It's Learning Time

Every now and then, I read the blog by Dilbert creator, Scott Adams.  Sometimes his blog entries are funny, sometimes they are very serious and sometimes I just don't understand them.  However, one of his more recent posts got me thinking.

If you choose not to follow the link, let me summarize.  Scott Adams feels that people are a culmination of what they learn.  Because of this, if they have learned how to be one thing and get tired of it, they can simply learn to do something else.  This might take time, effort, money and patience, but given enough of those four things, a person can learn to be something entirely different.  This is a very familiar theme to me. 

I find that sometimes I think that I know quite a lot and yet, really, I don't.  But I keep learning and knowing and understanding more.  Not just in the way of technology (as is my profession), but also in the ways of writing and analyzing writing.

Sometimes I think of myself as a constant learner and I think that anyone that is attempting to be a writer will feel the same way as well.  This is because writers are always trying to learn new tricks to get people to read their stories or new ways to tell a particular story.  And, based on some of the novels that have come out in recent years, it seems the old stories are the best ones to rework with new formats and new ideas (Romeo and Juliet with vampires, anyone?  Or Dances With Wolves with blue people?).

Hopefully, you get my meaning.

But this is not a blog post about Hollywood ruining every story that was ever made by rehashing poor plots and hoping that big explosions or pretty people will make it all work better.  No, this is a blog entry to talk about learning and the process of learning and the fact that no matter what we learn, we are better because we learned it.  Some people might choose to argue with me that people that learn bad behaviors are not better and therefore my argument would be invalid.  However, don't you think that people that have learned bad behaviors know they are bad because they also learned what good behaviors were?  This would also imply that at some point, they may regress back to said good behaviors because the bad ones just weren't working out.

At least it's something to think about.  And if you want, try to learn something to prove me wrong.



Until tomorrow.