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Chapter 1: Inventing Your Future

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” Old adage.

Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. … The best way to predict the future is to invent it. (Alan Kay)

Each chapter begins with one or more quotations. Read the first one given above. Think about what it means to you.

Does it seem to you that there are lots of people who try to tell you what to do? Often they try to convince you that they have your best interests in mind. “It will be good for you.” Moreover, often they are correct. However, just because they might be correct does not mean you will do what they say. Perhaps you are not thirsty, or perhaps you don’t like to be told what to do.

Now, consider the second quotation. Alan Kay has made many important contributions to the field of computers. Throughout his life, he has had visions of what he wanted to do—and he has followed his visions. One might say that he has invented his future.

As you live your life, you are continually inventing your future. This book will help you plan educational aspects of your future.

Learning to Read and Reading to Learn

The fact that you are reading this book proves that you have a good brain and have learned a lot. Did you know that writing was invented just a little over 5,000 years ago? If you were born before that time, the only way you could have learned to read would have been to invent writing. The invention of reading and writing certainly changed the world!

How did you learn to read? If you are like most people, the process began long before you started in kindergarten or the first grade. You saw your parents and caregivers reading. They read stories to you. They helped you learn the alphabet and the 10 digits. Perhaps they taught you to recognize your printed name and some other words.

When you got into kindergarten and the first grade, reading became a big deal. The teachers spent a lot of time helping you learn to read. They really wanted you to learn to read. Going back to the “leading a horse to water” adage, they led you to the printed word. They tried really hard to help you learn to read.

Your parents, caregivers, and teachers all strongly believed that it would be good for you to learn to read. They knew that reading would be quite useful to you as you got older. Part of the “learn to read” goal is that students should learn to read well enough so they can use their reading skills in learning new things.

Think about this in terms of the Web. The Web is the world’s largest library. It does not contain all of the world’s collected information, but it sure contains a lot. Moreover, it is growing very fast. Our education system feels that all students should learn to read well enough so they can take advantage of libraries. If you want to know something, one option is to read about it.

Now, ask yourself. Have you learned to read well enough so that it is easy to read and understand books, magazines, and other library materials? Are you skilled in looking up stuff on the Web? If yes, GREAT! If not, what are you doing about it? Are you blaming your teachers and schools? Or, are you now mature enough to blame yourself?

Most Important Idea in This Book

The previous paragraph is the key to this book. The book assumes that you are mature enough to begin to do the following:

1. Make personal decisions about what you want to learn and how well you want to learn it. This applies to both school and non-school situations.

2. Judge for yourself if your current level of knowledge and skill meets your current needs and the needs you believe you will have in the future.

Each year, as your brain continues to mature and as you get better educated, you can get better at doing 1-2 above. Each year you can take more responsibility for your own education. Each year you can take more responsibility for your own education. That is the most important idea in this book.

An Example

Suppose that you like to listen to music. There are certain types of music and certain recording artists that you really like. Finally, suppose that you have some recording, storage, and playback hardware. Now, ask yourself:

1. How did you learn about this music? (Probably your school teachers did not teach you about it.)

2. How did you learn how to collect this music and use your hardware? (Again, probably not from your school teachers.)

3. What do you know about the musical artists and their recording groups? Are you satisfied with your level of knowledge?

Of course, not everybody is interested in collecting and listening to music. If doing so interests you, you can build your expertise in this area. In the process, you will learn how to build a collection. You will learn how to learn about recording artists, their recording groups, and the production companies.

If you later become interested in a different type of music, you can use your learning and experience as a starting point for building a different collection and building knowledge in this different area of music. That is, you will have a lifelong set of learned skills that can be transferred to situations you will face in the future.

Expertise

In any area that that you know something about, you can think about how good you are in the area. What is your level of expertise? The diagram given in Figure 1.1 give a way to think about this task from an adult point of view.

Figure 1.1. An expertise scale.

I call this an adult-oriented scale because many adults tend to think in getting a good job and having the expertise to do well on the job. Notice the label “World class” near the right end of the scale. In your everyday life you are exposed to world class athletes, actors, and musicians.

