Daftness is a disease that always booms. If you are too fat, you start reading diet literature. If you want to improve your professional skills, you search for “gurus” in sales, motivation, whatever else who have a fantastic pony show and sell with catching phrases such as “The One Minute Manager”, “Diet Secrets of the Stars” or most popular “How to….. in a crazy short period of time.”
Advice Number 2 to all advice seekers would always be: “All good things take time” which is the first reason why your advice will be ignored. We all lack time, we are under pressure – how the fu…. can we take ourselves time to make it happen? We need a quick fix and we need it now! You can approach it philosophically with Seneca, who taught the essential lesson that we all have more time in life than we think we have if we understand what our life is about. If you listen to the media and advertising, it’s all about fear: “Don’t get fat, you will not be loved, use Blablaba” – very often in a subtile way, but ads are usually dead serious when it comes to sex, reputation and respect of the individual and how the product can improve it.
One of the most obvious, but still not often taught advices to people thirsty for knowledge should be, that you should always start to ask for the essentials of any discipline, before you invent freestyle or start looking for the quick fix is learn the essentials. Just one example for diets: How many people have read a book about the fundamentals of nutrition as for example differentiating carbs, proteins and fats from each other and what influence and need all three hvae for the body. One would refuse Atkins maybe immediately, if the person would know how dangerous a low carb nutrition is for the well being and “feel good” factor as it was proven, how low carb diets can positively influence people in developing a depression. In other words, Atkins can make you look good but feel worse. So what is it about then, feel good or look good? Certainly you will have to take both into your wish list equation and that’s what everybody needs to know the essentials first.
This applies to several areas, for example cooking: People are crazy for special interest cookbooks such as Thai Cuisine. It is full of recipes as any other cook books because that is what people are looking for. If they want to know more recipes, how will they do that? Of course, they buy more recipe books! I would ask these people, why not buy a book about the essential cooking techniques first and then specialize – suddenly you will realize, that if you know how a sauce is made and what a sauce can be made of, you can be very creative and design any sauce you like – and the fun thing is, you cannot do it wrong any more and can save hundred of bucks on special interest cook books.
Don’t believe that? Well, a lack of faith could be counted Number 3 reason why people know that the road to knowledge is long and winding and if you believe the quikc fix will do, you have to confess that you are just too lazy to take a real and serious approach – please, do me a favour and consult a specialist instead who has learned the Essentials – and you are done!