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 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;

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

Shaolin Temple Europe is trying to educate the world using an East Asian philosophy, taught by a Vietnamese Kungfu Master born in German. Though the website is primarily commercial, some useful educational videos are made available for free.

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.

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 in the west over longer or shorter recess/breaks.

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.

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.

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.

These are 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? What about 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?

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).