It is a thousand times better to have common sense without
education than to have education without common sense.
-Robert Green Ingersoll
I can vouch for the veracity of this statement. Having spent most of my adult life on college and university campuses, I've witnessed many, many people who have tons of education and very little common sense. They're perplexed by many of the simple things in life, such as how to relate to the people around them, and focused almost exclusively on their disciplines, their research, and the papers that they're writing that they know very few people will read. It's really kind of ironic that people with lots of education can write a 100-page dissertation or research paper, but can't fix the faucet in their kitchen sink when it needs to be changed, or get completely flustered when their car won't start in the morning and they have to find a different way to get to work.
I value common sense much more than I value my Ph.D. The doctorate took a lot of time and effort, but the common sense helps me much more in my daily life and my relationships with other people. Common sense has proved to be extremely important to me when I've faced certain obstacles, and it helps me a lot when I'm working with young people and looking for ways to get through to them. It helps me decide how to create and use classroom assignments, and it helps me to come up with unique dinners when there's nothing in the cupboards that I really want to eat.
Work on your common sense, and you'll be working on a richer life. Work on your education, and that's still extremely valuable. The trick is not to give up common sense for book sense, for having the latter without the former is like wearing a raincoat every single day--even when it's not raining.
The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a
particular mood of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change
its form. . . happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up.
-Charles L. Morgan
The things that make me happy now tend to be very different from those things that used to make me happy when I was younger. I feel very fortunate to be able to say this because I know many people who feel unhappy and dissatisfied with life because they're still trying to make themselves happy in the ways that used to make them happy, and those things just don't have the same effect any longer.
When I was much younger, I used to feel what I considered to be happiness when I bought certain things. I used to feel happy when certain people paid attention to me, or even liked me. I had been raised in a materialistic society that stressed acceptance by others as quite desirable, and so I grew up thinking I was happy when the things I had learned made happiness came to be. Nowadays, though, such isn't the case.
These days, I'm happy waking up in the morning, looking out the window, and realizing that I have a safe place to live and food to eat. I'm happy going for a walk and recognizing the fact that the trees are putting out oxygen and that I have fresh air to breathe and beautiful things to look at. Many things that I love are completely unnecessary for my happiness--I love chocolate, but I don't need it to be happy. I love my wife, but she and I have talked this over many times: if one of us were to die tomorrow, then certainly we would go through grief, but we wouldn't necessarily become unhappy persons.
As I've grown up, my definition of happiness has changed, and it now allows for itself in situations that before would have been stressful or even frightening. I don't put conditions on happiness any more, and that has made a huge difference in my life. My happiness has grown up as I have, and it's a great feeling to have! (Of course, this doesn't mean that many things of childhood can't still bring happiness--I still love doing many things that children do--but my happiness in that case is child-like, not childish!)
True imagination is not fanciful daydreaming; it is fire from heaven.-Ernest Holmes
Many of us would finish the title with the word "imagination." After all, that's what we were encouraged to do, over and over, while we were young. Some of us even know people who encouraged us to do this while we were a bit older. Somewhere along the line, though, we stop saying this to people; instead, we encourage them to use their knowledge, to use what they've learned from other people. Sadly enough, this change even occurs in our supposedly "creative" fields such as movie-making and music--the movies that we see and the songs that we hear usually are simply copies of successful movies and songs made by other people, following strict formulas to "guarantee" success.
I don't want my imagination to die. I want to use it until the day I die. When I see something that looks marvelous, I want to be able to imagine marvelous things going on there. When I see a place that looks spooky, I want to think spooky thoughts. When I'm faced with a particular problem, I want to be able to come up with four or five possible solutions, and not just go with the very first thing that comes to mind. The very first thing may even solve the problem, but will it do so creatively? And is there more to solving the problem than just addressing the surface? I can give money to a charity to help hunger, but is that money just paying for today's dinner? What about tomorrow's dinner, and the next day's? Are we addressing the poverty, or just the lack of meals? The only way to address the deeper issues is to use the imagination that we've been given to see those issues and come up with unique solutions that haven't been tried yet--because what's been tried obviously hasn't worked well if the problem's still there.
I get criticized fairly often for using my imagination, for suggesting unique things to do. The criticism is usually pretty subtle, as in "Well, that's just not how it's done." And my response is usually, "Well, what's being done isn't working, so why not look at imaginative solutions?" People get trapped in their ways of thinking just as they get trapped in quicksand if they happen to step in it, and it's not pretty. Use your imagination today--try to think of three or four ways of doing something that you've always done the same way, and feel how nice it feels to use your brain in a unique and special way, rather than following the rules and paradigms that may have been around for years, but that aren't making things any better--they just provide the same old way of dealing with issues that come up. Our world needs new ways of doing things, and you have those, right inside your mind.
I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the
contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.
-Margaret Mead
I can't imagine a person becoming a success who doesn't give
this game of life everything he or she has got.
-Walter Cronkite
I've included two quotations today because of all that I've read about success, these are the two things that come up over and over again: serving others and giving all of our effort.
How can we call ourselves successful if we completely ignore the needs of others? Many of us are taught that life is a battle and that the successful people are those who come out on top, leaving the "losers" behind. This definition of success, though, includes a complete disregard for our fellow human beings, and while we may end up with more money or a position of supposed power, the truth is that when we harm other people, we harm ourselves, too. It's like making it through a dangerous jungle, but then having to live with a debilitating disease that we caught while we were in there. Yes, we made it through, but our quality of life forever after is very low. When we serve others while striving to become successful, we set ourselves up for a very gratifying life in which we can see the results of our efforts both in our own life and also in the lives of others.
Nothing worthwhile ever comes from a halfhearted effort. If we're going to do something, be it work, a school assignment, a task for a friend, getting in shape, losing weight--whatever it may be, the effort will be more successful and more gratifying if we give it all that we've got as opposed to giving it just a bit of effort. Successful people give their tasks all their effort, realizing that the outcome of their efforts depends fully upon what they put into it. If you build a house and cut corners, the house will start having problems from the beginning. If you try to raise a child with mostly neglect, guess what? Try to fix a car or paint a room sometime while you're also on the phone, and when you're only going to give an hour to the job, no matter what. If we want to be truly successful, then we'll give all that we can to our tasks for the time that we're working on them, and we'll find success in our efforts.
To these two things, I would also add that we need to define success for ourselves rather than buying into other people's definitions of success. A person can be a great singer and not be a star, coming out with a new album every year and giving concerts constantly. Listen to Harry Chapin's "Mr. Tanner" sometime for a good example of a man who lost his love for music because he didn't live up to someone else's definition of "success." And when he lost his love for music, he also lost a lot of happiness in his life.
Do you want to be successful? You can be, and it's not all that hard if you go about it in the right ways. When you make sure that what you do is helping others (even indirectly), and when you give all that you have to what you're doing, you can definitely be successful--whether other people recognize it or not. Remember, your definition of success is up to you, so make sure that it's realistic and attainable, and something that will give you personal gratification.
