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The next idea I would like to share is the tremendous increase in effectiveness I experienced when I realized that there was room for taking my ideas more seriously - or seriously at all. It took many years to understand that this was the biggest thing that was holding me back from being successful. Here is how it happened. (In a sense, this is an analysis of some of what I described in part I.)
It used to be very frustrating to me that my ideas were not helping people. I was sure they were brilliant - I understood all the world's problems, and knew how everything should be. But when I would tell people the problems and solutions, they just wouldn't understand; nothing improved.
Finally, in a gradual process, I came to be aware that I was operating on the assumption that good ideas were enough, and that this assumption was keeping me from what I wanted. From this grew my work in seeing what would be enough, if not just good ideas. These few, simple steps are really the key. An awareness of what I wanted (to help people recognize their ability to help themselves and to help them learn facts and skills to meet their goals) and an awareness of what it is that I needed to do to achieve my goals. Truly, this is a very scientific process; it involves recognizing an unconscious habit of what we think ``ought'' to help us achieve results.
I would like to share a few examples of this application of ideas (which in other contexts I have thought of as part of the integration of thought and action).
One example of applying ideas is in the goals I have for the educational world. I had a vision, for instance, of Hampshire College students acting on their ideas for their education - for instance, by running student-taught classes. After many months, I began my first efforts to help other students to do this. My initial efforts were unsuccessful; however, after several years of trying different methods of publicizing my ideas, I was finally able to share these ideas in an effective way. (In this case, it involved many individual and group meetings, proposals, a course catalog, and then teaching several courses!) It was a lot of work to have my ideas actually help people, but that was what I was interested in and what I kept trying to do and finally did.
Other examples also exist of how we can apply ideas: for instance, that we have discovered (as I think Ben Franklin said) that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This is true (among other places) in health. But so few people apply the basic idea of brushing teeth or exercise - a representative example, I think, of how capable a particular person is of doing what they think they should.
There is another kind of applying ideas that has to do with the habits of the mind itself. If, for instance, I am always frustrated at what is getting in my way, rather than pleased with my progress (they both exist), then essentially I am deciding to feel bad - a habit. Once I discover that this is my habit, and that I do not want to be like that, I can apply the idea to modify this habit of thinking. (I'm not meaning to say that I can or do always achieve this, but rather to explain the possibility and show the similarity to other kinds of integrated thought and action.)
Finally, there is one more application of ideas I would like to share. Sometimes a teacher must choose whether he would rather help people grow, or whether he would rather be right and not have to change his perspective on truth. Truth, we are so used to thinking, is a matter of proof. And yet, the most basic philosophy shows that any basis for truth is relative (based on faith). So then, if science (knowledge) is relative, the question becomes what ones goals are. And for an educator, one would suspect that the goal is for the students to learn. So then, an educator may discover that students' learning is limited by his insistence on the value of a certain variety of truth over effectiveness in teaching. In the example, if it is really the educator's goal to have the students learn, then he could achieve this better by taking seriously his discoveries about learners, necessitating a new kind of truth - something most teachers are not used to doing or interested in doing.