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26/01/2007 "We are constrained by the way we are trained."Today I went to a seminar in biomedical engineering. Towards the end, when the speaker talked about how he obtained some new perspectives by applying old ideas to new areas of problems, he added one comment, "We are constrained by the way we are trained. In a lot of cases, the answer to the problem is already there, but we just do not accept it so readily. " This claim rings a bell. It happens not only in our academic life when we are doing our research and studies, it also happens in a lot of aspects of our everyday life. The things we learn, the ideas we acquire through training and practice, are intended to empower us to better understand the world around us, and to better understand ourselves. In many ways, those strong points we carry can be a good start to present ourselves, but when we carry those points to an overemphasized extent, not only to present ourselves, but also to identify ourselves along with it, we could be hurting ourselves, resulting in a slower learning of new things in life. The only reason is because that we are so conscious about our acquired identity that we sometimes become blind to the things outside of the box. A stong point is a strong point if it helps us to go further, but if it is taken too strongly to become a stubbornness, we can be impeded by our own strength. Paradoxically, we are who we are because of our experiences. We are shaped by the things we do, and the experience helps to form the way we see ourselves. Our experience is strengthening us in a lot of ways, but it can also weaken us if we unconsciously confined ourselves only to the limited experience of our own, and it can be doing even more harm if we consciously reject ideas just because we refuse to understand them. Even though every one of us has to pick up a standing point, and we always do that effortlessly, it does not necessarily mean that we should cage ourselves and shut our eyes to different ways of seeing the world. Of course, there is only a fine line between being persistent and being stubborn, between being tolerantly flexible and being without principle. Luckily, every one of us has a small world we carry with ourselves all the time: our mind. We have all the degree of freedom in this little world, therefore, we can always remind ourselves to be principled while maintaining certain degree of flexibility, to be strict while trying to be tolerant. |
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