When I was a boy, school was Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic. Back then, I didn’t realize their relationship to Learning, Literacy, and Life. This article focuses on how the 3 Rs and 3 Ls can help men and woman reach their personal and professional goals. Perhaps you will see their effect on your life as well.

READING

“A child who reads will become an adult who thinks.” ~ Sasha Salmina

Reading plays a crucial role in how we acquire knowledge. Reading Books stimulates curiosity and discussion, thinking and reflection, empathy and imagination.

Even simple, everyday things require the ability to read. If you need a car to get to work, buy groceries and shop for supplies, you’ll need a drivers license, and that means being able to identify the letters on an eye chart, answer questions on the driving test and read road signs.

No hablo ingles? No problem, the test in most states is now in Spanish. I learned to speak Spanish to be friends with the Hispanic boys and girls I met in school, not to encourage them to reciprocate by learning English. But English is the world’s Lingua Franca, and learning how to read and write in English can be an essential step toward assimilating yourself into the American way of life.

WRITING

“Every clear sentence I write clears more under growth of confusion from my mind.” ~Robert W. Russell

Writing plays a crucial role in how well we understand ourselves, share knowledge with others, and communicate our thoughts and feelings. Writing memoirs for example is a powerful way to connect the dots between yesterday and today and reveal a path into tomorrow.

Even everyday activities require the ability to make sense with words written for others to read. Our wireless connection with others over the Internet and our cell phones is typically an abbreviated form of writing but it still requires the ability to form clear sentences and phrases somebody besides yourself will understand.

If your job requires you to write reports and other documents, writing plays a crucial role in your career. In some companies, you are known only by what you write and how you write it. Good writing reflects good thinking, and your boss will notice.

ARITHMETIC

“Life is an equation because you get the most from it by learning how to convert negatives into positives.” ~Albert Einstein

Being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes is a humorous way to think of arithmetic, and being able to perform basic arithmetic calculations will improve your problem-solving skills. Why? Because doing them fosters better reasoning abilities. Hey, learning math is good for your brain and your income because it makes you smarter and more productive and your boss will notice!

Okay, so you skipped math because you knew you’d be driving a backhoe for your father when you graduated. But two years later an on-the-job injury prevented you from operating heavy equipment. So, you struggled to balance your job at a fast food place with your family responsibilities and six grueling years of night school and math to pursue your childhood dream of becoming an architect.

Now you drop into that fast food place every now and then to buy a hamburger and fries. But you grin instead of groan because now, thanks to the career that math made possible, you have enough money to buy the place.

Even simple tasks like balancing your budget or preparing a meal require a basic understanding of math. You won’t need calculus to adjust a recipe for 4 people if 8 people are coming for dinner. But math will be required if 10 people are coming. How do you adjust your recipe from 4 to 10? Hey, don’t ask me. I can’t boil water without burning it, and I forgot the recipe for ice years ago

LEARNING

“It is the responsibility of schools to seek learning conditions which will enable each individual to reach the highest level of learning possible.” ~ Benjamin Bloom”

Bloom’s Taxonomy highlights the symbiotic, hierarchical process of academic (professional) and non-academic (personal) learning.

Create > synthesize new information by combining parts.
Evaluate > judge value and relevance of the information.
Analyze > break down information into component parts
Implement > apply the information to solve a problem.
Understand > comprehend what the information means.
Remember > recall facts and information you’ve learned.

LIBRARIES

I learned more in a library than I did sitting in a classroom trying to remember and understand what a teacher was saying or writing on a chalk board. Now, many years later, reading a book on my Kindle doesn’t compare to reading a book in a library. Nor does tapping the screen compare to touching, smelling and seeing words on paper. Most of all, I go to be in a library, to feel that electric awareness that here in this quiet place are zillions of things waiting to be discovered, waiting to feed my curiosity. Libraries are sacred places.

The next time you are in a library, think of the men and women who put their thoughts and feelings into words in a book. Pull one off a shelf, open it and turn to a page. Can you hear the author struggling to find just the right words for you, his reader?

Some of those authors have been dead for thousands of years. Some published their book when the Egyptians were building pyramids. Some when the Greeks were discovering science and art. Some in the Dark Ages when mankind turned away from science and art. Some during the Renaissance when men and women returned to the arts and science. Some put their thoughts and feelings into a book just a year or so ago.

