Personal Growth

Current Synthesis on Personal Growth

Proposed: Human Learning and Development

Humans are innovators. We are explorers and discoverers, constantly learning and growing as we feed off of our existential reality; we are imagination machines who are born curious and hungry for awe. We explore, we discover, and we create, in perpetuity.

Free access to all that we currently hold as collective human knowledge could be made available through efficient learning experiences. Rather than breaking down faculties in terms of subject matters under Science, Art and Philosophy, we can break them down in terms of human experience and growth potential. These could include a strong and healthy body, an acutely aware mind, and covering all that a human might care to learn regardless of where they may be located.

Access to such quality learning should always remain freely accessible and available to anyone, anywhere and at anytime.
Maintenance, availability and accessibility costs should be covered by global budgets to ensure equitable dispersion to all.
(In)decent Proposal: Copyright restrictions and all access limitations to information need to be fully eliminated, and a new approach to compensating authors must be formulated, developed and implemented as soon as possible.

See Culture for further considerations of language and religion.

This matter eventually requires attention from everyone, everywhere. We can begin compiling all we know with the help of folks who are knowledgeable in all areas of personal growth, human development, engineering, arts, languages, species evolution, environmental sciences, and so on.

This is the author's field of study and his primary interest, and so he will naturally be focusing the majority of his contributions to this section of the Blueprint. The best approach to streamlining and moderating this global conversation will evidently need our collaboration in testing for logic, intuitiveness, robustness and efficacy.

What is learning? How is that different from education? How can we learn more efficiently and effectively?

You may be inclined to think that some of us are not educated (or learned, or informed) enough, and that including everyone’s voice will (certainly) hinder vital conversations and slow down important, time-sensitive decision-making. Well what if everyone had free access to quality learning so that they can fully understand the intricacies and thought processes involved for whatever topic of interest may be under discussion? Isn’t it odd why it isn’t already the case that everyone everywhere already has access to such learning? What if we put our efforts together to create a human-centric, universally inclusive, empirical and intuitive learning platform, based on our immediate need, interest, and/or intention, and customized to the learner’s ability level in real-time, no matter where or who we are. Would such a resource not level the playing field in terms of constructive conversations? Not to mention empowering all individuals everywhere to provide for themselves and their community.

Why We Can't Do This Alone

Which curriculum is the best, the American, the French, the Russian, the Cuban, the Catholic..? What if we took the best of all worlds and made a worldly compilation of all of the best knowledge known to man, created by all humans and made available for all humans? That has been my dream for decades now.

Though I'm more of a Wozniak fan, the following letter perhaps best represents how no one survives or reaches any worthwhile accomplishment alone, no matter how self-made they think they are - it's simply a misconception shown by many thinkers over the past millenia (thank you Prashanth, aka Gremlin Trapper at Launchpad23, for sharing this in our campfire/bookreview digital room):

 From: Steve Jobs, sjobs@apple.com
 To: Steve Jobs, sjobs@apple.com
 Date: Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 11:08PM

 I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow, I did not breed or perfect the seeds.

 I do not make any of my own clothing.

 I speak a language I did not invent or refine.

 I did not discover the mathematics I use.

 I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.

 I am moved by music I did not create myself.

 When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.

 I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.

 I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.

 Sent from my iPad

Some Philosophy on Education

While studying the IB (International Baccalaureate) curricula, I noticed an interesting parallel with the Greek Athenian approach to learning and personal development. In IB schools, the ultimate objective when preparing our kids to face an unpredictable and ambiguously unknown future, is to cultivate a student Learner Profile made up of ten values. These ten values are considered crucial in dealing with a slew of growing global conflicts and concerns, and are achieved through a constant practice of critical thinking, collaborative communication, and creativity. Key elements such as open-mindedness and kindness for example, increase the need for understanding others and all their differing perspectives, mitigating the various sources of friction we currently witness on numerous borders across the planet.

Consistent with this line of thinking, ancient philosophy focused on developing virtues. If all individuals understood the need to pursue excellence in the virtues they sought after, the whole of society would benefit from it. It's as if we came full circle, focusing on values again as the primary safety net for our kids, similarly to how the likes of Plato and Aristotle promoted the need for cultivating virtues. I also found out that I wasn't alone in making such a parallel when I stumbled on Jules Evans' Philosophy for Life (2013). Evans made references to various ancient philosophers and how they cultivated virtues as a path to eudaimonia - a sort of rational pursuit of self-actualization. He also reported on how these philosophers suggested that all members of society should take part in designing their society - i.e. their reality - and stressed the importance of education for everyone if a society is to cultivate happiness for all its people.

Evans also mentions another important philosophy relating to how anxiety is created not by external materials or circumstances, but by the internal thoughts of the mind. For instance, if I fail a test, if my perception of this event is negative then I will consider myself a failure and beat myself up for it. If instead I changed my perspective to celebrate my mistakes, I would consider my results a simple underlining and highlighting of areas that I could focus on for future improvement, assuming I care to improve them. No anxiety or negative emotions in this situation, but rather a celebration of information and identification of how I can continue to learn and grow.

