First, define what constitutes a "very powerful person". In my eyes, a very powerful person must be a person with "uniqueness". He is not a "so-and-so", but himself. He must have his own unique knowledge system, experience, reflection on experience, overall awareness, methodology and even outlook on life, and then he integrated it into a whole and became his own moat of life. Of course, he probably has a teacher and an object to learn and emulate, but in the end, he must have found a road that no one else has taken. On this road, people who heard the news talked excitedly: "Look, look, the strong figure in front of him is the super powerful person!" " 」
However, looking back on the education we received from childhood, from kindergarten to university, it is very difficult to cultivate "very powerful people" in this consistent and mature system. In the end, the vast majority of people have become "mediocre people." Even if some people are excellent, they are likely to be "excellent mediocrity".
Why?
Let me sum up, our education system has three fundamental characteristics, which determine that it can only train mediocre people most of the time:
First of all, it trains talents in the way of "assembly line"
No matter primary school, middle school or university, class is the smallest unit of this kind of mass production. The same teaching plan, the same teacher, the same teaching materials and even the same teaching time make every student in the class receive education in this unified way. Only in the postgraduate stage, personalized teaching similar to tutorial system appeared, but even so, there are still the same training objectives, credit courses, paper indicators and so on that need to be normalized. This streamlined talent production mode is the most economical and efficient education mode, but it is at the expense of smoothing the edges and corners of students' personal interests and talents. In this soil, it is extremely difficult for a master to break through the ground, so we often hear the sigh that there has been no master in recent decades.
Second, this is a "standardized" talent selection method.
There is a concept called "standardized examination", which is a method to define every process of examination as accurately as possible, minimize its error and maximize its unity. The proposition structure, question type and grading standard of the exam are treated equally for everyone. Because of the large scoring error of subjective questions, multiple-choice questions without scoring error have become the main form of standardized examinations. The standardized screening method shapes the students who meet this standard to study and think, but at the same time, it also causes such a consequence: the deterministic knowledge that is easy to standardize becomes the focus of assessment and teaching, while the controversial discussion and subtle gameplay that are difficult to standardize and need in-depth thinking are avoided. For example, the mechanical memory of literary common sense is a common part of Chinese examination, and the individualized aesthetics of literary works has disappeared.
Third, we are only satisfied with inheriting abstract knowledge and ideas.
From primary school to university, the main task of teaching is to convey abstract knowledge and ideas to students. Of course, this kind of inheritance is extremely important, but it is a major prejudice to stop here. Educators should also have the responsibility to teach students how to observe and understand the world with their own eyes. Many people equate this kind of realistic education with "utilitarianism" and emphasize that universities are things that cannot be taught, which is a great fallacy. Approaching the real world is not because of utility, but just to stay away from stupidity. Because theory and reality should reflect each other, the theory divorced from reality is a stagnant pool; Because the times are changing rapidly now, many new weather, problems and challenges will appear every day. Although past knowledge can be used for reference, it is difficult to make a difference without the blessing of realistic insight.
However, our education is a unified training method from theory to theory. Undergraduate education in many universities, especially basic subjects, is organized with the idea of cultivating scientific research talents as preparatory classes. But in the end, less than 10% of students take scientific research as their lifelong career, and those who are screened out will eventually face the embarrassment of failing to learn. Teachers themselves are mostly theorists who have never left school. They have no experience in practical polishing. How do they lead students to think realistically?
The one-way street of "theory to theory" has pushed many students to the Huashan dangerous road of scientific research. Undergraduate students find that they can't adapt to society and can't find a job, so they go to study for a master's degree. Master students find that they still can't find a job, so they go to study for a doctor's degree. But in the world of scientific research, it only focuses on the number of SCI papers and the influencing factors. Perhaps a few of them have won high-impact papers and become "people who are very powerful in scientific research", but more people still don't understand why their efforts always fail to achieve the expected results until they are put on the bench.
Assembly line, standardization and pure theory, these systematic deviations in the field of education, can cultivate a batch of unsatisfactory talents, but it is difficult to produce excellent people. A "very powerful person", like a prince in a fairy tale and a hero in a novel, has become an elusive existence, a symbol that can only be erotic. In the end, the vast majority of people, even with their best efforts, can't get rid of the invisible cage of social class solidification.
Maybe many people don't know that hard work is very important, but hard work alone is not enough. The most powerful constraint that restricts a person from becoming better is always his own mode of thinking (often shaped by the existing education system).
