My Idea Outlet: Defining Beliefs (2025)

I have updated my list of Defining Beliefs. There are three changes that I have made.

Belief #2 is perhaps the most awkwardly worded item on my list. I also keep mentioning a different belief of mine that has fallen off of my list. Even though there is a slight redundancy with belief #7, I wanted to restore some of my most widely used words when discussing my personal beliefs.

Defining Beliefs (Revised 2022)

I'm overdue to reevaluate my list of defining beliefs. For those who don't know, my list of defining beliefs is a series of statements that I have been maintaining to try to explain my belief system. I try to periodically update this list, and I have decided that I want this list to consist of ten items.

Defining Beliefs - Revised

I have long insisted that my list of defining beliefs has been my favorite personal project. As time has progressed, I have seen some things that seem less than ideal in regards to presenting these beliefs. In particular, my periodic updates have increased the length of the list, making it less of the quick explanation of who I am that I originally intended.

We are all born with a natural desire to learn

I haven't added anything to my list of defining beliefs. It's time for that to change.

It's better to prevent problems than to wait until it's too late

In case you missed it, one of my favorite personal projects has been the development of my defining beliefs. Although I already have a solid list of defining beliefs, I refuse to stop improving my understanding of the beliefs that drive who I am. I have decided to add another item to my list: It's better to prevent problems than to wait until it's too late.

Nobody will ever be better at being you than you.

A recent mental exercise that I developed asked others to create a list of defining beliefs. Since I already had a list, I added a new belief to my list. I want to make sure that I have it listed with the other beliefs when you look through the Defining Beliefs label, so I had to post here as well. I'm feeling a little lazy, so I have simply copied and pasted my explanation of this defining belief from the mental exercise follow-up.

There are a lot of people who say that you should find what you are the best at. I prefer a broader view of this concept. There is an infinite number of components to individuality. You might be able to find people who are better than you in regard to these components, but nobody will be able to reach your level on all of these infinite components. In other words, I can guarantee that I am better than you at some things and that you are better than me at some things.

I am a big believer in individual rights. I feel that being the best at being you is something special and something that should be embraced. I also feel that we should not only acknowledge our differences, but utilize those differences in our pursuit of becoming the best that we can be.

True education is a need.

I view education as the development of new skills and general mental development. I also view this form of development as a necessity in life.

In order to live an acceptable life, we can’t just live lives of mindless incompetence. If everybody lives that life, progress will dry up (even more so than the present) and quality of life will continue to deteriorate. Ultimately, this would would lead to a point where life and the continuance of the human race would become meaningless.

Unfortunately, some misguided egotistical sub-humans with power jumped to the opposite conclusion. They actually viewed education as an enemy of humanity and created the concept of schooling. While the original purpose of the schools has been forgotten by most, the anti-educational values are still highly visible to this day. The schools have redefined “education” to mean schooling rather than actual education. With so many people taking education for granted, a lot of people who claim to support education side with the schools rather than true education.

Let me put this another way. Education is a need. Schooling is at war with education. People who take education for granted assume that the term “education” is sufficient evidence that schooling is educational. These people insist that education is important, and want to convince others that they support the concept. They use this flawed logic to justify support for the schools. If we combine these things, we will discover that a lot of people who claim to believe in education are ultimately supporting the war against the necessity.

You should never rely on others to tell you how you prefer to do things.

We are living in a world where we act as though there is exactly one way to do everything. Partially due to to individuality, there is generally not a single approach to a task that works best for everybody. Besides, letting others live your life for you is no way to live.

This was actually a part of the reason that I started my Mental Exercise blog. It’s one thing to tell you how I accomplish tasks. Encouraging others to find their own way is something else. By challenging people to figure out an answer that can be highly variable (although I have been developing single-answer exercises as well), they are encouraged to develop a sense of what works for them.

I also feel that letting others tell you how to do things is neglectful to problem solving skills. What’s more beneficial, being able to apply a specific example of how to do something in Excel, or being able to find out how to accomplish specific tasks when asked to do so? This is why I changed my mind about simply handing out Excel tips. I wanted to help promote these problem solving skills.

There’s actually one more thing that I need to emphasize. If everybody is obligated to perform tasks in the same way, how will anybody ever develop a superior approach? If you rely too much on others, you are not going to experiment with alternative ideas. If everybody falls into this trap, then we lack any alternatives. Since better ideas would have to be alternatives to what is already in place, we ultimately inhibit progress.

The present and future are more valuable than the past.

I have never been a fan of history, and I feel that the past has limited value to the world around us today. A lot of people insist that history repeats itself, but there are two serious flaws with that belief.

