Fast Food Education

 Fast Food Education

The recent lockdown has led to a substantially greater number of people cooking and eating at home and not restaurants. I noticed some interesting psychological inter-play when doing this. The process of purchasing, preparing, cooking, and presenting a meal forces so much mental involvement in the process, that it continually distorts and diminishes the sensation of hunger. Therefore, we often find when we are hungry, if we take time to cook, we may not have the same urgent sense of “I must eat, now!” Which is very different to when we know our meal simply awaits us devouring it. What can we learn from this? A culture of consumption as opposed to proactive engagement in process takes many forms. I recently prepared a relatively simple toasted vegetable sandwich, and the process of firstly choosing the salad, inspecting the leaves with your fingers, then seeing the water droplets cleanse the leaves, then later chopping cucumbers and seeing the soft seeds inside contrast against the relatively thick green skin, then applying the various spreads and sauces to add taste - this process gets you in touch, it conditions the mind to become familiar with the meal. It is also comparable with a warm up before sparring in martial arts. It helps acquaint you with your body and its condition, its movement, the feeling of your muscles when handling different challenges, and gets the senses geared up. After spending time preparing the meal, bites will inevitably be more conscious and appreciative. The fast food culture trivialises the process. Instead of making it a conscious process, it creates desensitisation. The same principle will be scalable for many things. A leader who is very disengaged from the workings on the ground is another good example. If there is a factory that is suddenly taken over by someone with little experience in the field and with such environment, it automatically creates a disconnect. If however, we build up the familiarity of looking at the cucumber seeds, we will appreciate more when we taste it. If we walk the floors, talk to people, we will appreciate more the output. If we appreciate the individual journeys, we will value our staff. If we don’t, it will be like fast food - use for our benefit, and discard when useless to us. 

The Library

A prominent Chinese scholar was asked why he liked living in Europe. He said he liked the old buildings there. Indeed when I went to work in mainland Europe in the past few years, I noticed how the bank buildings were not newly formed glitzy sky-scrappers. Rather they were buildings frequently put up after World War II, and some that dated before this. This beautiful heritage and value of it, creates a culture of appreciation and depth. Appreciation means referencing the past, since it refers to what someone has done, or a culture has done. With focus solely on what needs to get done, without appreciation, this is similar to the “I need to eat, now!” consumerist mentality. The University of London had as one of their shared facilities, the Maughan Library (pictured above) which is near to the Royal Court of Justice on Fleet Street. It was tucked away, a private little place. WIth lamps, and meters high of books all around you in a very large round room, it oozed a spirit of deep thinking, contemplation, thought and learning. It is not a place for rushing. At times I’ve entered it in a semi-panic pre exam, with a need to cram as much as possible. Yes, it served that purpose for me, but this was not the spirit of the place. The paintings, the dim light, the carvings outside, gave a feel of attention and above all appreciation for the process of education. A simply beautiful experience, the educational equivalent of taking a slow breathe of fresh air at the summit of a mountain. It is in such a place that the mind can be open to education, where there are no constraints. Education after all, is a two way process; the knowledge getting to you, and also of you assimilating the knowledge and personalising it to become acquainted with it. This is not something that materialism can create simply be amassing lots of wealth. It is an experience on the mental platform of mental openness, facilitated by an environment that allows for mental comfort and intellectual stimulation. It is then not a surprise that the worlds most wealthy opt to study in these institutions and environments.

Fast Food Education

Fast-forward to the lockdown. It resulted in me doing a number of things in the house which I wouldn’t do normally. On the digital front, more time on Netflix, more time watching videos on YouTube etc. What we watch, often depends on our mood and what we prefer to digest at a particular time. When my mind feels a hunger to learn, I don’t put on Tiger King. Conversely, when I am in a more laid back mood, I will not watch a very serious documentary about World War 1. Anything meaningful takes effort. Periods of prolonged study do not pay off immediately. The opportunities for applying what we study may take time to manifest. However, a continual cycle of learning, checking what we have learnt against the real world we observe, will keep us ever evolving. Discipline also plays a great role. Social media has played a huge role in personal discipline. Checking feeds is an activity we begin doing when we might be bored, but ends up becoming such a habit that we do it when we are supposed to be doing other things. When we are distracted mentally, we might go on social media platforms. Human and animal-kind are both organised by natural hierarchy; it’s just the way we work. The more efficient will know the call of the day, and make it to the top. Most won’t, and will be governed by the others. Irrespective of form of government, this is just how things will work out, because it is natural. The average person may not be as disciplined as those that make it to the top, and therefore the vast majority will gain their knowledge through the mainstream forms; the precise reason why politicians are swarming to social media platforms to attract the masses to their messages. How does medium affect acquisition of knowledge? Well, do we want fast food, or conscious food. There is something about digital platforms that seems to grab the brain and make it hostage. Sadly, as generations continue to go on, the availability of such fast food style education is increasing. Ultimately there is a paradigm shift. This does not necessarily need to be negative since humans will always have some tendency to seek knowledge. However, it will certainly dumb down the extent to which there is a more conscious approach to seeking it. For those that have a more old-school tendency towards the beautiful high ceilinged libraries, layers of books, carvings on the ceilings, and this kind of environment to help open the mind, this can be done, it might just take more effort in an increasingly digital age.

