Be Brave

Be Brave.

Posted by la papillion under Self-realisation

A student of mine recently got 'scolded' by me. She was trying to solve a physics problem but she had no idea how to do it. I had a glimpse of her thinking when I asked her to think out loud. She said after doing this and that, she had no idea what to do. Then I realised that she is trying to figure out entirely the solution of the problem in her head before she even attempt it on paper. I told her severely that perhaps in simpler problems, the entire steps of the solution can be visualised before attempting it. That would be the ideal case, wouldn't it? You would have the confidence to go through the entire process of writing down the solution since you already had in mind what you are going to do next.

However, I told her, that as problems get increasingly complex, it's nearly impossible to figure out all the steps that you're going to do without at least writing down some stuff. As long as you some clues on how to do it, you should just proceed to write something and find out whatever you can from the clues, then let the things you had worked out provide further leads. This trial and error kind of behaviour in doing things would separate the good from the bad students. The good students simply tries something that they know in order to arrive at something that they don't know, whereas the bad students need to know everything before even attempting it. When they can't figure out a step, they won't even want to do the first step. The good students have the confidence to know that they would be able to innovate and improvise along the way to hit their objectives.

I was wondering how many of us are also doing that in our lives. Most of the time, we fear the unknown so much. But understand that fear drives us to either want to find out more about it or paralyses us straight there and then. No matter how much we research, there'll be a moment where you just have to press the trigger and decide to proceed on with the best knowledge that you have at that moment and just jump with leap of faith. How many of us are stumped and paralysed when the first unknown comes along that throw us off our path? How many of us reads all about swimming in books but keeps on postponing the actual act in the pool?

I can also think of many many examples of myself procrastinating objectives that I know would enrich me but because of my fear of the unknowns, I keep dragging doing the first steps towards it. I must believe that even without knowing how I would get to the end, I would eventually reach there. That definitely needs a leap of faith. From what I see, there's two ways  to get it - one is from religion, the other is by a similarly zealous belief in yourself. Both are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Have courage, my friends. Be brave.