Our schools (and our parents who push the school's agendas) fail us miserably by doing the exact opposite of what is healthy for our kids, focusing on standardized test results and competition with others, thinking that this is the only path to future success and better quality of life. Though it may be true that those who outshine their peers on test results end up being presented with better opportunities in the long run, education experts have long known that this is an unhealthy and unrealistic approach to optimal learning. Neil DeGrasse Tyson said it best when he was asked about his thoughts on ChatGPT, urging educators everywhere that it's high time we start changing our ways of incentivizing, challenging and assessing our pupils.

What is a healthy lifestyle? How can we nurture individual growth, while contributing to overall evolution and prosperity?

Waking up with the sun; taichi, kungfu, jujitsu, dancing, singing, biking, rafting, sailing, surfing, snowboarding, skating, rollerblading, playing sports of all kinds;

Waking Up (app) by Sam Harris provided some very useful mindfulness lessons and exercises that I had personally tested out and enjoyed a couple of years ago. He makes subscriptions available for free to anyone who has to think about whether they can afford to pay the fee. I like that.

Shaolin Temple Europe is trying to educate the world using an East Asian philosophy, taught by a Vietnamese Kungfu Master born in Germany. Though the website seems primarily commercial, some useful educational videos are made available for free and the master lives a humble life reinvesting all gains back into the facilities to help promote the art of Shaolin Kung Fu.

Human Garage are on an interesting mission to educate billions on diets and practices such as Fascial yoga, breathing and preventative care.

What I would like for us is to have resources like these be validated by various users and educators around the world, and then made freely available to everyone everywhere from a centrally accessible intuitive interface.

How does food, shelter and well-being affect learning and growth?

Endless books have concluded that eating a wide variety of locally grown whole foods while avoiding heavily processed foods is the healthiest and most sustainable approach to a human diet. Just as many books determined that we learn better when we're well fed, have had sufficient rest, and feel we have a safe environment around us. Body movement is no less important as it leads to better neural activity, hence the many debates that have taken place in the west over longer or shorter recess/breaks.

For example, The Oxygen Advantage (2015) teaches us to breathe slowly and regularly through the nose, expanding our stomach and diaphragm instead of our chest. This approach helps us regulate the oxygen we inhale by warming the air on its way in, and balancing out the carbon dioxide levels that we need in our bodies for optimal functioning and recovery. During exercise or movement, we can add a 5 second pause half way through our exhale to further improve our training and optimize our results.

The Chimp Paradox (2012) is a book that Football coaches tend to use to help their athletes better understand the natural impulses we tend to have and how to overcome them. It presents our brain as a tri-modular human, chimp and computer that we can learn to train and use efficiently. Well worth the read.

The China Study (2004) was the largest ever study done at the time of its original writing. The author compared and contrasted diets and apparent results in various regions around the world. Its takeaways align with the majority of scientific books on healthy diets, suggesting that key factors include locally grown whole foods, not processed nor overcooked. Beans, greens and grains seem to be the only foods that all books agree on in terms of unquestionable health benefits. All other books on diets (and supplements) seem to have contradictory equivalents to them out there somewhere.

Side note, I've always enjoyed any rendition of Baz Luhrmann's Wear Sunscreen speech. Especially being in my 40s and having trouble conveying the value of our time and the beauty we all have, which we often fail to recognize in ourselves and fully appreciate when we are still young.

Existing Tools

MIT's OpenCourseware, Edx.org and Coursera.org currently provide access to numerous quality courses from reputed establishments such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. These resources provide direct access or AUDIT options that allow you to peruse through all course materials and content for absolutely free.

One of the courses available for free on these sites is entitled Learning How to Learn, by Barbara Oakley (and friends). Its follow up sequel I believe was entitled Learn Like a Pro. I recommend these courses to all of my students as they help us better understand ourselves and how we can optimize our time learning far more efficiently and effectively than we would without knowledge of the contents of these courses.

Establishments like University of the People are working to make fully certifiable tertiary degrees available to the masses in localized languages without leaving their students indebted.

The likes of Google and Microsoft are now starting to provide some access to free learning and certifications that seem very handy, but one can't help but feel a little hesitant when considering how these courses are primarily aimed at preparing individuals to become laborers for large tech monopolies and conglomerates.

Regardless, we have a great start towards free access to quality learning; at least if we know what we're looking for. What about the unknown unknowns though? How can we discover and learn about things that we've never heard of or encountered before? Or what about the fundamental knowledge required by those who live in a dry desert, wetlands, tornado alleys, typhoon-ridden, isolated, overpopulated, underpopulated, mountainous, rural, snowy, andor remote areas? Should driving or riding a horse or manipulating a shovel be part of a learning curriculum?

