I’ve been thinking lately about what makes smart people smart and dumb people dumb. These are just varying degrees of intelligence which can be broken down into a process of pattern recognition, memory retainment, and application. How well someone goes through this process reflects how smart or dumb other people will perceive them to be. This is process is known as learning.
The patterns I’ve seen of people learning typically fall into one of two categories: motivated people and lazy people. The motivated people were the “smart” people in school. They were the ones who received high grades, honors, participated in various events, activities, and whatnot. The other category were the slackers and cheaters. These people drag other people down with them.
The difference between the two is that one group of people recognized that hard work yield bigger rewards and benefits than lackadaisicalness while the other group recognized that doing the bare minimum, scraping just barely by, is enough to survive. I guess we develop these patterns early on as children when our infantile brains are trying to make sense of the world and continue developing these patterns as we grow up. People eventually fall into certain same behavioral patterns that characterized by what they remember and how they apply those memories.
Learning doesn’t have to stop after being in an education for some 20 odd years. Lack of stimulation will make you dumb and lazy, but ultimately the motivation for learning is to survive. All we really need is water and food. A domicile, in the basic sense, is not necessary but provides stability for sociality. In a developed, economic society, the lack of skill sets (in a simply put way) leads to joblessness which means no income which means no sustenance.
Some people seem to recognize patterns earlier or faster than others, and these are the people who get ahead in life for better or for worse. Others don’t learn as quickly. It’s hard to tell whether it’s something biological or whether it’s the presentation of information. Getting those slower ones to learn requires a different methodology, and that’s just another pattern.
Everywhere I go, I keep seeing patterns: traffic patterns, the way people drive, how people talk, how people code, what people write, instant gratification, long-term rewards, movies, media, trends of all sorts, and the list goes on and on. What to do with all these patterns? I guess the appropriate response (but not necessarily required) is to apply what I’ve observed.
