Hello Mohamed
Thanks for the call this morning and the opportunity to put
together a post for GrassRoots Inspire. Like most of my life, I am going to ignore
the exam question and take a different tact. If you are currently taking or
preparing for exams do not do this, from bitter personal experience it almost
always goes wrong but just happens to be my idiom. Hopefully, this tact may
achieve the goal of inspiring but via questions and a Memento-esque approach to
chronology. I will also shamelessly blow the word count used by others. Alas,
the VerboseChat or Slowgram app hasn’t been invented yet but I look forward to
the day it is. May these musings that have helped guide me be of some use to
you.
How does your mind
work?
Like all good stories, we start with someone crying at their
home on the sofa. This was me four years ago. Narrative wise it didn’t make a
whole bunch of sense given I had been promoted twice in the last three years,
was doing well in my apprenticeship and had just bought my first house. The
insidious thing about depression is that it isn’t even about being sad, or
indeed any strong or weak emotion. For me, it was and still is a pervasive
apathy to all things which inevitably leads to frustration and self-loathing.
It was after that episode that I spoke to a doctor who diagnosed me with
chronic depression and I started Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and Mindfulness
meditation. Looking back this conversation was well overdue as by this time I
had resat a year of A-Levels and dropped out of the University of Birmingham
where I was studying Computer Science all while spending far too long sleeping
even by teenage or student standards. I learnt from this that my and everyone
else mind is not completely theirs. As a test take a minute, close your eyes
and try to think of nothing. Were all those thoughts things you wanted or were
some out of nowhere? If not then how does your mind work? How could you improve
your understanding and relationship with it?
How do you learn?
When I was younger I was told I was dyslexic, which later
with dysthymia (Chronic Depression) would lead me with a series of conditions I
can’t spell. This never felt real, mainly because I been consistently unable to
cause a ‘Freaky Friday’ like curse and spend the day in someone else’s mind. It
was only one day in my early teens when my brother and I were reading a web
page together that I started to realise what it meant. I was around 3 lines in
at the point I was asked to scroll down, roughly 30 lines in the future reading
time-wise. Now, this isn’t to say that dyslexia should be thought of as a
disability merely that the way I think and learn seems to be poorly suited to
how most education and work environments are set up. We are all to some degree
going to differ from one another and this poses the question, how can I improve
how I learn? How can I improve my way of traversing the world based on how I
think? For me, the acquisition of audiobooks, an increased number of
conversations with others and a love of diagrams greatly improved the rate at
which I could take in and recall information. We are rarely taught how to teach
ourselves and by looking at this further we can gain the ability to unlock all
the knowledge that is at our fingertips. So, how do you learn?
What must you do?
We live in a universe of wants, best exemplified by New Year
resolutions and the exciting if potentially unhealthy world of food via apps.
An insight that helped me clarify what I ought to put my now stableish mind and
ability to learn towards was the writing of the late great Christopher
Hitchens. In ‘Letters to a young contrarian’ he is asked why he became a
writer. His answer was simple, he didn’t want to become a writer per se, the
actual case was that he had to write. It was something he felt he must do.
Personally, I must solve problems to stave off boredom and, as mentioned before,
allowing my mind to turn its over exuberant analytic slant onto itself. This has
led me to my current role as an Information Architect. A job that although
vague is purely around being able to work with someone to describe and reason
through the best way to achieve their objective. The Information part of the
deal means the problems are normally based around communication, decision
making, learning or reference. This all buys into the idea that if your job is
your hobby you never work a day in your life. If someone pays you for what you
must do then to an extent you have cheated the supposed ‘life is hard’ system.
I discovered this when I started an apprenticeship with Capgemini. It gave me an
endless stream of problems that allowed me to study without realising it and
although late gain a degree. To you or anyone reading this, I pose Hitchens’
question. What must you do?
Who has problems that align with what you must do?
Just like my mind, ability to learn and goals in life the
idea of a job remained foreign to me. At the moment I’m studying for a Masters
in Philosophy and after chatting to some people about jobs realised we all have
probably not thought about what exactly it means or at the very least haven’t
thought about how to communicate the meaning. My thinking led me to the thought
that a job is just a problem that someone else would like to solve. So at its
simplest chores that get given to kids are there firstly to clean the kitchen
but also to save parents time. There are problems that people want solving that
they are also willing to pay for someone to solve. Now, this may be due to lack
of interest or skill or the problem is of a scale that they can no longer
handle alone. So if we take the ‘what must you do’ answer and join it with the
thought above. Who are the people or companies who have problems that relate to
what you must do? Even if it's for a job you don’t want to be in, what is the
problem that the person hiring you wants to solve? How would you go about doing
that?
The last bit, promise
So, I messed around and messed up a fair bit. Redoing years
of A-Levels, dropping out of University, spending several years unemployed and
then even when employed a few years feeling apathetic. Through understanding:
How my mind works; How I learn; What I must do; and finding the people who have
the problems I must solve, I overcame these various setbacks. Now I work for
myself and am currently contracting for EDF New Nuclear Build as their Lead
Information Architect and passing my evenings musing over my Philosophy
Masters. All alongside the occasional rambling letter to others. These answers
did not make my dyslexia or depression disappear but they helped me develop the
habits and behaviours that allow me to operate effectively with them and the
various other interesting obstacles life throws in our way. We cannot choose our
mind, body or the events that befall us but we can choose what we do with the
time we have.
Yours Sincerely & Verbosely
Thomas McCumiskey
