Being a lifelong learner is great, but just learning every single day of your life, without direction, means that by the end of it you could be no closer to your goals than the day you started. Reflection is that secret sauce that really helps you get where you need to be.

What this means to me

To me, reflections are two things. One, a way to better understand yourself. And two, a way to better understand your goals — what you're trying to accomplish and where you're going in life.

I wanted to make these reflections to maybe help someone else out who's thinking similar things and trying to better themselves. I hope they can see what I did, and learn from my own thoughts, mistakes, and ramblings.

Reflecting has been a vital part of my own growth. I feel like the best growth only comes from reflecting, because it's through reflecting that you're able to really analyze what you did, why you did it, if it achieved what you wanted it to, and if not, how you can better yourself, the situation, or anything else next time.

Back to the start

Going back to my intro, I want to clarify something else because it's a core component of my beliefs.

There are no true wasted efforts.

In saying that learning every day without direction could take you no closer to your goals, I mean that for the most part. However, I genuinely do believe that any learning you make the effort to do will help you in some way, shape, or form. You may not see how immediately, and it may present itself in the most unlikely of circumstances, but transferrable skills/knowledge is truly a wondrous concept that does exist.

As a personal example, I once found a biomedical stats class helping me understand machine learning concepts due to the similarities of statistical concepts. For a more ambiguous example, I've found the puzzles I enjoyed solving as a child helped me make rapid iterations when problem solving, which has benefitted me in many ways including debugging code.

All effort means something

In a more philisophical side, I think effort is incredibly meaningful. Simply the act of putting in effort is important. If we can put effort into something in one way, it improves our ability to put it in another way. Then, when we really need to put in effort, we've built the habits that let us get into the zone and try our best.

Though this reflection has evolved from one simply about lifelong learning to the importance of effort, I'll bring it back with the theme of intentionality. Being intentional with our efforts is what can allow for the best learning. The act of reflecting is an intentional effort that is put in. I feel young when I consider the fact that I have my whole adult life ahead of me, my 20s not yet finished and my 30s and 40s not even started, but I'm hopeful that my habit of learning is one that will continue strong.

After all, if I've done it for years now within high school and university, even outside of school, surely the habit is maintained or even improved once school is no longer a core component of my life.

Better examples of effort - Aug. 29

So I've shared this with a few people and received really positive feedback, but thinking back on it, realized that both of my examples of effort in my life were for something "work" or "professional" in some sense. Even if I do like the idea from the machine learning example about learning one thing helping to learn another, it feels flat. Given that there is so much more to life than that, I wanted to share examples that feel more meaningful to me.

So, this started with the idea that any effort you put in will help you, often in ways you didn't expect. An example I like is hobbies, where books I read ages ago have helped grow multiple friendships with people who will gush about reading with me. Then we have cooking, where I've put lots of time into experimenting with curries and was able to treat my mom to a Thai curry that she loved this summer. Sometimes I don't even feel like it's "effort" when it happens (like I read because I enjoy it), but it's an intentional use of time and for the sake of my thesis, I'm bringing it under the term effort.

The tapestry of you

Upon sharing this piece, it's also had me exploring my thoughts on how the things that make us unique are what help us connect. It's in the same vein of that book I loved helping me become friends with someone, and honestly I think I'll write a full reflection about this in the future.

To put the idea as eloquently as I can,

Every experience you have weaves another thread in the tapestry of your life.

What I love about this imagery is how it takes these messy lives, the good and the bad, and calls it a tapestry. Something beautiful to be admired. And when it comes to relationships, when learning these fun little pieces about people I care about, I often think about how that new information sheds more light on their tapestry.

Now, you can take the idea of a tapestry in many ways, from connection-building to inspirational, but I'll leave further thoughts about that for the future. For now, I hope this addition to my reflection was a worthwhile read and helps bring more appreciation to the wonderfully complex lives we live.