Inner Einstein!

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage-to move in the opposite direction. -Albert Einstein (1879-1955), once wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning.

Foul Play

What if you were captured and placed in a prison. Let’s make it even worse by assuming you were unlawfully placed in custody. No broken laws, no dastardly deed, simply stripped of your freedom! What would you do? Would you kick and scream and cry foul play? But what if nobody could hear you? What if you knew for sure that NOBODY was coming for you?

What would this do to you mentally, physically? After having had it so easy. Nice hots meals whenever you wanted. A cool drink to quench your thirst. A safe house with a neighborhood watch program. Now imagine you had the chance to be given drugs that would numb the pain and suffering. Maybe just a little something to help you sleep through each day.

Drugs or Alcohol

Even better, you could actually have the choice of drugs or alcohol. Would you take it? Now let’s up the ante. If you took it, then the trade off would be that you were forever trapped. There would be no possibility for escape and you would be confined for the rest of your life. Would you still do it?

Or maybe if you stayed in that stupor long enough and caused no uproar then you’d be allowed to perform some hard labor that you could not stand for 8 hours a day and then return to your cell. Is this really the path you would choose? Maybe you know people who live this very existence every day. Maybe you have even found yourself “living” like this!

Think Escape

You see there’s always a way out. There’s always an escape plan. A map for your own victory, but we keep sitting back waiting for someone else to deliver it. As we remain in our sedated state, we whine and complain that circumstances just don’t seem to be cooperating. We think there’s no escape.

But that’s just it! The escape tool is the ability to think, but as soon as we are challenged to do just that we freeze like a deer in the headlights. Unable to save ourselves. So we do nothing until the pain gets so overwhelming that we hit the fork in the road to either submit or choose the path of inspirational dissatisfaction!

ADHD IQ

This week I was speaking with a friend of mine that was stressed out because he was having challenges with his son. When I asked if he had been tested for learning disabilities, I was told that when given an IQ test, he scored one point below genius! When challenged in a typical classroom, he became disruptive by jumping on the ground and rolling himself up in a carpet.

This was the exact behavior that the school did not know how to deal with, so of course they suggested that he immediately be put on a drug treatment. The story made me want to jump out of my skin! Here’s a kid that tests at the level of genius…and let me remind you that we are obsessed with measuring so we can categorize…and all we want to do is drug the kid so he can’t think. But I’m sure once he’s in that stupor and imprisoned internally he’ll finally “behave” and that Jupiter will align with Mars again!

Tracing Numbers

Oh and by the way, when his father, distraught over the repeated insistance that is kid is not “right,” asked his son what happened that day in class, the kid replied sarcastically, “dad, they were tracing numbers.” Suddenly, I had a vision of Einstein sitting in class being told that he had to trace numbers while he was daydreaming about traveling alongside a beam of light. Maybe he would have rolled up in a carpet too, figuring that if they were going to treat him like a juvenile, he might as well have fun!

Now I’m certainly not saying that we should let chaos run the classroom as kids try to find their inner genius, but I am making a plea for common sense. If the kid blows one of our illustrious tests out of the water then perhaps we should take that evidence and do something with it instead of drugging these ADHD, BAD kids into a drug induced personal prison.

Over Board

As I grow older, I want to ensure that we are not a country of stiffs. I want that kid in a science lab somewhere questioning conventional wisdom. I encouraged his father to fight that fight because that kid just might be the one who cures cancer. Or how about all those hyper kids that can’t wait until sports time? I want them out there because they might end up being the ones that protect us on the police force or the battle field. I want them to be strong, fearless and aggressive.

So we walk this fine balance where we want our kids to learn that discipline is a key ingredient to a more stable and fruitful life, but we are in danger of going over-board. The most important part of teaching, in my opinion, is provoking other people to think, to find their inner light switch. We must teach our kids and each other that thinking is the most powerful weapon in the world and the coolest part is that we all have the same ability.

Chisel & Saw

So what if some people are supposedly “smarter” than you on paper? What does that mean? There are all types of brilliance; social, physical, intellectual, organizational, artistic and on and on! The best news is that we’re all wired to be really great at something, but what happens to that seed depends on many factors; but none more important than whether or not you chose to think about it and then act upon it!

So the chisel and saw that you need to escape your prison are right there in your head. But the warning is that we might be your own slave master. Are we imprisoning our thoughts. Are we drugging our inner Einsteins and the future of our children? Maybe to begin our escape, we might just want to roll up in a rug and be kids for a few minutes. We just might awaken a bunch of hidden geniuses!