What are you doing to cultivate your potential? How often do you practice literacy? When was the last time you tried something that wasn’t necessarily physically demanding but had you questioning if your mind was up to the task?
Every day, I ask myself why it appears that so many are comfortable in lazy banalities. What’s wrong with digging into our minds whose currency and lifeblood are words? Our imaginations have become muscles atrophied through the neglect brought by existential angst. Don’t worry about those things outside yourself; dig into the things within that are vast landscapes awaiting your exploration.
Where do you begin such an enormous task? Maybe right there on your smartphone. Go ahead and ask it to tell you about the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory or lookup Burmese Laphet Salad. Stop listening to your favorite songs and tune in to some music you think you hate. Don’t make it easy. Go way out of your comfort zone and try some Merzbow. You could make a commitment to watch an entire Bollywood film that would certainly feature at least half a dozen hit songs, which would give you some idea of the music nearly 2 billion people on earth enjoy.
Other avenues await you, such as recording some video on that phone, installing Adobe’s Creative Cloud of applications on a computer, and learning video editing and storytelling. Or open up Photoshop to learn that tool. Indesign is another one of Adobe’s tools, and with it, you can collect your thoughts and photos and publish your own book.
Video, photography, and writing are not your cup of tea. Grab a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and start watching tutorials on how to make music. Download some free VSTs (instruments and effects) and just playmaking sounds until you develop some skills.
Like drawing or sculpting as a kid? Krita for drawing is free, and Blender offers sculpting as part of their suite of 3D tools and it too is free.
Feel like you already have too much screen time with your connected devices? Turn off the TV and reclaim that time so you can set your attention to productivity tools that actually reflect who you are instead of passively continuing the diet of useless nonsense. Pick up a bunch of knitting needles and make a pair of socks, or buy some clay and sculpt a blob of nothing in particular.
Still not ready for challenging your brain with learning stuff you “think” is too hard? Go to a museum, a concert of music you typically don’t listen to, a play, the opera, or go volunteer at a hospice, halfway house, or other services that help your community.
The thing is that you have to break out of your routine because your routine is potential already realized. You own the repetition of fully knowing how you do the same thing day in and day out; there is no surprise or growth with standing in place. To get somewhere, you must take a step forward. Do not take steps backward or trace the ones you’ve already walked in; where do you think they’ll get you?
In effect, you must walk on the hot coals of discomfort and over the edge of certainty. Only through the continued effort of exploring where you might fail to enjoy the chore or fail to master something will you achieve the skills you need to wear down the calluses of your own stubbornness against change.