Importance of Importance

I used to think i couldn't learn. My life K-12 was pretty miserable. Except when I found (or they found me) a teacher who saw my potential with just a little help. It wasn't until my first quarter in college, after spending years in the Air Force, when I took a class called, Study Skills. This article isn't just about education or college. I'm simply using that as an example.

This is really all about, life. About seeing and being able to see what is really there and needs to be.

Sunrise from my home in Bremerton

I realized, that yes, one actually can learn. There is a method. One that works. I have no idea why that wasn't taught in grade school. I knew others could learn more easily, I just couldn't figure out how they did it. Until it was explained to me.

During my university years toward my eventual B.A. in psychology, my main professor and adviser once said that the reason people can't remember things is they didn't think they were important enough to bother to remember.

Or, they didn't make them important enough to remember. Many, maybe even most (though I'd dispute that from what I've seen of late), seem to have an innate ability to remember things..I for one, do not have that ability come easy to me.

Another issue is taking things from short term memory and putting them into long term memory.

Either way it became clear to me at some point that it's all about importance.

Consider. You are in a serious traumatizing situation. It's one of those times when for the rest of your life you will never be able to forget what happened. Why? Because it was important at the time. One way or another, it was made to be important. Very important. More important than anything.

And so it was when I was in college. I realized I had to make things important to me. I had to make my mission getting that college degree. Secondary were good grades. When there was a choice between learning and good grades, I would go with learning. My entire experience of college therefore was two fold.

Get a degree and learn (but after all, do try to keep up your grades, so maybe 2.5 fold?).

Through life, once one is degreed, there is an alternating issue of which is more important. The degree, or the grades that brought it about? I never once had anyone check if I had good grades toward my degree, and seldom did they even check if I did have a degree. Some did, however.

For the most part I'd say learning is far more important than either grades or degree. However, one needs the degree so much of the time in order to be better situated in order to need and use that learning.

Thus it may be more important to get the degree in a sense, than to learn. followed up by good grades. Of course you need grades good enough (C or above) in one's major area of study in order to move past that class (and not have to retake it). But aside from all that, learning really is or should be, paramount. I saw too may younger students who thought partying was the most important aspect of college. And perhaps sadly, some of them may now be running companies, or even more sadly, parts of our government.

Learning really is more important in the end than anything else. More important than party time, rest, relaxation, personal relationships, or even (oh no!), money.

Beyond all that and perhaps intrinsic with it it, it is really all about what is important enough to remember, and what isn't.

IF you make the entire situation important, that is, if you see college in this case, as your life depending upon learning and graduating (at times more specifically on certain classes or papers), if it is most important to you and you see it as your life depending upon it, you will learn. And you will remember.

Of course, you also need to follow certain obvious and reasonable practices. Did you know if you do not review what has happened, or what you have learned, you can forget 80%? I had a method (one I was taught) to take notes during class, after class as soon as possible, review those notes, any handouts, or papers or content from that class. Review it that night briefly. Then the end of the week and finally at the end of the month.

Thus you force it all into longer term memory. You make it important. but you also make it important in class as you are learning new material, and see it, experience it, as you life depending on it. Not to stress yourself out about it, but to simply focus, being mindful, being present, and knowing at all times in the back of your mind, the rest of your life depends on learning and remembering it.

And that brings us to the issue at hand.

We have a culture now where little is deemed as truly important. We are distracted. We try to multitask which has inherent issues regarding learning and even health. Our attentions spans are shorter than ever. We are perhaps too oriented toward fun and what is easier in desiring shortcuts. And not enough oriented toward what is fun and pleasurable, in being able to not overwork too much and in not taking proper vacations.

Our priorities are skewed from what a human needs out of life. They are skewed by those who wish us to give as much as is possible and then some, for the least amount of payback by them to you for your efforts, and a loyalty to you that is lacking, while their expectations of loyalty from you is required.

Short cuts aren't that great unless they are also the best for the situation. Shortcuts for the sake of them are destructive. Don't be lazy, but do be economical. Work smarter not harder so you have the ability to make the important important and the non important, forgettable. Just choose carefully what is and really should be forgettable.

I agree. Economy of motion, action and resources is important. But that has come to be misconstrued as simply the best way to always go. And far too often it's just, not.

The caveats, are important.

Make what is and should be (and that's) important...important. Be mindful.

On Leaving a Clean Kitchen, America

Being able to cook good food makes you a good cook. Quite obviously.

