As you can all see, I’ve started to create a new look for my blog, using the original URL name for my new title. When I originally created this blog a few years ago, I did so after delving into a book that my Dad recommended to me called The Day I Became an Autodidact. Now, I’ll be upfront with you all: I actually have not read the whole book cover to cover *head hangs in shame*. But, on the bright side, I was inspired by the parts I did read to become something that I really already was: an autodidact, or, in regular-people language–a self-taught person. I have always been the kind of person to seek out new challenges for myself and to be in a constant state of learning, so the blog link title was a natural choice.
Luckily, after 5 years (or however long it’s been), it still fits.
As I’ve been thinking about what it means to me to be self-taught, I reflected on this quote from Philip B. Crosby in Quality is Free:
“There is a theory of human behavior that says people subconsciously retard their own intellectual growth. They come to rely on cliches and habits. Once they reach the age of their own personal comfort with the world, they stop learning and their mind runs on idle for the rest of their days. They may progress organizationally, they may be ambitious and eager, and they may even work night and day. But they learn no more. The bigoted, the narrowminded, the stubborn, and the perpetually optimistic have all stopped learning.”
I wondered at first why he included the perpetually optimistic, but after thinking about a minute, it makes sense–if you always look forward, expecting everything to work out exactly as you hoped it would, then you will neither learn from your mistakes nor seek ways of thinking that are higher than your own. Think of it as like our relationship to God: if we always ask Him only for what we think is best, expecting him to answer all of our pleas, we will never see that there is a grander design than the one we have just mapped out for ourselves.
So, hope you all enjoy the new look and the new focus!
P.S. On a separate and completely unrelated note, how on earth do you put those tab things at the top of your pages that take you to different pages (Home, About Me, etc.)? And how do you add those pages in the first place? Ah, technology, how you mess with my head…