Doesn’t matter where or when. Those writers are still alive in the words they wrote for you. Be a space-time traveler. Let the author’s imagination carry you to once upon a time in a land far away. Let him or her give you insights on politics, religion, history, philosophy, art, science — anything and everything that has occupied the heads, hearts and hands of men and women throughout the ages.

“Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. Books are engines of change, windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print, the most accessible and wisest of counselors.” ~ Barbara Tuchman

LIFE

Life is not a playground. It’s a classroom where you get the test first and the lesson after. But it’s easier to see and apply the lessons in those tests if you are grounded in the 3 Rs and 3 Ls. You are a literate person who learned how to learn because you learned how to read and write! And even if your job doesn’t require math skills, the equation below is certainly relevant.

The Pyramid of Learning and Life was originally published in Kurious Minds Pub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Laptop open. Doc ready. You even made coffee.

Three tabs later you’re watching a stranger review a blender you’ll never buy.

You know what you’re supposed to be doing. You even want to do it, mostly. And yet here you are, forty minutes gone, watching something you don’t care about. Then the guilt shows up, right on schedule. Lazy. No discipline. What’s wrong with you.

But if you actually get moving, something annoying happens. It wasn’t that bad. It almost never is.

So why does starting feel so much harder than just doing the thing?

People blame the phone. All the scrolling, the short videos, maybe our attention just isn’t built for this anymore. Could be part of it. But I don’t think that’s the whole story, because people were stuck at the starting line long before anyone had a phone in their pocket.

Why Beginnings Feel So Heavy

There is something strangely soothing about staying put, even in a bad place. You know exactly what today is like. You know what happens if nothing changes. A new project, a new job, a different rhythm of living means stepping toward a version of your life you haven’t tried yet. There’s this pull that makes you prefer staying in an unhappy version of yourself rather than exploring something you don’t know. When nothing pushes you, it’s very easy to procrastinate.

Your brain also just reaches for whatever’s easiest. Checking your phone takes no effort. Lying down takes no effort. Telling yourself you’ll start after dinner takes no effort. None of this makes you weak. It just means the other option felt hard and uncertain, and your brain did what brains do.

Sometimes it’s not even the task you’re avoiding. It’s what the task might say about you. What if the test goes badly? What if you send the application and hear nothing back? Not starting keeps that question unanswered a little longer.

But I think the real problem is that you don’t know what the thing will actually feel like yet. So your mind fills in the blanks, and never with anything reasonable. It runs through everything that could go wrong before you’ve even opened the laptop. A task that might take an hour turns into an ordeal in your head, just because you haven’t met it yet. A lot of the time, the not-knowing is scarier than the thing itself.

Also, not every case of being stuck is fear in disguise. Sometimes you don’t feel like doing the thing. Sometimes you want the thing done, but you don’t know what to do to make it happen. The thing is just this vague, confusing mess you’re not sure how to approach. “I don’t feel like doing this” and “I don’t know how to do this” are not the same, but sometimes they feel like the same situation from the inside.

If any of this is relatable, I want to say something to you here. Feeling defeated at the prospect of something new isn’t a weakness. It’s usually just a feeling that you’re staring into a void your brain has no reference for. That’s just what new looks like before you’ve been through it.

What the Climbers Know

I think about climbers sometimes. Someone at the base of a route knows, before they touch the rock, that it’s going to hurt. Their arms will give out. They’ll probably fall, maybe more than once. None of that surprises them. So why bother?

Not because they’re sure they will. They climb because they want to see what they’re made of, and the only way to do that is to get on the wall. The climb itself isn’t a test to get past. It’s information about themselves they can’t get any other way.

That’s a different way of treating difficulty than most of us default to. We treat a hard beginning like something to pass or fail. A climber just treats it like a question worth asking with their body.

Maybe that’s the shift. Not waiting for fear to disappear, but getting a little curious instead. Not “what if this goes wrong” but “I wonder what actually happens here.” Not “can I handle this” but “what happens if I just take one step and see.” You’re not trying to make the fear vanish. You’re trying to get more interested in finding out than you are in staying safe, the same way a climber wants to know what’s past the part that scares them.

