Read a book

One of the biggest obstacles to solving most of the world's problems  today is ignorance. People simply don't know enough and suffer as a result. Sounds kind of crazy right? But it's true.

For example, teaching people where AIDS comes from and how it gets transmitted has been the number one factor in dropping the spread of the disease. Yes, new and better medical practices have helped, but reducing ignorance has helped more.

Another example of ignorance that is kind of funny is Gerber baby food.  In some countries in Africa where the literacy rate is atrociously low they put pictures of what is inside the food containers on the labels. If you are at all familiar with Gerber baby food you know that there is a picture of a baby on every single one of their products. It took a great deal of convincing on the part of those that can read to explain to those that couldn't that it was food for babies not food made from babies.

IF you know what foods are poisonous and which ones are not you can safely feed yourself and those you care about. If you know how to defend yourself from vicious predators, both animal and human, again you can keep yourself safe. Knowledge can help us solve or eliminate most of our problems.

That's fine. But how do we obtain more knowledge? There's two main ways. The first is the harder and more dangerous of the two and that is learning through personal experience and trial and error, what works and what doesn't. The second, much easier, much safer way is to learn by reading about the experiences of others.

A person who has more words at his or her command, can more adequately express their needs and desires. And the easiest way to learn more words is to spend time every day reading. As you come in contact with more and more books you will, over time, get a better vocabulary. A great deal of how we absorb new words comes from examples of them being used in context.

See, what happens is, you read a bunch of words that you do know and then you see one or two that you don't. But based on how they are used in the sentence you can generally figure out the meaning of the ones you don't know, thus increasing your pool of knowledge.

Also, reading can be both fun and relaxing. The time you spend reading is time that you are not focused on your daily routine. It can be a short getaway from your problems.

You can't personally teach the whole world to read. And you can't protect the whole world from all the dangers that are out there. But you can increase by at least one the number of people that know enough to save themselves from all the dangers the world has to offer, just by making a habit out of reading, both for fun and to stave off ignorance. Remember, a person that doesn't read, isn't any better off than a person that can't read.

Learning

Have you ever taken a martial art and wondered why it seems like you do the same few moves hundreds if not thousands of times? Or you may have noticed that in role-playing games, either computer or pen and paper, a lot of what you do is the same thing over and over? Travel to point A. Fight just about everything you encounter. Loot the corpses. Then rinse wash repeat for points B through Z? Or how most songs are a few lines of verse then a chorus and a few more lines of verse and the chorus again. Repeat ad infinitum.  In school grammar and arithmetic are pretty much the same thing year after year from elementary to high school.

Do you know why all those things operate under the same general principle of repetition?
In martial arts the theory is that if you do a thing thousands of times it will become a part of who you are and after awhile you will no longer need to be afraid in dangerous situations. You will be able to protect yourself and those you care about by instinct.

Songs generally have a chorus so that there is a part that will stick in your head and be memorable.
Role-playing games have you follow the same formula over and over to simulate what happens in real life.  No you probably don't travel around in real life brandishing a claymore, slaying tons of monsters and equipping yourself with the items they drop when they die. But you do use the experiences that happen in your life to grow stronger as person just as you do in a role-playing game.

And last but not least you do the same things year after year in school building just a little bit more each time on what you learned last time, because that is how we as people learn, through massive repetition.

That's right all of these things are connected because they tap into how we accept new data into our lives. When we are children we learn to speak a language by hearing countless tens of thousands of conversations going on all around us. We learn the alphabet by being told over and over what each letter is. Once we learn what letters are we learn what words are by seeing the letters of the alphabet shaped into words again and again. And we learn to read by seeing the printed word and being told what words make what sounds repeatedly. We learn through repetition. People that learn faster need less repetition. But very few people ever learn anything all the way through the first time.

Have you ever read a book then had a couple of years go by and then read that same book again and got something completely different out of it? It's not because the book changed in any way. It is because you are not the same person that you were when you read it the first time.

When you find yourself doing some repetitive task that you think is boring and you just do not see the point, instead of tuning out, try asking yourself, what could I possibly learn or be learning from this experience?