Where the hell have I been?

Ok, so I am not going into all the details of what I have been up to for the past couple of months when I have not been posting. Instead I will share with you the insights that have come out of my abscence.
First, when you start blogging you become more observant both of your own actions and of others.
This first observation has taken me to find out some other stuff most of which I will relate to golf or martial arts or writing since those are the areas I actually understand at some level.

I have observed that people who do reallywell in elementary and high school, often do less well outside of those arenas. As I am one of those people I have taken a fairly hard look at the process of educating the gifted (as we were called). The first thing I notice is that we were expected to be more grown up than our counterparts, for example no one expects the others to do a presentation for anyone outside the school especially not when there are visitors to the school. In some cases we aren't even warned in advance of the event. As I look back on this I realize that many of those teachers thought they were providing a great opportunity but few thought of the stress that can put on a child. Aside for needing to be correct, the very singling out of the person for special positive treatment can cause problems with those who are singled out for corrective treatment. I have observed with some children that this can result in a dumbing down of the child's in class interaction so s/he can play more comfortably with their peers. Unfortunately, this can result in the resulting adult feeling more comfortable with people who do not challenge them intellectually later in life.

Added to this problem is what results from the child always succeeding at school tasks with very little effort. This actually has two negative results first the child never learns the lesson of having to work hard to learn anything which can prevent them from enjoying the feeling of working for a success. Unfortunately later when they need to learn something e.g. golf, martial arts or even academics, then have difficulty sticking to the task as they feel they should already know it. The second problem is one of self-motivation, which may actually be a subset of the first issue. Self-motivation requires the feeling that hard work will payoff, never work hard, never get the payoff, never do any hard work.

Finally this has led to what I am now starting to think of as the Success Tripod: Repetition, Discipline, Responsibility. Maybe this is old news to most people but I don't think anyone ever articulated it to me. It goes like this; as kids we do things repetitively and often we hate to do it because we don't really know why we are going over something ad nauseum. What we don't realize is that we are learning the first and most important step in success - the ability to do something over and over again without necessarily seeing an immediate benefit.

The successes we achieve in our schoolwork by doing this leads to the second leg of the tripod, Discipline. I define discipline as doing the thing we don't want to do, when we don't want to do it. In school we were forced but now we start to force ourselves this not only develops discipline it also displays it.

This leads to the final leg, Responsibility. By this I mean being personally responsible for any outcomes over which we have control. This includes taking responsibility for things we have done that may have gone wrong as well as those that have ended well.

Without all three legs our tripod cannot stand. And yet they feed off each other in many ways, anyone who looks honestly at their life can easily see how for every success they achieved these three elements were there in greater or lesser degrees. The question then becomes how do we teach these to children and how if a person does not learn them as a child we can teach them to adults. It would seem that teaching this would be a first step in changing people's lives for the better and in fact as I write this I wonder if maybe this is what so much of our study into the human condition is really for, to find out why some are able to achieve while others with even greater raw abilities somethimes fail. I am going to keep thinking about this in relation to my own inability to post more regularly and what it reveals about me.