The first flaw is that we really don’t know what happened in the past. History is generally portrayed in a biased manner. American history, for example, is generally recorded by people who love America and want to portray its history in a positive light.

The second flaw is that the past will never be a perfect match for what we are doing today. No two individuals are alike (not just within the present). We have new technology. War on American soil wouldn’t reflect the topography and climate that have influenced European wars. There are so many factors that the past is irrelevant.

It’s not just that the past is irrelevant. In some ways, the past is inhibiting the future. We have all heard that we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. While I understand that you shouldn’t have to redevelop every single idea every time you want to build off of it, there are times when a better approach could be found if we didn’t cling to existing ideas. In other words, we NEED to periodically reinvent the wheel.

Take a look at the schools. The process was designed to destroy thought and individuality. People don’t realize the true purpose of the process. Every time the school prove themselves to be detrimental to society, we insist on further investments in the process. If people backed off of tradition and formed their own beliefs, the collective understanding of education will improve. This is what needs to happen if we want to improve the quality of education.

If only the people of the past cared about the future. If they did, the present would be more tolerable. Hopefully, I can push myself in the right direction. Hopefully, I can help make the future a better place.

Those who want to learn should be allowed to do so with as little restriction as possible.

Recently, I made an effort to summarize my educational beliefs. I think that I found words that work for me. Like I wrote in the title, Those who want to learn should be allowed to do so with as little restriction as possible. I’m not going to go into too much detail here. That’s what my education blog is for. Even so, I can explain the basics of this belief.

Learning is ultimately the responsibility of the learners. We need to ensure that they are given opportunities to learn if they wish to do so. This is what I’m talking about when I’m talking about educational rights.

Schooling is restrictive by nature. For that reason, they clearly interfere with educational rights. This is quite possibly the biggest issue that I have with the schooling system.

The bottom line is that we need to open up to education rather than restrict the concept. The more we push for the schools, the more we fight educational rights. As someone who believes in legalized education, I will not show support for our anti-educational schooling system.

Who I am is more important than what I am.

When we are kids, we are bombarded with a cliché of a question. “What do you want to be when you grow up.” I hate that question. Instead, we should really be asking, “Who do you want to be when you grow up?”

Watch a game show sometime. Contestants will be asked by the show’s host to talk about themselves. In most situations, their job will be mentioned. If not, they will mention why they don’t have a job (unemployed, retired, or student). It’s like people think that they are their jobs. Obviously, that’s just an example. These days, people consistently define themselves and others by their profession.

How about another example? Let’s say that you’re a doctor. That must mean that you’re the kind of person who helps others out. Or at least you do when there is a paycheck involved. That doesn’t exactly explain anything about who you are when you are away from the job. It does nothing to explain your motives. It does nothing to help us understand your beliefs and opinions. It doesn’t tell me anything about whether or not someone like you can be a friend to someone like me.

I used to follow the path of the mindless masses. I didn’t like it. Others were trying to influence my career path, but I lost the path that I should be following. Instead of dedicating my life to getting a respectable job, I should be dedicating my life to becoming the best person that I can be. This is a mentality that is definitely not socially acceptable, and people look down on me for trying to better myself rather than bettering my work life. This is why I have frequently backed down on what I view as right. Hopefully, I will eventually overcome societal pressure and become the person that I’m capable of becoming.

Intelligence cannot be measured.

If you want to convince me that you are intelligent, do not brag about your IQ. Even more importantly, do not brag about how well you did in school. IQ testing is invalid, and grades seem to have an indirect inverse relationship with intelligence.

Part of the problem with seemingly objective measures of intelligence is that intelligence is really a matter of opinion. Different people value different things when trying to establish whether or not an individual is intelligent. For example, I care far more about your ability to form your own thoughts than your ability to repeat what others have told you. Trivia games such as Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit target known facts rather than mental process, I am particularly unimpressed with people who are successful in these games. Other people, however, view trivia games as intellectual.

This brings up a closely related issue with measuring intelligence. How can anyone possibly measure how well anyone can come up with ideas and think for themselves? You can’t exactly have a one-of-a-kind idea on an answer sheet to provide an accurate measure of how well the thought was formed. What I value most in terms of intelligence is absolutely impossible to quantify.

What can be quantified? Testing can probably exceed wild guesses in your vocabulary, short-term memory, and ability to figure out patterns that others created. These tests will really be a sampling since you can’t test every possibility in these areas. There are also other factors in scores such as mood, rest, and distractions. Obviously, even objective testing is not perfect.

