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recent
I have to put the Japanese study on hold for a couple days already. A Mind At A Time came from Amazon today. Maybe it's because I am getting tired of reading computer or business related books, which I have been for the past three years. Maybe it's because I see in this book a chance to finally understand myself, but I am pretty excited about this book.
Having graduated from high-school 8th from the bottom of my class (I wonder if mom and dad ever knew that...) I felt like a lot of people thought I was pretty much a looser. I didn't think so myself of course... the fact that I was able to do as well as I did with as little work as I did doesn't say much for my work ethic I guess, but in a way it showed me that I was not an idiot. What really baffles me now, as I look back, is that no one (even myself) realized the things I was doing great at. Certainly no one encouraged me to follow them. The focus was always on the things I didn't care about, and thus did poorly at.
For instance, I probably spent more time on drawing when I was a kid than any other single activity. Yet, there was never a real effort to encourage me to develop that, or even the general "artistic" theme. Granted, the sole reason for my high-school to exist was to push people into the ministry, and they could have cared less about art, but still, as much time as I spent on that you would think someone would have noticed that I was good, and encouraged me to do it more. Instead, I can only remember people telling me to stop. (mostly during algebra class). In fact there was one time in 5th grade when I was forbidden to draw for a year, and I was banned from having a paper and pencil in my room. Now that I am in Japan and have had a chance to see how popular pornographic cartoons are, I have too wonder how successful I might have become had I been encourage to draw more naked ladies instead.
In high-school, I didn't find what I excelled at until the end of Junior year, although from the beginning I had no shortage of people pointing out my apparent weaknesses. I was not a star athlete, although once I discovered how much fun it was to run around in circles until I couldn't feel my limbs during my Junior year track debut, I became much more interested and much better at any sport I tried. I think what I found so appealing about track was that it was a struggle against myself. Only. As long as I could get my best time yet, it didn't matter what the guy with legs six inches longer than mine (Jon) could do.
In high-school though, the biggest surprise for me was my ability to learn a foreign language with less struggle than most people. I remember one letter that went home from my Latin teacher telling my dad, "Kevin must have some abilities, languages just isn't one of them." I guess I had just never met any women from old Rome that caught my attention. Instead I met Maria, a Swede, and after studying Swedish, found that foreign languages are actually interesting. I went from being ranked dead last in German, to being among the top students. And even compared to the students who had better grades than I did, I could converse and express (basic) abstract idea circles around them. They were better at memorizing verb endings for the quiz, but take my word for it, having the perfect noun form is worthless if you can't build visualize the idea in the target language. I didn't even see it as a "gift" then. It was not until I actually came to Japan and saw that some people studied just as much as I did (a lot more than I ever did for anything in high-school) and just couldn't get it.
Yet, even then, I can think of no one other than my advisor at U of M that said anything more encouraging than "What can you do with that?".
Anyway, to round it up, I think the reason I am so excited about reading this book now, is that my biggest regret from when I was younger, was not exploring the ideas Dr. Levine puts forward. I never really stopped to say, "Hey let's see what I am good at and concentrate on that". I never knew it was an option.
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