However, if you are in middle school, you are probably not thinking too much about what jobs you might have when you get to be an adult. You might be spending more time thinking about the types of things you like to do and may well continue to like far into the future. That is why the diagram groups 2 and 3 together.

Many adults have both a vocation and some avocations. That is, they have a job or other regular activity (such as homemaker) and hobbies. Many artists, craftspeople, and musicians, for example, hold a “day job” to make a living so they can afford to pursue their much deeper interest in their avocations.

Final Remarks

A later chapter of this book talks about the time, effort, and drive that it takes to get really good at something. In brief summary, it takes a great deal of time and effort to develop your built-in (that is, innate) gifts.

If you like to play computer games or other types of games , then you may have seen this in your struggles to get to be good in playing a game. With help from a knowledgeable teacher, you can completely master the game of tic-tac-toe in a short time. Various computer games and board games may take tens to hundreds of hours to learn to play really well. Various sports and intellectual games such as chess, bridge, and poker take thousands of hours to achieve a high level of performance.

Thus, I encourage you to start thinking about what you want to become good at. Select one or more areas and begin to put in “serious” time and effort in increasing your expertise in the area.

Questions to Ponder

Each chapter ends with a few questions to ponder. This “pondering (thinking) will help you to learn more about yourself. That, in turn, will help you to take more responsibility for inventing your own educational future.

1. Have you decided what you want to do or what you want to be when you become an adult? Do you know some people who are good role models? What are you doing now and what will you do in the future so you will have the needed level of expertise?

2. Think about two or three things that you are good at (relative to other things you do). How can you tell you are good at something? What did you do to get good at the things you are relatively good at?

3. Name and think about at least one thing in this chapter that you found interesting and relevant to your life. (If you can’t do this, you are probably wasting your time reading this book.)

Expertise

Note to self: Reading level in this chapter is too high.

You are good at doing some things and not so good at doing other things. Your level of expertise varies. This chapter is about expertise—what it is, how to measure it, and how to increase it.

There a many different areas in which people strive to build their expertise. One person might want to be a good carpenter or a plumber. Another might want to be good in math and the sciences. A third might want be good at basketball or ping-pong.

To simplify things, I use the word discipline to refer to any area where one might want to gain a high level of expertise. Thus, playing computer games and writing poetry are both disciplines.

What is Expertise in a Discipline?

Figure 2.1 is the same expertise scale as Figure 1.1. At the left end of the scale, a person knows very little about a discipline. At the right end, the person is one of the best in the world in the discipline.

Figure 2.1. An expertise scale.

Think of a discipline that interests you. Where does it fit on the scale? You probably know people who are lower on the scale and people who are higher on the scale. Now do the same thing for another discipline. Practice until you are fairly good at judging your levels of expertise.

Competitive people like to judge their expertise against others. Collaborative people tend to think in terms of meeting their personal needs and interests. This is an important idea. Some people are very competitive. Other people are very collaborative.

When I was your age, I enjoyed playing football, basketball and softball. I was better than some of my peers and not as good as some of them. I wasn’t very good relative to my older brother and his friends.

I spent a lot of time playing these sports. My expertise levels increased through practice, physical growth, and mental growth. However, I was only moderately good. I wore thick glasses, was overweight, had a relatively slow reaction time, and had low dexterity. No matter how hard I tried, I was never going to have a high level of expertise in sports.

During this time, I found other disciplines that interested me. I was good at math, board games, and card games. I learned to play chess and soon became better that many of my friends.

Success tends to breed success. Many people are motivated to learn and do the disciplines they can do well.

However, “do well” does not need to be a competitive thing. In many situations, doing well means doing well enough to meet your personal needs. For example, many people read a lot because they experience success in reading for pleasure. What difference does it make if someone I know can faster than me? I am motivated by the fun I get out of reading. I read well enough to enjoy reading.