A friend of mine took a different approach to learning by building LinkPower an creating an entirely new ecosystem aiming to reward kindness and efforts based on the measurable impact generated by individual action(s). This encourages on-ground activity and generates both real-world results, and tangible value in exchange for the time invested (a measured energy exchange = Qi Token). The data generated by these actions in the various communities around the world then form a rhizome of human knowledge, providing lessons learned to anyone, anywhere. I have been supporting this initiative for a few years now and believe is a promising step in the right direction.

Community service may very well be a decent step forward in rebuilding community values and bringing people together again, growing and learning together through their actions and lessons learned. An approach to learning through living.

When ChatGPT was released, the author was relieved to know that he may no longer have to build such an engine by himself. We still need to:

• Ensure that it is relevant and free of biases if we're to leverage it to provide free, quality, universally inclusive human-centric learning
• Build an intuitive interface (which is apparently being worked on already) to help users find the right questions and prompts (it's far more difficult to pose the right question than it is to provide the right answer);
• Provide an avatar to indicate personal learning progress
• Provide an actions and skills interface to determine what learning experiences are still required before we can perform certain tasks that we're interested in accomplishing
• So on and so forth

To track and evaluate learning progress, data miners can create algorithms based on Educational Data Mining advances with the help of courses like the one produced by PennX, entitled Knowledge Inference and Structure Discovery for Education (free to audit on edx.org).

In terms of written content, Blinkist has done a pretty fantastic job at making a wealth of information easily digestible. There are few free alternatives like it at the moment, but I've personally used it for about 3yrs now and haven't cared enough to investigate them. I would love to see a web of relationships amongst their library, connecting the various views and perspectives that are shared by the authors. This could allow us to create virtual "past" conversations that can transcend time!

Can We Envision Something Better than What we Have Now?

There is a need for an intuitive, human centric learning platform that can help anyone, anywhere, learn anything that they need to learn. A basic graphic interface like WebMD's can provide the necessary UI/UX to allow anyone to click into the possibilities that we can make available for them to learn.

All human learning experiences can be considered as micro projects within larger projects - or as a portfolio of programs and projects. The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK, PMi.org) provides us with a plausible template to work with. They broke down the nature of all projects into 49 processes, tools and techniques, divided into a set of ten knowledge areas and five process groups.

I suggest we aim to neatly encode all learning experiences in a similar fashion, breaking down all learning processes (experiences) into a set of Human Faculties (e.g. health, communication, stem, arts, etc.) vs Developmental Stages (such as Piaget's, for a baseline example). Call it the Life Management Body of Knowledge (LMBoK); the core engine on which a human centric, free quality human learning platform can be built.

LMBoK Objectives can be defined as Life Manifestos; preset or manually configurable pathways and achievements to pursue, as we incrementally select our learning chunks and modules.

Here's how I described ePangea's LMBoK in February 2020 - Lmbok at a glance - bird's eyeview

An intuitive interface that permits users to determine the plausible questions that they could explore and discover, which they would not otherwise know to ask (to know about things that they did not know they did not know)

A database populated by all humans everywhere, translated in all languages on the fly leveraging existing systems such as Google and Bing translators (which continue to improve exponentially over time).

An algorithm (or a set of algorithms) that weigh(s) the value of a "knowledge chunk" based on various attributes such as usability, applicability, dependability, source reputation, user demographic, peer reviews and overall credibility rating.

A platform that is open source and transparent, leveraging the latest in AI for up-to-the-minute real-time accuracy, blockchain ledgers for long term tracking and accountability, and data mining and machine learning for validation, verification, automation and optimization

The result is a state-of-the-art, intuitive and human-centric learning tool that is freely accessible to anyone, anywhere and at anytime. It is to be maintained by everyone who cares to learn andor to share knowledge about anything we have thus far discovered as a human collective.

It is in essence a theoretical and tentative snapshot of our human faculties, translated into content areas that are broken down into an individual's developmental stages, to help us navigate and nurture our physiological and intellectual growth by selecting what, when and how to best learn (and further develop, grow and improve) anything that we care to learn (and further develop, grow and improve).

To navigate such learning and growth, I always envisioned an avatar-like profile that tracks our progress in terms of human skills and traits. The same way a Role Playing Game tracks a players Strength, Magic, Health and such, imagine tracking our own human abilities in terms of Cardio Capacity, Muscle Definition, Language Mastery (per language), Design Skills (per field, such as Art, Architecture, Engineering, etc), Coding Capability (per language), and so on and so forth, however we deem necessary. Learners can then quickly identify what skillsets they care to improve next based on what they care to achieve, while employers - or those seeking help and collaboration - can quickly determine who has the necessary qualifications and ready to jump in. They can also provide the precise support and professional development required by the learner so that they can achieve their mission objectives; Win-Win for everyone involved.