy stuff fades. Avoiding hard things leads to nothing.