On Destiny

This post is rather different from the preceding ones. I am not going to talk about anything technical but rather I will talk about questions that keep me from sleeping.

When waking up I am generally in a good mood. However, as the day progresses, the state of my mind degenerates. I often feel, by the end of the day sad or preoccupied by various defects that mark my personality. The next day, the cycle repeats. Almost like a factory, I seem to be dragged in a direction that is pretty much determined. After some thinking, I realized that almost everyone else is the same. People seem to act often against their will.

One of the things that I managed doing these days was reading Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. I have not finished reading it, but I shall write a review here when I do. In this particular essay I shall try to discuss only one of the chapters of the book. The chapter in discussion is chapter 5, What Makes a Perfect Parent?.

Levitt uses a study done by the U.S. Department of Eduction. The study was done on an enormous amount of children. He puts forth a number of questions like: "Does it matter if the child's parents were well educated?", "Does it matter whether the child had low weight?", "Does it matter if the child is regularly spanked?", etc. In the end, he reaches some conclusions. For the curious amongst you, the first two factors mentioned above matter, while the third does not.

What surprised me most was the conclusion he reached at the end of the chapter. He said that the only common trait of all the factors that matter is that they are "Things that parents are". Meanwhile, the common trait of factors that do not matter are that they are "Things that parents do".

Extrapolating this to my case, I realized for a second the nature of destiny. I realized that a person should be in a certain way to do a certain thing and not vice versa. What you do is defined by what you are.

Offtopic: If some of you saw the movie "Batman Begins", you probably remember that in the movie there was a similar quote but it was exactly the reverse of this. I don't know if it was for marketing purposes or what, but generally speaking that quote was also true, but in another way. For the outside world, you are defined by only what you do (i.e. by the way you manifest yourself). However, acts cannot be made without a certain personality behind them.

Back to the topic again... I have certain friends who are very skilled at certain things (like programming). What I realized by looking at the way they thought is that they generally think different than most people. For example, they are very curious. They also often have a very intense passion for things they do and very often are aggressive when it comes to their skills.

I realized for one, that when people imitate this way of doing things, their skill also increases. It is somehow like this: You must first become a good programmer to be able to learn to program. You must become a good tennis player first and learn tennis second. You must be a fighter first, and learn boxing later, after you became a good fighter.

Now for the bad news. I found that generally, to adapt your mind in various ways I found that you must do a lot of repetitions. You must do that thing which you attempt to do. And this must be very often. If you learn to play Go, you must do it very often. You must play with high ranked and low ranked. You must play very often with people that have a rank just above yours. You must watch games played by guys that are far better than you are. You must solve problems.

The same applies for nearly any other domain, be it Go or programming, mathematics or martial arts, or even if you want to be a better student at school. And speaking of school, one thing that I found VERY annoying is that the accent is always on theory. Which is dry without practice.

At any case, this concludes the post. It probably is abrupt and probably isn't very unified but, I felt like I needed a core dump on the subject.

See you next time...