After a hiatus of over two years, I had a client session with a guy and we essentially picked up where we had left off. It is interesting after such a long time, because it is obvious he doesn't speak English as often now, but toward the end of the session he was getting back into the groove through muscle memory. This isn't technically an English lesson of course, it just happens to be in English, but with my background as a language trainer, I double up and add some value to what I offer.
We get to talk about a lot of things generally, and today we were talking about school and how his daughter is struggling to keep up with physics, because she doesn't understand what she is actually doing. This is common in todays lessons it seems, where instead of giving truly practical and visual examples of what is happening, they are taught just to get the answer. This has various problems of course, because the answers aren't always as clear in life and adjustments are often required, but with a lack of understanding, those adjustments can't be made.
This led into a discussion about how job applicants are using AI to generate their CVs and cover letters, and then companies are using AI to filter them, because there are so many applications. This means that AI is judging AI on who is suitable to shortlist for the position, weeding out the majority of people who actually wrote their own CV. However, what they are finding is that the quality of applicant that makes it to the interview is lower than expected.
No surprise.
Well over a decade ago when a few of my female friends were online dating, they would often complain about the "quality" of their dates. They would be surprised at how different the person would be between the time they spent chatting prior, and an actual date. The intelligent, witty, thoughtful person they had come to know, was replaced by someone boring and inattentive. And to me at least, it was pretty clear why, as online the person had the time to reply, so they could think longer, search for a funny meme, or even research a topic a little before speaking. Face-to-face though, it was just them, and unsupported by the internet, they had little to offer the conversation.
These three circumstances are connected, because the more we rely on "the answer is enough" the less we actually learn about the process to get the answer. And just like in life, it is the journey that is important, not the destination. A lot of people are foregoing the experience of the journey because they can jump straight to the destination, without considering that the journey is where they are able to accumulate a lot of value.
For example yesterday, I wrote a post about "love" and looked at the hormones associated with different phases of the experience. Some hormones are only generated in the later stages of love relationships, and those are helpful for social connection and community building. However, it is possible to never get that far, meaning those evolutionary hormones aren't created, and ultimately, it is going to affect us when we are taking part of the journey, but then jumping to the "answer". Long-term relationships aren't required to have sex and children, but what are we missing when we have sex and children and a complete absence of the long-term hormones?
Whether it comes from just getting the answer, or if we are picking and choosing the bits we like so we don't experience the whole journey, the problem is that there are lessons that go unlearned. We seem to believe that we can learn the lessons from a book, by searching for the acute answer when required, but the fact is that knowledge doesn't mean we have the skill, let alone the ability to insert that into an flowing application.
We are handicapping ourselves.
The journey matters, whether we are learning math and physics, performing the tasks of a job role, or looking to find a romantic partner. The journey is our personality and resource pool we can draw upon to solve the problems we face, and while better answers might be available at our fingertips for many issues, a lot of the time it is impractical to search for them, because they are required on-the-fly and in the moment. Not only this, most of the time when we need a lot of personal skills, we don't even know we are lacking them, so even if we had the chance to search for answers prior to needing them, we wouldn't.
I have heard many stories about kids who have the memory required to do well at school, but have no idea what they are actually doing. Many stories of interviewees who were "brilliant on paper" but couldn't explain anything of value in real-time. And many stories of tragic dares where the gap between expectation based on past internet-supported performance and reality based on real-world conditions, is very wide. Everyone seems to have the answers, until they actually have to make it happen.
If you are boring, get a life.
Live the whole journey, not the final answer.
As the end of the journey for us all is the same.
Taraz
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