A Small Way to Test It

Before you do the unfamiliar thing, write down what you think will happen. What don’t you want to see happen? Then don’t try to fix the whole problem in one sitting. Just do a small piece of it, enough to get real information. Write the first paragraph. Study one topic. Send one application. Show up to the first class.

Afterward, check. Was it what you expected? What surprised you? What was easier than you thought, and what was genuinely rough? This is the trick. By doing this, you change the beginning into a discovery process, not an evaluation.

Moreover, taking the first step doesn’t obligate you to anything. You can experiment and find out it’s not for you. You can alter your approach halfway through. You can stop. You can come back to it later. The first step is just information, not a contract.

Perhaps we make too big a deal out of starting things because we feel we have to know how everything will turn out before we begin. That’s not how any of this works, though; you cannot know how something feels from the outside. At some point you just have to go in and find out.

There’s no need to feel extra motivated to embark on an endeavor. Sometimes there’s just a need to become a little bit curious about what comes next.

Why Starting Is So Much Harder Than Doing was originally published in Kurious Minds Pub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For over a year, my roommate and I had the kind of friendship where we did not have to try.

We talked about our families. Our money problems. Whatever show we were watching. People we knew, people we didn’t. Nothing important, and also everything important.

After talking to her, I always felt lighter. Like something in me had been put back in place.

We never really fought. There was no reason to fight.

One night I couldn’t fall asleep. She was video chatting with her online student from our room, and her voice kept pulling me back in every time I was almost asleep.

I told her I couldn’t do this anymore. That she’d have to take her classes somewhere else, in the common room, the dining hall, anywhere.

She said she didn’t want to go outside.

I said she had to.

She did.

And just like that, the problem was solved.

It wasn’t, though. Because something had changed, something that can’t be pinned on a map. We continued to share the same room but stopped sharing the same friendship.

We spoke only when the other was in need. Pass the charger. Did you lock the door? The kind of talking that fills silence without meaning anything.

The long conversations were gone. I tried to bring them back several times, but it never really worked. It was like trying to reheat something that can only be eaten once.

Here’s what I didn’t want to admit to myself.

I wasn’t only tired that night.

She was making money teaching online, something that looked so easy for her. I was trying just as hard and getting nowhere. And that very same day, before class could even start, I’d sat with the ache of watching her skip off with other friends. I sat in the room, alone, with the feeling of being the one left behind when the more interesting option appeared and took her away.

I never said it, didn’t even think it, just wished it would all stop.

So I turned a feeling into an order.

And an order doesn’t sound like hurt. It sounds like control. It sounds like someone who doesn’t care what it costs the other person.

I’ve thought about this a lot since then: the gap between “I am a bad person” and “I behaved badly in that one moment.” They feel like they should be the same thing. They aren’t.

Most people liked me. I’d never had anyone go quiet around me before, never had to sit with the fact that I was the reason someone pulled back. It’s a strange thing to learn about yourself late: that even a person who tries to be decent can still hurt someone, simply by being overwhelmed and not knowing what to do with it.

I never told her how sorry I was. Not properly. My ego got in the way at the time, and by the time the ego wore off, the moment for saying it had somehow passed too. Now we talk maybe once a year. No anger. No coldness, even. Just distance. A door that’s unlocked but never opened.

I think I became a better version of myself after that, more aware, quicker to notice when I’m about to turn a feeling into a weapon instead of a sentence. But becoming better didn’t undo what I’d already done. That’s the part nobody tells you. You can grow, genuinely grow, and still not get back what you broke.

The other person has their own memory of that night, their own right to keep their distance, and no amount of my personal growth obligates them to forget it.

What I wish I had said to her, instead of “I don’t want you to do that anymore,” was that I was feeling lonely, and I didn’t know why, but I’d been comparing myself to her for quite some time now.

That statement would have cost me my pride.

But it would have been true. The truth, although it might be crude or hurtful, is always the best medicine for a festering old wound.

To make a mistake is human, but to admit one is divine. And maybe growing up isn’t learning how to avoid every bad moment. Maybe it’s learning to catch yourself before a bad moment turns into a permanent distance. Some things can be repaired. Some things can be forgiven.

And some things, even after the anger is gone, never become exactly what they were before.

I learned that the hard way.

Some Things Just Don’t Go Back to the Way They Were was originally published in Kurious Minds Pub on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.