The biggest concern with intelligence testing is that it tests a very limited subset of what should be considered to be a part of intelligence. Quantifying absolutely everything that can be quantified would take more than a lifetime to complete. Like I said before, many components of intelligence are impossible to quantify. The subjective components of intelligence are far more significant than the objective components, but all that we ever test is a limited subset of the objective components.

I have had people insist that they are more intelligent than I am purely based on the argument that they graduated college. Because I feared the mentally harmful components of schooling, I did not attend any more schooling than I felt obligated to finish. If I changed paths and became a college graduate, I would have to become far more mindless than I am confortable with. Anyone who brags to me about being a college graduate is unimpressive to me at the least. I am fairly open about my beliefs that schooling is mentally harmful. If anyone who knows anything about me insists that collegiate success automatically makes them more intelligent then anyone who lacks a stupid piece of paper, I will view them as imbeciles. Of course, that’s just my opinion. In the end, that’s all that intelligence really is.

You have to be in a situation to know how you would deal with it.

What were we thinking back in the days of slavery? While in school, slavery is a topic that everyone will encounter. What’s remarkable is that everyone says that they would have known better than to have a slave if they lived in the south during that era in American history. I refuse to say the same.

Before people criticize me for saying that I MIGHT have had slaves, let me clarify something. I also am not saying that I WOULD have had slaves. I also do not believe in slavery. I am simply stating that I was born in a different time with different influences and a different environment. I would like to think that my insistence that I think for myself would have ensured that I would have seen slavery properly and done the right thing. I just can’t be certain.

What this really comes down to is that it is absolutely impossible for me to know how I would have handled that situation since I have never been in that situation. The reason that people overwhelmingly insist that they would have been above slavery is not because people are smart enough to know better. It’s because they know better in our current culture and want to believe that they would have known better in the slave-tolerant culture of our past.

While I can’t say for certain how I would have dealt with slavery, I can say that this is not an isolated component of my belief system. There is no situation that I can know how I will handle if I haven’t been in it before. If I grew up in a household that smoked, would I smoke? In a natural disaster, would I be more likely to panic or to bring people a sense of calm? I can take a look at who I am and guess, but guesswork can’t mimic the situations.

Happiness is the ultimate goal in life.

To an extent, we are all selfish. We are looking for the best lives that we can have. Just about every action that we take can be linked to one selfish desire. We want ourselves to be happy.

I’m not going to go on about how we are all equally evil because I don’t believe that. Some people thrive on the misery of others and want society to collapse. Others have a strong conscience that makes them feel horrible if we are aware of anyone who has problems that we can address. Some people feel obligated to make the world a better place. Happiness can be viewed as a motivator for both good and bad, but our motivations are still coming down to our own personal happiness.

Teaching and learning refer to the same process.

I know and understand my beliefs, but I seriously struggle converting my beliefs regarding the connection between teaching and learning into words. In short, I feel that teaching and learning are technically the same thing.

Let me start by coming up with a quick definition for teaching and learning. Teaching is the process of getting someone to learn. Learning is developing new abilities.

How does one learn? Learning is up to the person who is learning. Such a person must take resources and provide the effort to translate those resources into the ability to accomplish the task. The learner must provide motivation and effort toward learning.

The only person than can properly teach you anything is you. A “teacher” in school can’t provide your effort, make sense of the resources for you, force you to understand, or succeed for you at accomplishing something that you had never done before. It is ultimately your responsibility to take resources and convert them into something that teaches you anything.

This is where the explanation really gets tricky. Teaching is essentially the process of getting yourself to learn while learning is essentially the process of teaching yourself. Each individual component to teaching is part of the learning process, and each individual component to learning is a part of the teaching process. The actual elements of teaching and learning are identical. If every single component of these processes are the same, then the processes themselves are the same.

Some students may take the motivation of grades and utilize resources provided to them by the schools. In the end, they are still teaching themselves. Unfortunately, “teachers” insist that they are the ones who are ultimately responsible for teaching children. As a result, teaching and learning have both become highly inefficient, undesirable, and even restricted. We need to realize something that the schools won’t tell us. If we are prohibited from learning on our own, we will not learn.

True knowledge does not exist.

Our schooling system tries to give children the knowledge that we feel that they will need in order to contribute when they grow up. One of the problems with this concept (besides the reliance on the idea that everything that we will ever need to know is known now) is that true knowledge does not exist. You can find theoretical flaws in just about everything that the schools share.

Take a look at history. We insist that history is important because we learn from the past. What happened in the past? Does anyone really know? History is heavily skewed by the people who recorded history (winners of wars) and those who write the text. I always found it interesting that the schools are always demanding updated textbooks. History won’t change. The words might.

