You Can Learn By Teaching

When you cannot teach someone about something, that means you do not understand it. One way to understand something better is to start teaching it to people, learn from it and improve on it.

Someone (Einstein, Richard Feynman or somebody) put it well,

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Contrary to that idea, to get better at anything we need to repeat it and rinse. So, instead of waiting to fully understand a subject before teaching it, one can start teaching it and the process of teaching someone clarifies things in our own head and improve our understanding of the subject.

Bad Thoughts Are Bad and Good Thoughts Are Good

Thoughts are the root of everything we experience in our life. So why do we entertain bad thoughts if we know that bad thoughts are bad for us and good thoughts are good for us?

Mind, like a farmland, needs to be plowed, weeded of bad thoughts to get the crop of Ananda (Joy). It takes no effort to let weeds grow in the garden, it takes no effort to let bad thoughts grow in our mind. It takes a lot of deliberate practice and effort to remove the weeds and fertilize the flowers and plants.

We reap what we sow, we cannot sow an orange seed and expect to reap a papaya. We reap good life by sowing good thoughts, so why not go ahead do it? Someone rightly said, everyone wants to be rich but not everyone wants to work for it. We all want joy and happiness and peace but not all of us want to work for it.

I recently found this interesting book by James Allen, mentioned by Les Brown in one of his talks, you can read it for free on Google Books here, enjoy the good thoughts 🙂

“Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; Bad thoughts and actions can never produce good results” — James Allen

https://www.google.com/books/edition/As_a_Man_Thinketh/mdslAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover

Actions Are Your Best Friend

The Prophet Mohammed said, “There is no better companion on this way than what you do. Your actions will be your best friend, or if you’re cruel and selfish, your actions will be a poisonous snake that lives in your grave.” –Rumi

Thinking is the opposite of acting, so if you are not acting you are thinking and if you are thinking too much and acting too little, you are going to have a massive cognitive dissonance and that dissonance can only mean one thing, your mind will work hard to match your actions with your thinking or your thinking to your actions. Unfortunately, matching your thinking to your actions is the path of least resistance and so mind will lead your thinking to closer to your actions and that is simply a race to the bottom.

“You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems”
–James Clear

I’d say you don’t rise to the level of your thinking, you fall to the level of your actions. You can think all the greatest ideas and ideals in this world but they are not going to transform you, what will transform you and make you a better person is when you act on a few of those dreams, ideas, ideals!