Growing Up

Our inner critic is usually formed in a system based on right and wrong answers and outperforming others on structured tasks. Listening to our inner critic will rarely improve our creative work - it may actually result in conformative work.

We need to turn this inner-critic into an inner-coach and drive our personal growth.

We do not need to suppress or kill our inner critic, but only need to re-educate it, but only need to deploy three simple ways to make space for the inner child:

1. Get more playful in our creative endeavours.
2. Skip doing something adults do in favour of doing something that kids love to do, like drawing, writing poems and playing in the pool.
3. Practice constructive questioning by asking why to the things we (and others) take for granted.

Children are extremely curious. They keep asking, "why?" and explore new things just because they want to know.

But research shows that during the schooling years, curiosity steadily declines, and as adults, we fall into fixed and convenient thought patterns.

Research around curiosity found that children at age 5 scored 98% on a creativity test. When the same children took the test at age 10, only 30% scored well on the test. By age 15, only 12% of the same children did well. Less than 2% of adults are defined as creative based on their answer to this standardised test.

Science suggests this decrease in curiosity could be caused when we feel there's no gap between what we know and what we want to know, so we just stop being curious.

Whenever our inner child surfaces, we are told by society to grow up, throwing aside or killing childish things like innocence, wonder, awe, joy, sensitivity, and playfulness.

Most grown-ups don't realize that they are not grown-ups at all, but emotionally wounded children inhabiting adult bodies. And a wounded inner child is the root cause of bad relationships, bad career, and of the persistent negative emotions of fear, anxiety, insecurity, and inferiority.

The brain’s building blocks are neurons: nerve cells that receive and transmit signals along neural pathways. Certain pathways are forged at birth. Others can be manipulated by learning. 

So when you’re stuck in a rut, your brain’s neurons could literally be stuck on a neural pathway you’ve carved out through your behavior. But you can get unstuck by choosing to make new connections.

This picture is one of the earliest proofs that Victorians could also smile in photos.

The model is a young lady who poses typically for the period, however, letting a smile be seen on her face.

The picture shows a family who is captured a bit earlier than expected, fact that allows us to see everybody's natural laughter. This is what used to be known as 'Gigglemug' or 'habitually smiling face'.

Social connection makes hope possible. This is the message in the film based on the life of 13-year-old William Kamkwamba. The story plays off in Malawi during a famine caused by a series of natural disasters.

William's family cannot afford for him to continue with school, and William is forbidden to return. But William sneaks back into school and gets permission to continue using the school's library. He develops strong ties with his science teacher, librarian, family, friends, and fellow villagers.

He ultimately discovers how wind energy can bring water to his village and save them from perishing.

The Farewell is about a first-generation Chinese immigrant, Billi. She wants to visit her dying grandmother, Nai-Nai, in China, to say goodbye.

Nai-Nai is unaware of the seriousness of her illness while the family believes it is kinder to keep her illness a secret and make her happy. Conflict ensues as Billi wants to tell Nai-Nai the truth. This is a tale of how people express love differently and the quiet wisdom and positive outlook of Nai-Nai.

The fear of vulnerability is ultimately a fear of rejection or abandonment. To combat it, you must first learn to love and accept yourself with all your flaws, embarrassing stories, past mistakes, insecurities and awkwardness.  

Realize that everyone feels like this, regardless of how successful they are.

Whenever you think about self-love, try picturing yourself making a mistake. Forgiving your own mistakes instead of overreacting to them is what self-love looks like.

Sell-love is deeply connected to our relationship to the ones around us, as we are definitely shaped by our experiences. On the other hand, we have what we call self-sufficiency and self-reliance, terms that define the relationship one has with himself or herself, without involving anybody else.

"Self-love is less about the ability to withstand loneliness or establish independence and more about awareness and acceptance of our incompleteness. It’s about letting others love us even when we feel unlovable because their version of us is often kinder than our own. "

He wondered how he could predict the probability of a future event if he only knew how many times it had occurred, or not, in the past. Bayes figured out that even when it comes to uncertain outcomes, we can update our knowledge by incorporating new, relevant information as it becomes available.

His theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event.

Data can be imperfect, incomplete, or uncertain. Most of the time, there is more than one explanation for why things happened the way they did; by examining those alternative explanations using probability, you can gain a better understanding of causality and what is really going on.

It’s both natural and useful to take time to explore a task before committing to one path forward. 

While children tend to do this automatically, adults may need to plan ahead for their exploratory time. Explore: consider multiple solutions, ask questions that may seem tangential, and be open to discovering unexpected ways to tackle the project.

Adults generally do a great job of applying past knowledge to new situations. Children’s brains thrive instead in unfamiliar contexts, in part because more contexts are unfamiliar to them. 

So the next time you’re tasked with a completely new project, don’t force your prior knowledge onto it.