I strongly believe that one thing that separates successful people from unsuccessful ones is the grit or the ability to continue the process in reaching the goal despite the tremendous hurdles encountered along the way. This could best describe what I have gone through this semester in this course. The value of resiliency and the power of long term goal have played significantly in continuing the online course.
Like Lehrer, I also believe that success and long term goal could not only be accomplished through IQ. In fact, there are many people who have high IQ, but they have not reached their goals in life. Obstacles could not be overcome by pure intelligence just like what common sense would tell us. Unfortunately, life is full of obstacles. We are always confronted with the situations that make our lives more difficult.
This would lead me to my next point which is the tremendous value of feeling in thinking. I would not have accomplished the several assignments in this course without feeling positively toward the ideas that I have written in my essays. Actually, it takes a lot of guts and positive moods in generating clear and distinct ideas that would mesmerize the readers, my classmates, and my professor. The intense positive emotion is highly necessary in creating thoughts that may influence others.
One of the things that a person has to do, as I learned from Lehrer’s essay, is to know clearly what he/she wants. An individual has to possess a clear vision of what he/she wants to accomplish in the future and be sure that he/she really wants it. Without a clear vision or goal, success is unachievable. For one thing, a clear vision is a measurement of success. We would not know whether we have succeeded without knowing our direction. A vision usually sets the standards for us so that we would know whether we are making progress or not.
In connection, I have successfully learned that everything we say may not be exactly the same as what we think. The words we utter usually have different meanings that should be decoded further in order to fully put them into context. Every word that we say has underlying ideas that may not exactly describe what we want to say.
Philosophically speaking, our ideas should be clear in our mind before expressing them into words or sentences. This is the process of conceptualization which is undeniably crucial. Attaching symbols or words to the ideas and manifesting them into a written material such as essay is usually the next step. As rational human beings, we articulate these concepts as much as possible in a logical and consistent manner (Tarnas).
This is actually one of the obstacles that I encountered in this course. As I observed, we tend to write down words that do not exactly characterized our ideas. Our main objective was just to express these abstract concepts into an essay that would hopefully make sense to the readers and us. Consequently, it is possible our ideas to be misinterpreted by others because of the words we used or how we constructed the sentences.
This is why it is easier to copy words or sentences popularized by experts or writers so that our ideas would be acknowledged immediately. However, copying and owning words or catchy phrases from others is unethical if one does not recognize the owner or creator. This is another challenge that I have encountered in this online course. I learned that I should have the ability to convey my thoughts as accurately as possible without plagiarizing my essay. Admittedly, I am tempted to copy catchy phrases or quotes from other materials by simply owning them. But, as I said, my long term goal does not include doing the easy task but working harder despite the hurdles that come along my way. So, I am quite prepared to overcome these challenges with my innate resiliency and persistency.
Nevertheless, a strong foundation of the grit within me would help overcome these obstacles. We do not need to be like Isaac Newton to accomplish our goals, as claimed by Lehrer (2009). We just need a strong character to unleash our potentials within us and the belief that we can do it.