Clarity, Please

Clarity was missing from most of the classes that I took in school. I think that this is one of the major problems that I had with my education. 

What does it mean when I say clarity? I'm not sure. It's the type of phenomenon that you know when you see. Clarity is the lack of confusion that allows you to easily summarize or capture in words what the essence of the idea is. Because classes are so complex and often times touch on so many topics, at least for me, this becomes very hard.

The result at least in my case is that I end up learning pretty much nothing from the class the individual concepts don't distill into one central idea that I can categorize and contextualize and instead I'm left with a bunch of little anecdotes that gradually fade. In fairness this might just be because I learned most of it right before the test anyways.

But I think most students learn just before the test anyways. In which case maybe it's better to just spend every class hammering home the same idea from a different angle rather than trying to get through boatloads of material.

I think that looking for this sort of clarity, the kind of distills knowledge that is an aggregation of multiple concepts, it's really to me what intelligence looks like. The ability to recognize that higher-level pattern is the key in understanding, and really is what understanding is.

The people that I generally have been most amazed by in my life, are people who have a very good deal and understanding about what they understand and what they don't understand, not necessarily respecting their own nervousness in certain cases.

V**** said something to me wants to the effect of never underestimate your own ignorance which I think means that he really understood where he didn't know what he was talking about but didn't mind and use that as the opportunity for creativity and new definition. Being able to hone in on the places that you don't understand specific things and get that you don't get them is the key to continuing to improve what you do understand.

When I teach things and communicate concepts I want to focus on and communicate those over arching points or at the very least do my best to communicate to get people to those over arching points. I don't want to communicate loosely unrelated concepts and expect people to fill in the dots I want to help them fill in the dots.

When I'm thinking about things myself I want to understand the places where I have the doctor fill then and understand the places where I don't have a dad filled in. Figuring out which questions to ask or which things I'm uncertain on seems to me to be the fundamental blocker in my learning processes currently.

This sort of meta-understanding of my own understanding is very similar to the meadow understanding I've been trying to build about my own emotional landscape as of recent. Having an understanding of one's own feelings and being able to have an accurate and clear language about how I'm feeling at any individual moment seems to me to be the most powerful tool that I can build long-term in my life.

If I can recognize when things are unclear to me and clarify them I will learn. If I can recognize when I'm frustrated and remove myself from the situation I will handle my relationships better. Both of these require introspection of a very specific sort which is understanding the quality of mind that I have that specific moment.

Nothing understanding this quality of mind actually takes time. I think that one thing I really want to do here is slow down and learn to talk less and think more about this quality of mind before I respond. When I was approached about uniswap, I thought that it wasn't worth my time. What a mistake that was. And so clearly because of hubris. Being able to identify moments where that occurs is the key to really making sure that I am in touch with who I want to be.