Why improve your IQ?
This is something that happened to me, and one of the stories that I draw upon for inspiration even now.
It happened when I was only ten years old. When I was still at junior school.
I’d been naughty. I can’t remember what I’d done now, but I do remember that a friend and I were dismissed from the junior classrooms and sent to the infant section. We were to spend the day with six year olds. We were to sit on tiny chairs, at tiny desks and we were to stay there all day.
It was supposed to be humiliating; it was supposed to be our punishment.
But it wasn’t a punishment.
In fact it was the opposite; the punishment turned out to be a REWARD!
I guess I’ve always had a different way of viewing the world than a lot of people. Most people really would have considered it a punishment. But for me it was different. For me it provided an incredible realisation.
As I sat on those miniature chairs, I began to notice what the other kids were doing. I began to notice their assignment. On the board was a short fill-in-the-blanks assignment on the subject of Noah’s Ark. I quickly read through it, filling in the blanks automatically as I went through it…
Noah found__ [two] of each animal and lead them into the _____ [Ark].
It was only about ten lines long, and so I got to the end in less than a minute. And when I got to the end I found that the answers were written down at the bottom, all ready for the student to put into the correct blank space.
How demeaning, I thought, shouldn’t they give these kids a more challenging task. Then I looked at those kids, and this is when the realisation came.
Those kids were struggling. They were pausing at each gap for a good few minutes (some a lot longer), and having to really think about the answer.
And at that point I realised how different I was to them. How easy I found a task that they struggled so hard with. How I instantly completed a task without thinking about it, when they had to spend a good hour on the same thing.
And yet only four years ago I was one of these kids. I was one of these people that struggled on a task that seemed so easy now. The only thing separating us was four years. Four years and I was able to cut the time of a task down from an hour to less than a minute!
Another four years later, when I was about 14, I looked through some of my old school work from the age of ten. I remembered how much effort I had put into it. Seeing projects that I remembered took me days to complete, but now, they seemed so easy. Easy enough to complete in a couple of hours. Again I realised the leap I had made in those few years.
Then I hit a plateau.
Things weren’t getting anymore difficult, but they weren’t getting any easier either. The work wasn’t really getting more complicated – it was just on different subject matter – but work from a couple of years ago was just as tough as it was now.
It wasn’t until about the age of 19 that I realised why things weren’t really getting any easier. I was challenging myself sideways, but not upwards; I was learning lots of new subjects but not reaching more complex levels on any of those subjects.
At the age of about 19 I began to discover that I could improve the way I was using my brain. For a year or so the results were slow, but then I got better at applying them and things began to become easier.
And now assignments that would have taken me over a week just last year (and that is a stressful solid week of work), are now taking under a day.
This has given me incredible freedom. I’m seeing my peers struggling with mountains of work, like I was last year, while I’ve finished everything and am getting on with things I enjoy doing. So I get to enjoy lazing in the sun with a good book, trying hard not to be too distracted by my friends, who are stuck inside at their desks panicking about deadlines.
By challenging myself when I have the energy and time to be challenged, I have made the more demanding times of life so much easier. And the non-demanding times of my life a piece of cake!
An easy, stress free, relaxing life is what I’ve created for myself. And most importantly I’ve given myself the time to work on my passions, the things that I really enjoy doing. And as a bonus, I can achieve my passions easier as well.
Most of all I know that I’m still growing. I know that in another four years time, the things I do now that are challenging will have become easy, and I’ll be chasing new frontiers. Frontiers that will not only affect my life, but other people’s as well.
It is the people that have grown beyond the average that are really affecting the world. Many of these people have grown naturally to become the world leaders, the scientists, the musicians. Others have worked hard to get there. But it is these people who are now affecting your life, and it will affect your children’s lives as well.
Invest in yourself and you could be the person who cures cancer, who creates a more peaceful world, or who takes rock ‘n’ roll to its next evolution. Would you like to be one of these people? Would you like to have done your bit to affect the lives of millions?
These are the things you want future generations to look back on and think ‘what would life have been like if…’
In fact take a moment and do that right now. What would life be like if we didn’t have the Internet, no television, no electricity, no books, no speech, no wheel, no ability to make fire…
I’m telling you now, you have the power to make something wonderful happen; you just have to draw it from within yourself. What are your dreams? What do you want in life? What would it be like to have achieved them?
Empower yourself to make what you want to happen, happen.
Are you willing to do that?
You decide.
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