“The only thing you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.” Albert Einstein

Hearing: The Key to Improving

Improvement, and being happy with where we currently are, don’t go well together. An attitude of continually striving to maintain and increase our standard is what is needed to succeed. Improvement often comes as a result of an event, called feedback, which more often than not, will not be like music to our ears. How we evaluate, internalise, and act on feedback will, in part, determine whether we go on to succeed, or fail.

Slow!

A couple of months ago, in my first Muay Thai class, one of the instructors was putting my hand wrap on for me. He saw the rakhi, a string, on my right hand. English not being their first language, rather Thai, he gestured and asked what it was. I said it was for protection from my sister. I saw he had a white thread on his hand also. I asked him what it was. He folded his palms and said, “Buddha” and “Temple”. I said thank you after he put the wraps on and continued with the session. He was very warm and a gentleman. Being the first session, another trainer told me I was kicking wrong. He gestured, don’t whip, push, put your hip and back into it. Time and time again, he would repeat the same instructions, and I’d continue to struggle for at least 45 minutes. Toward the end it got marginally better, but then the session ended. In the next session, it was as difficult, he told me I was kicking wrong. I found this experience extremely frustrating. I had previously done karate; and my kicks were the most powerful part of my technique, by far. I didn’t need any special mentoring in kicking during karate, it was just natural, and here I was for at least a couple of sessions, making very little progress in this very area. For some reason, I didn’t like hearing him saying the kicks were wrong. In the next session, the instructor said, “Slow!!!” to try to get me to use less power and focus on technique. My muscles eventually began to become reconditioned to the new technique, which had more push, more of a lean back, more force, and less snap, less whip – which was the karate way that I’d become conditioned to from before. I removed power almost totally, and focussed on technique. The power could always be re-introduced once the technique was right. One day I came in a little early just to watch the other group training. I studied their technique more. After a few sessions, I was with the same instructor, and he was much happier. After training with a number of instructors, and getting various bits of feedback, which were all so useful, I felt better rounded. In a consequent session, whilst one trainer was on the pads, the trainer who tied my wraps in my first lesson was just watching, attentively. After a few minutes, the two trainers spoke to each other for a while, demonstrating techniques and focussing on specifics. They then told me to change a few things. I trusted them completely by now, and listened very carefully. I could also see how doing what they said to do would lead to improvement even before I did it. It was excellent – the more I listened, internalised, and applied, the more effective I was, and visibly so. We started doing some more spontaneous moves a few moments later whilst maintaining the technique, and they signalled very loudly “Good!” The agility in the legs, waist, and back was a lot better in a couple of weeks, and I began to put in 80% of power to good effect. Upper body and legs began to synchronise well, and I expressed my thanks to the instructors. I later came to know that the instructor who tied the wraps for me in my first session, was formerly a champion in his weight in Korea, and had fought in more than 260 fights, almost all of them being victories.

Listening and adapting

There were two instances of feedback in the above example; the first being in the first few weeks regarding how the kicks were wrong, and the latter being after some sessions from the two trainers. The attitude during the first was one of cloudedness and previous baggage, which creates layers between what is coming in, and you, who should be listening and applying. These layers are the talk of the mind, and can be severely detrimental in us picking up these gems of feedback and really improving. The layers are usually down to a sense of ego saying, I am right in what am doing, don’t try to tell me what to do, or how to do it. In the second instance of feedback however, there was acceptance of the trainers, trust in the trainers, a real desire to improve, and ultimately an openness to change the way I was doing things recognising that it was not right. The mind was clear, and there was very little between the words coming out of their mouth, and me incorporating these. The mind is the medium which can either position us to improve, or to continue and be ignorant to good advice. In the Bhagawad Gita, the ancient Indian scripture recited by Lord Krishna to Arjuna, essentially to prepare him for war, Lord Krishna says that the mind can be one’s worst enemy, or best of friends. How clear it is that this was the case for the Muay Thai technique, and it doesn’t take much to translate this example into the corporate context, or indeed the personal life context either. We need to be open to feedback about us, to accept that we may need to change. However, we must be careful what feedback we take on. The source of feedback must be authoritative, or well positioned at a minimum. It is ever so important to be able to trust the source of feedback, especially in an environment where others may be rewarded at your expense. So we must be bold, open to change, and yet careful when trying to learn how we can improve in our paths to success.