Chris J Wilson

My wife has a growing interesting in speed reading and related rapid learning techniques. I was really interested in accelerated learning about seven years ago but came to two conclusions.

1. There’s a lot of rubbish out there
2. I was unsure if it led to long term learning. Speed reading was a perfect example. It promised a method to read many times faster and remember everything. I questioned these statements as they usually seemed to focus on short term memory performance and not long-term memory. So I just wrote the whole thing off. But my wife’s interest has re-kindled my own, and I want to do a little experiment. I mean, If I could read three times faster, that would mean more books. So I’m giving it a go, I’m sceptical, but I’ll report back on what I find.

Celebration of Discipline is Richard Foster’s classic look into the timeliess Christian Disciplines. He covers a the inward, outward and corporate disciplines looking at different traditions, the mindset and goal behind each and with suggested practices to start exploring the traditions. It was a hugely influencial book in my early adulthood and I have been rereading it this last year. Shop your local indie bookstore

I am not an expert. I’m not incompetent in many areas either, but I’m definitely not an expert. I have so much to learn in every area of life — work, family, faith, creativity, DIY, finance, generosity — that far surpasses what I do know. Sometimes this makes me feel really out of place in a world of Gurus. When I look at what a lot of other copywriters say about themselves, it’s all boasting about how fantastic they are. It’s like all those businesses that say they are the best at what they do; someone must be lying. I’m sure there are plenty of brilliant and talented people out there. Still, there are also plenty of “fake it till you make it” wannabes who Shakespeare might say “the guru doth boast too much, methinks.”

Most of the time, I feel somewhat inadequate because I’m not an expert, but today I realized it has some advantages.

• As a non-expert, I know I need to keep learning and keep growing.
• As a non-expert, I’m not stuck in “best practices” or “the way it’s always been done.”
• As a non-expert, I sm open to listen to other people and their experiences.

Of course, it’s not really a strict expert/non-expert divide but a scale. At times my ego is stronger and makes me less teachable and more boastful. Still, increasingly I’m trying to embrace sharing my experiments and results as well as listening to other people’s tests. When I do take that approach, everything seems better, and suddenly, many of the gurus look a lot less intimidating.