But cooking, serving and then eating a meal, while leaving the kitchen still a wreck, in still having a kitchen full of all the pots and pans and utensils you used, doesn't just show how you know how to use all that stuff, that is not the badge of honor.

It also shows that you don't know how to manage a kitchen. It may say that you have good (or great) cooking skills. But it also says you have terrible kitchen skills.

A chef in a professional kitchen has a staff who cleans up. Or if they don't, they clean up themselves. Typically after the night is over, or throughout a shift in order to have the clean tools to cook with.

Though more typically they will have a dishwasher to help them keep up. Otherwise, they'd need way too many utensils and dishes to cook with and serve on. Besides they are cooking dish after dish, meal after meal for person or group after group, for hours on end. While cooking at home is one meal at a time.

A cook in a home kitchen who leaves a mess to clean up later, after the meal, simply shows how inexperienced and amateurish they are. After all, cleaning up as you go really isn't that difficult. It just takes practice and some organizing.

Nor is saying "the dishwasher is full" an excuse for leaving a kitchen mess and certainly not leaving a mess overnight to wake up to. Certainly not for someone who was uninvolved in the previous night's revelry.

So keep up as you use utensils, pots, pans, dishes and so on. Then when you finish the meal and it's ready to eat and serve, you will walk out of a kitchen that is truly ready to be ignored until the next meal and you can eat in peace and relaxation.

If there are any dishes left over it should be from the meal itself and not from the cooking of it. But even that should be taken care of and not left overnight.

Surely there are good times here and there that come up wherein it simply detracts from the event to be cleaning when you should be socializing. That is true enough. But how often should that be considered reasonable to happen throughout a year? A few perhaps, to be sure, but not a lot of them and not on a regular or certainly not on a daily basis.

Because in that case, you are just lazy. Admit it, then you're just a slob.

It takes organizing skills to cook a sophisticated meal. It takes true organizing skills to finish cooking a meal and leaving things so that it looks like no one has even touched the kitchen.

That is the sign of a true master. And a thoroughly achievable one at that.

This isn't just about cooking dinner, however. You may have guessed by now this is about so much more.

America has become very good at quick fixes. Fixes that simply don't work but sound really great. At first. Those "fixes" then continue to remain in place even long after it's common knowledge they failed. Which as we've seen, leads to some very angry communities. Some very damaged communities.

We're not the only ones in the world doing this kind of thing.

Many other countries have picked up some of our bad habits. We have been world leaders in so many areas and that has led to some mimicking our good as well as our bad behaviors.

It's far easier to say for instance, "I'm tough on crime." Then to say, "We have to address the reasons for the crime we're seeing."

As in much of western medicine, we choose to fix the symptom rather than the cause.

This leads us to end up doing things like lowering taxes until we can't afford real maintenance of our country and citizens. When really we need to fix the middle class so we don't have to lower taxes in the first place so we can continue to afford to fund and fix things. As we should be doing.

This twisted thinking leads us to fall into believing some very odd things indeed. Things like we must push all the money up to those who least need it in order to fix things that are wrong with our country. Things that got to be needing to be fixed because of wrong thinking to begin with.

This leaves those at that other lower end to have to be "creative" simply in order to exist, many of whom end up in a biased and broken judicial system. While those committing crimes in acquiring more money at the uppe other end of things, in being people who don't need more money just want it, seem to get off completely free when they get caught. If they ever do get caught. If their crimes are even brought out to the light of day. In fact, many times they are rewarded for their illicit behaviors, even if they are ever fired.

There was a time when common wisdom was to choose the hard road because in that way you learn the most and you end up fixing more.

Anymore however that is considered insane by too many. We have gotten lazy, rationalizing we have to produce more and more rather than better and better. After all, when there is an easy way to accomplish something, the easy fix becomes the priority in order for you to move on as quickly and cheaply as possible.

This is not human thought, this is "corporate thought". A disease seemingly invisible to so many people now a days. But it has become insidious and ubiquitous.

It is however fixable. It is all fixable. With effort. Learn to love effort. Learn to love fixing and not masking symptoms. Learn to be aware of results, of the facts, of cause and effect.

Try the longer road. Try the harder road. Try the better road.

Try to fix things. Not just make them unnoticeable.

Clean the kitchen as you go along. It seems like a lot of work a the time but once you get used to it you begin to realize, it really is the better way. And it will also lead to other things in your life increasing in their quality, and decreasing in their perceived effort.

Life can be good. Life can be better. It's all up to... us.