I resonate with that erudite statement from psychologist Esther Perel, not just from a relationship perspective. Life is a struggle to get what you want, especially when what you want is not mediocrity or inducing excruciating boredom.
Hard-earned Victories
Some struggles in life are small and temporal, and some are large and enduring, their concurrent amplitudes intersecting and hopefully not causing deflationary interference. The victories over those struggles determine the expansion of your proximal development. Those hard-earned victories become instrumental in never-ending personal development. They make you who you are and will become.
If you want it
James Brown (1933-2006), The Godfather Of Soul
You gotta learn it
You gotta build it
And then we can earn it
To that point, I love the statement uttered by legendary football quarterback Tom Brady that his best accomplishment is the next Superbowl ring, not the one he stands on the podium for today. For proximal development is precisely that, the continual expansion of your fractal of ability. To never settle for the status quo. To never capitulate. To keep reinventing yourself.
Human World
A human world worth having is a world in which the fractal of humans to each his own can expand along the axis of their innate and unique proximal development.
A world facing the serious, compounding, and unavoidable consequences of entropy will need all hands on deck for humans to adapt to the unstoppable decline of available energy on our planet. Our educational processes, which prepare less than 6% of American students for unscripted real-world scenarios, are ill-prepared for what is to come.
We will need skills to meet and greet a wide swath of nature’s evolutionary challenges and not remain stuck in the regurgitation of narrow manmade suppositions of foregone merit. Hence, we must learn about nature’s first-principles to respond appropriately to the challenges it throws our way.
I keep fighting for a better world worth having and sadly leave people, who do not believe I am worth “having” and fighting for, where I found them.
