We live in interesting times, don’t we? And we should be excited because we are for sure living in history. Grand changes are upon us already. The technology is truly leapfrogging society forward. But as frail human beings, we are going to have to learn how to respond, how to go forward.
One of my colleagues was recently telling me about one of his students who really didn’t want to study at all. Didn’t care about anything. And what did I think? Well, I said basically, does this person believe in happiness? Does this person want to live out a happy life?
Eudaimonia as Aristotle talks about. The potential of happiness is inside of all of us, but we have to put in the work, don’t we? My personal story, I was a bad student, but I was smart enough to realize that I am eventually going to have to graduate from high school if I want to achieve anything at all. I had a lot of difficulty with math And at the time, we needed 11 credits. We needed math 10 and then another 10 subjects in grades 11 and 12.
And I fortunately fared extremely well in French and in theater. We were, I guess, nationally renowned for a high school theater group that came out of our little town. Remarkable, really. We won the provincial championships 4 times, I believe. Did 2 tours across the country.
Wow. Amazing story, really. So I could not achieve success with this math and no math ten and no graduation from high school. I’ll think about this. High school, but at the time of course to graduate, not that important because you could quit school when you were 16 years old, get a job and make 2 to 5000 US dollars a month around 60 to a 150,000 New Taiwan dollars.
A tremendous amount of money at the time. You could buy a house in a year and a half and a car, 8 months. So your life path was right in front of you. You would meet a girl when you’re 18 or so, eventually, marry children, save some money, retire and die. But of course, no one told you that the primary industries in British Columbia were going to go away in 10 years or so which they did.
So I fortunately actually got my high school diploma and went on and eventually went to university and did fairly well at my studies. The point being that if you don’t put some effort into your life, you’re not going to achieve this happiness. So what do you do? Well basically, you need some resolve. You need some strength.
You need some belief that I’m going to be capable of pulling my piece of life off. So to that young student, what one must say is that you have to get down to work. You don’t have to be an excellent student but you must realize that if you don’t pass these basic test, these preliminaries, you inevitably are going to suffer. Your happiness is not going to be there in your life. And as we know today, the millions upon millions of people that have just voted for Donald Trump because he’s told them he’s going to make America great again.
And god bless him. I hope he will. I truly do. But it’s not going to be easy because everyone is going to have to work, of course, especially the young people. Now the vast majority of people, of course, should not go to university.
They should undertake some other type of training because really, what is university good for with the exception of training perhaps to be a doctor, a lawyer, or a candlestick maker as I often like to say, just a liberal arts degree is useless. That said, it should train you how to think and you should be able to have the knowledge to learn how to learn from that liberal arts degree. But many people, however, are not interested in thinking in that sense. They’re just not. They want to accomplish something physically in their life.
They wanna build a house or lay a floor or install lights or repair a machine, and that’s fine. It’s a good thing. Our society needs people like this as well. So if you undertake your liberal arts degree, you’re only there to learn how to think. From there, you’re going to have to be retrained.
I have liberal arts degrees in philosophy of all things. Useless. But for me, wonderful because it was able to give me a basis of understanding, my understanding at least of life. But after I graduated, I had to be trained And I was retrained as a salesman, as an advertising salesman. And I worked very, very, very hard to learn this straight.
Being a salesman, I mean, the world doesn’t evolve, I think, economically without someone selling something, and that was the profession I undertook. And I was eventually good at it, but it was hard. It was no gift at all. By the same token, life is hard. There is no easy pathway to this success, to this happiness that is spoken about.
So get down to work and enjoy your day and develop a routine. Promise yourself, why am I here? Answer this question. What is my mission? Write in my notebook.
Answer this question. What happens when I leave here? Answer this spiritual question. And then you will have a lot of joy. Happiness ultimately will only be adjudicated at the very end of your life according to Aristotle.
But that’s okay because along the way, you will know whether you’re on the right path or not. Find that resolve. Remember my math test. I eventually pulled it off after failing it three times. And if I can do it, you can do it.
Pardon me. Anyone could do it. Just continue day after day after day after day. Never give up. Never give up on you.
Promise yourself. And you’d know what they say. You know what they say. Critical thinking is everything especially when you’re going to accomplish your goals and your dreams in life and critical thinking is great. You take care. God bless. Bye bye.