When a student walks out of school and enters a bigger world, reads a lot of books, knows a lot of people and experiences a lot, he may break through the original shackles and gradually realize the path of becoming stronger.
For example, the following path:
In addition to the "theory to theory" thinking path instilled in schools, there are at least five paths. The characteristics of these five paths are that the "real world" is regarded as an important variable to acquire knowledge, not only to think about problems in idealized situations, but to hone the ability of integrating theory into reality and considering complex situations in reality.
Many extraordinary wise men in human history have shown us how to work hard in the Five Ways. Here I give a typical example:
Investor Charles Munger's model is to absorb the knowledge of many disciplines (including mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, economics, engineering, etc. ) widely using the most basic models of these disciplines as his thinking tool to analyze and judge real problems, comprehensively analyzing from all angles, thinking about the vibration caused by multiple complex factors, and finally getting a complete, comprehensive and profound analysis result. In this model, a lot of theoretical knowledge is naturally and frequently used across disciplines, which plays a miraculous role in the analysis of practical problems. Compared with investors without multidisciplinary knowledge background, Munger can gain a deeper insight into the internal structure and essential characteristics of these investment problems, and thus put forward investment judgments beyond the market.
The model of economist Zhang Wuchang is to observe and practice the real economic behavior in the market personally, and gain theoretical insights from the insight into the real world. Compared with those scholars, he can find and analyze more complicated and changeable economic phenomena and bring them into the theoretical field of economic research. For example, he once sold oranges in the street twice on New Year's Eve, and experienced changes in the bargaining situation between the two sides under different time points, weather and other factors. He also keeps aquatic products such as oysters and salmon beside his seaside villa, and then analyzes the property rights of movable and immovable natural creatures. This way of acquiring theoretical wisdom from the real world coincides with Charles Munger's way of acquiring practical wisdom from the theoretical world, showing us two complementary ways of communicating theory with reality.
Nassim taleb, an investor and author of Black Swan, alternately studied theory and reality. Taleb is a thinker who shuttles between academic and business. Graduated from Wharton Business School, he is a senior quantitative financial trader and a researcher at Courand Institute of Mathematics, new york University. His childhood dream was to become a philosopher. He is proficient in many languages and has extensive works in philosophy, logic, history and psychology. His black swan thought is not only the result of his deep insight into the real world, especially the extreme events in human history, but also the result of the integration of multi-disciplinary ideas. In his book Black Swan, we can see that he absorbed Poincare's philosophy of science, karl popper's skepticism, Daniel Kahneman's behavioral economics and Mandelbrot's fractal geometry, as well as Pascal, Hume, Locke, Hayek, Montaigne, Dennett and Quinn. Taleb's life course vividly shows the feasibility of such a path: asking questions from reality and history, searching in the ocean of thoughts, verifying in practice and sublimating in writing.
Richard feynman is not only a world-famous physicist, but also an educator, because he can always show very abstract physical concepts with vivid language or exquisite field experiments, and let students understand these concepts from a deeper level. In his eyes, physics is by no means a boring theoretical statement, but a part of the life world. His "Feynman Lectures on Physics" is the most successful physics textbook in history, which has been selling well for decades. He is also particularly good at representing abstract processes with graphs and charts. The Feynman diagram method he invented provides a visual expression method for quantum processes and has become the working language of particle physicists all over the world. Feynman's greatest revelation to me is that there can be no boundary between abstract theory and vivid reality. If someone thinks there is a boundary, it is precisely because his knowledge and thinking are not enough to understand the deep connection between the two. On the contrary, if a person can express theory from experience and use concrete abstraction, it just shows that he is probably an extraordinary thinker.
Director Hou Hsiao-hsien has a specialty of "reading people". He will carefully observe all the people with him and read like a book, especially those who look strange, which will arouse his strong interest in "reading". Presumably, this great director must have regarded everyone he met as a huge material library, and through analysis, decoding, variation, and then integrated into his films, he shaped the characters in the films in an unusually real way. Compared with getting inspiration from books, Hou Xiaoxian is better at getting wisdom from real experiences and getting first-hand information and inspiration. This effort to decode reality is worth learning.
The road taken by the above five "very powerful people" is different from the formal school education, which provides us with extremely valuable enlightenment on how to work hard. You can choose one way to practice hard, or you can learn from others and try many ways to practice. Of course, it is very likely that we will never reach their height, but "we can learn from it and get from it" does not prevent us from changing our life path with their most open and advanced ideas.