The Impatient
I just read this story: "There's no speed limit"
It got me to remembering how as a child there were an endless amount of steps to take. And that finishing too quickly and not showing your work was viewed upon almost like cheating.
We all live in the same world where time passes by at a constant speed. When we are younger or when we are fully engaged and in the zone time slows. I think itis this perception of time or ability to perceive time faster than 1:1 that helps some excel.
I feel that with the internet, kids today are given almost limitless resources. At the click of a button they could be learning anything from higher level mathematics and astrophysics, biology, finance, poetry, or philosophy. And yet they very often find themselves defaulting to watching youtube videos, using their phones to play games or Facebook, or window shopping for things they don't need. What a waste!
As a kid I taught myself how to program. The speed I learned was bound by the how fast I could acess information like game source code and tutorials (4800 bps) or by how fast I could get responses to my questions on C++ from people on usenet (1-2 days). Compared to today's real time responses, that is a glacial pace. At this very moment, a person can learn how to code a simple web app, host it somewhere for free, and launch it in less than a day. There is a slow transition of people from strictling being consumers to being makers. The gifted self-select and the cycle perpetuates so that only a few individuals stand out.
Are the vast resources of the internet, then, wasted on the young? If it is possible that there can be no speed limit, then why is it still the case that only a subset of teenagers and young adults actually engage in expanding their minds at feverish paces? At "achieving" great things? Why is it so rare and delightful to find someone engaged, driven, and bright? I'm still missing the full picture, but I believe that the solution exists with more community involvement via mentorship, peer teaching, and educators being more sensitive to allowing students to reach the upper bound of their ability to learn.
I think we need to start valuing impatience.
I'm trying to write more frequently. When posts get past a couple paragraphs I find myself spending lots of time revising posts that often get ditched in the drafts box. For the following weeks I want to work on posting shorter, free-flow reflections that are longer than a tweet, shorter than an essay, but still long enough to be a blog post.