I had a great response to my post yesterday in the class, so I thought I’d share what I wrote back to one of my students who was talking about her hard times in the past week.

Hi X,

It sounds like prayer is one of the things you do to change the equation in your function box. You know, we all are awash in a sea of our own thoughts. The good and the bad things that happen in our day get automatically processed in our function boxes. We react with more good or bad thoughts as output. The output thoughts control the link to what we do about the events.

Interestingly, some people believe that we cannot control the flow of our thoughts.

I posted this to my students today. I thought some of you might enjoy reading it.

Hi Class,

Since I began teaching many years ago, I have heard many possible versions of why students couldn’t get their work in on time. The most common is: “I’ve got a lot of stuff going on at home.” Another common version is: “I’ve got a lot of stuff going on at work.”

Of course there are the individual events related to health and money that jump up and get in the way of schooling. Sometimes these issues are fabricated as plausible excuses to get out of work, but far more often there is at least a seed of truth in the statements. I don’t discount them. In fact, I can understand how home life, work, health, and money can all impact the way we think, and therefore the way we perform.

If you see yourself in any of the above statements or possibilities I talk about, please don’t take it personally.

Are you confused? I’ve taught for over two decades, and I can be as confused as any of my students ever were.

Setting the stage for being confused:

Being confused means falling out of the comfortable line of thinking.

Life became a bit more complicated during tax season this year. We have been working with an accounting program that normally does a great job of keeping all of our income and expenses organized, but for some reason the program’s database got corrupted (I’m pretty sure I was the corrupting influence, but with computers, it’s always best to blame the machine–just to be safe). All blame aside, someone (me) had to transfer every transaction out of the database and go through it by hand. This meant reorganizing every bill and every receipt to make sure that dates, amounts, and categories all lined up.

I was confused.

Believe me, they didn’t line up. I was confused. For example, I had about twenty or so different business receipts all dated July 1, regardless of when they were actually paid or billed. The same thing happened in September. According to the data, we had eaten at a place called Dobson’s Restaurant over a dozen times, but we only went there once. The clincher was the bill for $78 for parking at Malaga Car Park, which happens to be in Spain. Um . . . Spain? Didn’t go there. Didn’t park there. Yeah, I was confused.

We noticed the smell when we went into the kitchen . . .

This morning we put a pot of beans on slow boil after soaking them all night. Neither my wife nor I gave them a second thought, which can be a mistake when boiling beans. We noticed the smell when we went into the kitchen to make tea. Burnt garbanzo beans smell a lot like burnt toast. The toasted ones that didn’t get all black ended up tasting pretty good. Not a bad discovery . . . but I doubt we’ll be seeing them in the snack aisle.

Stay with me here. It’s okay . . . I’ll get back to the beans in a minute. When trying to achieve mental focus, the first thing I do is limit the amount of input to my eyes and ears. I find a quiet place and turn off the distractions: the TV, the radio, and even the background music. I have refined my environment by removing the excess noise. That clears out the clutter and gives my mind room to think.

He is a great kid, a stick of TNT . . .

I love to tutor kids. Yesterday I was tutoring a 7 year old who has been struggling with attention issues in school. He is a great kid, a stick of TNT in terms of energy. Most adults I know think how nice it would be to have that much energy, but if you really think about it, you might just prefer your somewhat diminished adult energy.

The force of energy in TNT comes from within, but as the explosion develops the energy expands in different directions, getting weaker the further it gets from the center of the explosion. It happens very quickly. That is exactly what this kid is like. His mind is operating at high speed, but it is going in so many directions that his thought energy is wasted. He is struggling in school, but he is by no means stupid or incapable. He just has to find a way to harness the powers within him. His energy serves no purpose unless it is focused.

I am Van Gogh, I am Einstein, I am Beethoven, I am Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain).

I am Van Gogh, I am Einstein, I am Beethoven, I am Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). So are you. We are all capable of doing anything we desire. If you have some other genius you admire, then use that name instead. The names, the genders, the races are irrelevant. Each of us is each of them. I look up to many others as geniuses. These are just the names that came to mind this fine Saturday morning.

Interesting, isn’t it? There are people we call geniuses. We look up to them as if they are different than we could ever be, yet each of them was once a newborn with no particular knowledge, skills, or aptitudes other than the ability to learn.

The ability to learn–that’s the one thing all of us have in common, regardless of where we are or who we are. Don’t believe me? Look up Srinivasa Ramanujan.