Nature and Nurture

We are all born with a wide variety of “gifts” (natural abilities). Each of us has a distinct set of genes. Even identical twins do not the same exact genetic makeup. Nature endows each of us with a unique set of gifts.

A genetic makeup represents potential. Each person has different potentials. Well before you were born, your environment affected your potentials. A poor environment can damage a person physically and mentally. There is a lot known about how poor nutrition, various drugs, lead poisoning, and so on can lead to a newborn having reduced physical and mental potentials.

Damages to one’s potential can occur throughout life. In addition, there may be physical and mental damage due to accidents, air pollution, diseases, and so on. On the bright side, a good home environment and a good education can help you to achieve your potentials.

Both nature (genetics) and nurture (environment) contribute to expertise. As a personal example, my parents were mathematicians. I have “good” math genes. I had a strongly supportive math environment that came from my parents and good schools. This combination of nature and nurture helped me as I earned a doctor’s degree in math.

Measuring Levels of Expertise

How well can you read? How well can you do math? How good are you in bowling, tennis, or basketball? The first two questions can be answered through taking written tests. Schools use such tests to see how well their students are doing compared to national averages. Countries use such tests to compare themselves to other countries.

Some written tests can be computerized. Suppose, for example, you want to know how well you can read. There are free tests available on the Web that can be used to measure speed and comprehension. The site https://rocketreader.com/cgi-bin/portal/fun_tests/perception is simple and easy to use. The site contains an educational but more challenging reading test. I believe the content of the reading material is well worth reading. ). This site indicates that on average, people read about 25% slower from a computer screen than when reading hardcopy from good quality paper.

It can be more difficult to measure the expertise level of an athlete. Bowling is easy enough, because a bowler gets a score on a game. This score depends just of the performance of the bowler. This can be compared with scores of other bowlers.

In tennis and basketball, one is competing against other players. In doubles tennis and in basketball, one is a member of a team. It is a greater challenge to measure individual performance in a team environment.

How Long Does It Take?

It doesn’t take very long to move above the absolute novice level in a discipline. For example, suppose that you have never played chess. With a modest number of minutes of instruction, you can learn the rules of the game. With a little more instruction and practice, you can play the game.

Then, with another 15 years or so of hard work (averaging 30 to 40 hours or more per week) you can get to be about as good as you will ever be. If your natural gifts in this area are high, you will be world class, doing well in international tournaments.

Many people have studied high level experts and how long it took them to become world class. Depending on the discipline, it takes 10 to 15 years or more. It takes good instruction and coaching. It takes a high level of self-discipline.

In most cases, age makes a difference. If you want to be a world-class athlete or scientist, you need to start the years of effort when you are relatively young.

In summary, to become world class in a discipline takes the right combination of both nature and nurture, and it takes many years of hard work aided by good teachers and coaches.

On the other hand, consider the following quote:

“After forty years of intensive research on school learning in the United States as well as abroad, my conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn if provided with appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.” (Benjamin Bloom, Developing Talent in Young People, 1985)

What this says is you can get to be pretty good at almost anything you want to do. The opportunities are there. It is up to you to put in the time and effort to take advantage of the opportunities.

Final Remarks

You have natural gifts in many different areas. You can develop these gifts through study and practice.

Our school system selects some areas in which it wants all students to develop their gifts. Thus, for example, it feels that all students should learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. It feels that all students should learn science and social science. It feels that all students should develop skills in interacting with other people and become responsible adults.

Schools touch on only a few of the areas in which you might want to develop your natural gifts. You have ample time and energy to develop personally useful levels of expertise in many different areas. You get to decide what areas you will pursue.

Questions to Ponder

1. Do you sometimes feel “bored?” If so, what do you do when you are bored? Do you “waste” the time and opportunity? Or, do you spend time exploring new disciplines, developing new areas of expertise?

2. Think about two or three areas in which you are pretty good. Estimate how many hours you have spent achieving your current level of expertise in each of these areas.

3. Name and think about at least one thing in this chapter that you found interesting and relevant to your life. (If you can’t do this, you are probably wasting your time reading this book.)