Week 19: Impatience! THERE AIN’T NO QUICK FIX

Impatience! THERE AIN’T NO QUICK FIX

This week I have been really impatient about my learning. I know that I am learning a ton.

But I have been really impatient wanting it to go faster. Silly me right?

The interesting thing is that I am not the only one! I have learned that I am a product of the society that we live in.

Dr.Brooks explains more in depth about this in an article he wrote called:

THERE AIN’T NO QUICK FIX

Dr. Shanon Brooks

The following is adapted from a keynote address

delivered April 13, 2004 on the George Wythe College

campus during the 2004 Statesmanship Invitational.

In the immortal words of Jerry McGuire, “we live in a cynical world.” We also live in a

surreal environment of entitlement, enlargement, enticement, fat blasting, and muscling

up. With the baby boomers refusing to grow old and a very individualistic Generation X,

it is little wonder everyone is looking for that miracle cure, the solution in a bottle; a

quick fix.

In this “blame everyone else,” “I want my fair share,” “I deserve it” world, we are

looking for the fountain of youth of “quick fixes” (and spending in the search, hundreds

of thousands of hours of time and literally billions of dollars). We can’t really help it, it

surrounds us in the media and entertainment, it is the new morality taught in our schools

and churches. This search for the “quick fix” is the new (or old as Tocqueville speaks of

it in 1835) American approach to marriage and the modern family, personal and

corporate finance, functions of government and domestic and foreign policy.

The search for the “quick fix” impacts the food we eat and how we eat it. It controls our

attitudes about nearly everything we do and think. It is the antithesis of patience,

compound interest, traditional white weddings, Olympic gold earned on sheer will,

delayed gratification, courting, “wait and see” and “building for the next generation.”

The last two generations of Americans have suffered immensely from this search, but I

fear nothing like the current generation which has little or no mooring in the ancient

bulwark of principle. The more we desire things from an entitlement perspective, the less

we are willing to “pay the price” or to accept our current station and moving forward

from that “plot of ground which is given to [us] to till.”

No, we will continue to demand today with no effort, that for that which our grandparents

spent a life time living to acquire, and never securing the knowledge that they

possess—that the joy is not in the getting, but in the living towards.

In education (not schooling mind you), we make huge strides in the direction of entering

on the path of becoming true liberal artists, only to be sucked out to sea with the tsunami

undertow of public opinion and fear of pain.

The truth is, unless we can resolve to just be honest with ourselves, our attempts at Liber Education will end up in little more than slightly higher mediocrity. There is a price to pay to get a superb leadership education and in our day everyone seems bent on finding a short cut.

Acquiring a liberal arts education is likely to be the most difficult and painful thing you

have ever attempt in your entire existence. It impacts every aspect of your domestic,

religious, and professional life. If you are alone in this endeavor, you will be chastised,

ridiculed, gossiped about, made fun of, and left out. You will spend hours upon hours in

solitude studying books that nobody you know has ever heard of. People will say, “while

I admire your effort, what kind of job can you get with that?”

Aristotle to Augustine, Homer to Shakespeare, Adler to Hutchinson, Barzun to Lewis,

Dickens to L’Amour—it is always the same. True Leadership-Statesmanship comes out

of none other than pain, struggle with God and self, tenacity and hard, long study.

This concept is no where better discussed than by Mortimer Adler in his essay Invitation to the

Pain of Learning:

One of the reasons why education given by our schools is so frothy and vapid is that the

American people generally—the parent more than the teacher—wish childhood to

unspoiled by pain. Childhood must be a period of delight, of [happy] indulgence [of]

impulses. It must be given every avenue of unimpeded expression, which of course is

pleasant; and it must not be made to suffer the impositions of discipline or the exactions

of duty, which of course are painful. . . What lies behind my remark is a distinction

between two views of education.

In one view, education is something externally added to a person, as his clothing or other

accoutrements. We cajole him into standing there willingly while we fit him; and in

doing this we must be guided by his likes and dislikes, by his notion of what enhances his

appearance. In the other view, education is an interior transformation of a person’s

mind and character. He is plastic material to be improved not according to his

inclinations, but according to what is good for him. But because he is a living thing, and

not dead clay, the transformation can be effected only through his own activity.

Teachers of every sort can help, but they can only help in the process of learning that

must be dominated at every moment by the activity of the learner. And the fundamental

activity that is involved in every kind of genuine learning is intellectual activity, the

activity generally known as thinking. Any learning which takes place without thinking is

necessarily of the sort I have called external and additive—learning passively acquired,

for which the common name is “information.” Without thinking, the kind of learning

which transforms a mind, gives it new insights, enlightens it, deepens understanding,

[and] elevates the spirit, simply cannot occur.

Anyone who has done any thinking, even a little bit, knows that it is painful. It is hard

work—in fact the very hardest that human beings are ever called upon to do. It is

fatiguing, not refreshing. If allowed to follow the path of least resistance, no one would ever think.

You do not need it easier. You don’t.

No, what we need in our homes and in our generation is for our education to be much,

much harder. The strength and fortitude for the completion of a future mission is never

developed within the comforts of our “Comfort Zone.” I tenaciously engaged in their work.

It was Sir Walter Scott who wrote, “All men who have turned out worth anything, have had the chief hand in their own education.”

I challenge you, if you have not already, to join our ranks, to settle for

nothing less than a real Thomas Jefferson Education—the kind you painfully earn.

The easier it is, the less you are learning. The harder it is, the greater chance that you’re

earning the kind of education you want.

As the great classical historian Thucydides put it:

“There is no need to suppose that human beings differ very much one from another: but it

is true that the ones who come out on top are the ones who have been trained in the

hardest school.” ~Thucydides

Copyright  2004 by Shanon D. Brooks

I know that when we are tenacious in our learning, that is really where we are able to become great. Yes, it takes time, and man is it hard! Especially when we can so quickly get the information that we are looking for. But really getting the information through us that, takes effort that I personally just need to buckle down and do. To be honest, really “THERE AIN’T NO QUICK FIX” Visit Dr. Brooks blog for the full article of “THERE AIN’T NO QUICK FIX”