Of minds, creativity and cars
Displaying curiosity as a child is what helps us learn, form concepts and get an understanding of the world through the eyes of the people that answer our questions. Not all answers are verbal and it is mostly with what they do, as well.
Speaking of curiosity, did you know that terrorists consider themselves altruistic? To tell you what it means, altruism is when a person is more concerned about others than themselves to an extent that they believe they are selfless. To interpret that for you, a terrorist essentially believes in their heart strongly and deeply that they are putting others ahead of them to an extent that they are ready to give their life for them and the belief system they adhere to.
Why am I telling you about this out of nowhere? This is because recently one of my content writing copies came back to me with 2 grammatical errors for editing and it kind of took me by surprise. For those into creative fields, you would understand how being precise in your craft is almost everything you’d ever care about. Losing this precision can make you get into an existential crisis, no less.
This is when I instantly started to refresh my grammar, reach out to the grammar textbooks I had preserved and instantly ordered the industry-standard book for vocabulary to build my word power.
Still wondering what it has to do with terrorists? I will get to it…
The book ‘Word Power Made Easy’, by Norman Lewis starts off by reminding us that we were all curious as children and we never shut up from asking questions. As an adult, if you have been in a situation where you have a word at the tip of your tongue but can’t recall it or blamed your memory for not being able to express something, you’re not alone.
This curiosity helped us understand the world, build a vocabulary, learn new concepts, think of alternate ways of doing the same thing and ideate with ease. If you have been one of those curious kids feeling like a dull adult living a monotonous life, you’re not alone.
Kids are exposed to active learning as most five-year-olds have a vocabulary of around 10,000 words and learn about 2000–3000 words annually. No matter your age, you can go back to such active learning too.
The book says that the best way to get creative again, to be filled with new ideas and to learn new words can happen just by rekindling this powerful urge to learn. So much fuss just to learn words? Not really…
New words introduce us to unexplored ways of expression, neo thinking, ideas and perspective. You could discover facets of you that you never knew existed. You could read through people as though you’ve already known them. The best part? Ideas will come to you.
This book introduces us to different personality types in order to learn words as understanding 10 new personalities can lead to widening our grasp of people in addition to learning the 10 new words.
That’s when I came across the word altruist again and the memory sent me back to my days of sociology class where the complex psychological thinking of terrorists of them thinking of themselves as altruists came up.
But only this time, I had learnt this word through the etymology of it. Alter means other in Latin and words like alternative, altercation and alteration are derived from the same roots indicating similar concepts. Altruists are selfless, they care about others and that’s what terrorists think they are. But that’s the last person you would call selfless, right? Something to ponder
Whenever I went out with my parents as a kid, I would sit at the back seat and identify every car around us. The thrill of recognizing a car by the design or recognizing the company by looking at the logo was still higher for the child in me than most thrill I feel as an adult.
Now, I can’t even recognize a car that goes right past me and again, this has nothing to do with cars. It has everything to do with the urge to keep learning and exploring.
It took me a lot of courage to admit that my copies came back with grammatical errors. It takes courage to admit when we’re wrong and indicates that we are ready to learn, explore and be vulnerable.
I would take this up a notch and make the bold claim that as adults we become too busy to learn. Mails and texts awaiting our response, calls that require returning and people around us needing our attention for one thing or another, we tend to forget the attention our brain is seeking from us and our curiosity is demanding from us.
I hope reading this rekindles your urge to learn irrespective of your age. Your work could be monotonous, creative, lively or exciting, don’t keep your learning parallel to your work and enjoy the way the world changes for you then.
