Personal Development: It's Not Rocket Science, but It Is (eBook)

Preface

Once upon a time in England, there was a young man. He was not particularly poor but neither was he particularly wealthy. He was not educated but he was not unskilled. When he was neither young nor particularly old, he met a woman and fell in love.

They married. He was thirty-six and she was a blossoming twenty. Though of modest means, he could afford to keep her, and she could afford to be kept.

This romantic tale took place in the early 1640s: long before Charles Dickens wrote his romantic novels, and even before Jane Austen wrote hers.

The young marrieds moved to the tiny hamlet of Woolsthorpe, to the north of London. They didn’t go by car or train, because there were no cars or trains at that time.

The young wife, Hannah, conceived very soon after, and was due to give birth around the end of the year.

Alas, the father never saw the birth of their child. He died three months before Hannah Newton (nee Ayscough) gave birth to their son. Hannah named the child Isaac, after her late husband. The infant child was sickly and weak, not expected to live beyond his first day of life.

But live he did, from illness to years of turbulence and rejection that scarred his young life.

A couple of years after the death of her husband and birth of her son, the young widow Hannah married Reverend Barnabas Smith. The two of them moved to start a new family, leaving the three-year-old Isaac in the care of Hannah’s mother, Margery Ayscough.

When Isaac was just ten years old, Barnabas died, and Isaac returned to live with his mother. He also met his two half-sisters and half-brother for the first time.

Some years later, Isaac’s mother decided that Isaac should manage her property, but he was no farmer, nor property manager. He could not focus on the practical aspects of his responsibility, and would rather sit up a tree with a good book. Consequently, Isaac was sent away again, this time to grammar school in Grantham, further to the north.

From Grantham, he progressed to Trinity College in Cambridge, and then to Cambridge University. Isaac Newton, now in his twenties, was swept up by a revolutionary scientific way of thinking. He experimented with optics and worked on new methods of Mathematics.

***

At last, I hear you say! He had found his calling and passion! He found acceptance after years of being rejected and sent away. He became rich and famous, because we’ve all heard of him, and the curtain falls to a happy ending, right?

Well, not really. At least, not obviously.

***

In 1665, disaster hit the country.

The Great Plague of London swept first the capital city, and then threatened the outlying towns. Cambridge University was forced to close, and Isaac had to go back to the family home, his work unfinished.

His experiments and university work were put on hold, but his brain just would not stop.

Isaac studied and contemplated his work while at home, often wandering around the orchard on the farm. It was there that he idly observed an apple falling from a tree, and asked himself, “Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground? Why should it not go sideways, or upwards, but constantly to the Earth’s centre?”

This question inspired Isaac Newton to come up with his law of universal gravitation, and the world was forever changed.

***

Jumping ahead in the story, in 1687 Isaac Newton first published this principle of gravitation. It says that every object in the universe is attracted to every other object with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

Did you get that? (You are taking notes, aren’t you?) Let’s rephrase it a little:

Every object in the universe is attracted to every other object.

Everything is pretty much under the influence of everything else.

That’s a Scientific Principle! The first one of this book: Everything influences everything.

The rest of the principle just says how much.

Newton stated this law of universal gravitation, along with his three laws of motion, in a book he wrote: Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (That’s Latin, not bad spelling). It was a best seller!

Here is a take-home point of this story:

Isaac was brilliant. He was rejected and sent away by his step-father. He was deemed a lousy farm manager by his mother and sent away to college. His studies were interrupted by a killer plague!

His gift of curiosity about a falling apple changed the world.

Are you curious?

I am, by nature, curious. People often point to me in the street and say, “Isn’t he curious?”

That was actually a joke, a pun, based on the fact that the word “curious” has two meanings.

It means, “desiring to know stuff” (That’s me) and also “strange or odd” (No comment).

Curious, that…

… and herein lies our first exploration into what things mean and what we think things mean, what others think they mean and what they used to mean.

If you are wondering what Personal Development has to do with Rocket Science, then you are, by definition, curious. Curiosity is a good thing.

The dictionary definition of curiosity is: A desire to know or learn.

This is a good thing. It shows that we are not so arrogant as to assert that we already know everything, or that what we do know is all that matters. We realize that our universe expands beyond our own present experience and knowledge, and we want to be a part of that universe.

Ah, he said “universe”. Rocket Science?

We’ll get to that.

The second definition of curiosity is: A desire to know about people or things that do not concern one; nosiness.

This is not necessarily a good thing. Here, the desire to expand our universe includes expanding into somebody else’s universe, without their knowledge or consent. I wouldn’t assert emphatically that this is not a good thing, but as social beings we might want to consider another person’s universe before we expand into it.

Another definition of curiosity is: something arousing interest because of novelty or strangeness. In other words, strange or interesting, making others curious about them.

If you wore a flowerpot for a hat, people might comment that you are a curious person. They do not mean to imply that you want to expand your universe, rather that you have expanded theirs by making them curious, at least curious enough to wonder about it immediately after the encounter.

You want to be a curious person, desiring to know or learn. You don’t so much want to be a curious, nosey person, meddling in other people’s universes. You also don’t want to be a curious person who is strange or odd. Or maybe you do.

The opposite of being curious is being incurious. The definition of that is: Lacking intellectual inquisitiveness or natural curiosity; uninterested.

You definitely don’t want to be that.

Incurious people respond to curious people and ask, “What do you want to know for?” or “Who cares?” or “Go away. I’m watching TV.”

Incurious people call upon what they consider to be the First Law of Curiosity: “Curiosity killed the cat.”

What they fail to realise is that this Law actually has two parts: “Curiosity killed the cat. Satisfaction brought him back.” This was the full quote circa 1912. Interestingly, the original saying, as cited by no less than Shakespeare himself (Much Ado about Nothing) was that care killed the cat. Care, in that context, did not mean nurturing, but worrying.

Worrying about stuff, or being overly concerned about finding out stuff, could be hazardous to your health. Curiosity can drive one crazy, but finding the answer is absolutely life-restoring! You’ve felt that, haven’t you? That “aha!” light-bulb-moment that completely turns the page on frustration and sets before you that invigorating rush of satisfaction!

Take that, o incurious one!!

In fact, one person famous for his wisdom – King Solomon – had this to say about curiosity in Proverbs chapter 25 verse 2: The glory of God is to conceal a matter; but the glory of kings is to search it out.

In other words, God created a treasure hunt for his creation. He would hide the mysteries of the universe in the ground, in the sky, in the oceans, and in the mind. This was not to keep them hidden, but to...