The interpretations of someone writing about American history because he is fascinated with the country will turn to various sources to piece together information. The text of these interpretation could be cited by future historians. Many of the sources used will be written by similar pro-America historians well after events took place, and their sources will likely be from the American perspective of historical events. Each generation of history textbook will be less accurate than the last. Historical facts are completely unreliable. We don’t know what really happened because the facts that are presented to us are heavily influenced by what historians want history to be.

Being told something is insufficient to make it true. Simply reading text or listening to a lecture shouldn’t be nearly enough to convince us beyond a doubt that anything is true. Going one step further, there is always a theoretical possibility that anything that you believe to be true could actually be wrong. While some of these things could require a great deal of creativity to question, the inability to find any theoretical flaw could be viewed as a mental deficiency on your part. This is a big part of the reason that I value thought above knowledge.

A common belief among all is not proof.

Have you ever heard someone insist that something is true because, “X people can’t be wrong?” Obviously, you will have to replace X with a number such as one million. Personally, I never liked this argument. It’s like saying, “I’m right because other people said so.” That’s not exactly compelling.

A lot of people are exposed to common influences. For example, society consists primarily of products of our schools. The schools’ insistence that schooling is beneficial combined with the pressure to conform to the role of a successful student will ensure that most people who graduate school will believe in schooling regardless of what schooling actually accomplishes. In this situation, the mainstream develops a strong belief that is not rooted in reality.

This brings up another point. The mainstream is highly influential. If enough people believe something, people will assume that it’s true. After all, we will look stupid if we don’t know what is assumed to be fact. The problem with this is that the mainstream is rather mindless, and anyone who can manipulate the mainstream can shift the beliefs of a significant portion of the population.

In addition to fear of looking stupid, accepting the mainstream’s beliefs is easy. We don’t have to bother looking for evidence and using that evidence to form our own beliefs and opinions. That’s a big part of the reason that I view the mainstream as the mindless masses.

If one million people believe something because they are adapting their beliefs to what a million people have said, it raises an interesting question. How many people truly believe it? The number of believers is insignificant and irrelevant. Personally, I don’t care if everyone else on earth believes the same thing. That doesn’t make it true. If it did, we might as well all try to believe that everything is flawless just to make everything flawless.

The first time is more valuable than the hundredth.

I remember being given a book of Sudoku for Christmas one year and being asked about what I thought. Aside from the simple reality that they were not actually new to me (I had solved Number Place puzzles in the past), I came up with a simple comment. Sudoku can make you think when you are trying to learn how to solve the puzzles, but they lose value after you have solved enough of them.

The first time you solve just about any puzzle in the logic family, the primary purpose is to figure out how the rules work and how to use them to find a single answer to the puzzle. Even if you have to look at solving instructions (I would recommend avoiding these whenever possible), you have to learn how to apply them. During your first attempt, you will have to think.

If you develop a love for a particular puzzle, your goal will change. Since you already know how to solve the puzzles, the most valuable aspect of the puzzle will disappear. Instead, you will be applying what you already know to the puzzles. What was mentally demanding initially could very well transform into a routine. What is routine? It’s performing a task without having to think about it.

This doesn’t just apply to puzzles. Pretty much any task will initially require the development of new ability followed by a more routine approach to finishing the task after familiarity has been established. Routine leads to a bland and mindless life. We all deserve better than that.

Thought should not be restricted by words.

Thinking is generally viewed as talking to ourselves with our mouths closed. If that is the extent of our thinking ability, I’m not impressed. I have found over the years that I can take shortcuts. I can also overcome situations where I can’t think of a word that fits what I’m thinking.

How did we first come up with the ability to talk? Could we think before that point in time? I feel that we had to think through the development of language. In order to come up with a word to represent something, we had to think through what sounds we could make and what would be a good enough sound combination to identify things.

At times, I have thought more in concepts than words. When this happens, my thought process is more efficient and less limited. Unfortunately, this is a task that seems to exceed what most people can do these days. This is most likely due to the insistence that we explain our thoughts. That’s not always possible if your thoughts weren’t attached to words in the first place.

I can’t always convert my thoughts into words. I’m not a writer, and I’m not good at explaining things in person. While posting to a blog, this is always a concern. I am confident in what I’m saying, but I’m not confident in how I say things. I would be surprised if the text that I have been writing isn’t full of oversights and gaps in explanations. Hopefully, there are times when I actually make sense.

In the ideal world, no two people are alike.

We have all heard that no two people are alike. Unfortunately, we really don’t support that idea. We only accept those who conform to a strict standard. My whole life, I have been told that who I am is unacceptable.

I believe in individuality. I feel that we should embrace our differences rather than fight them. I am convinced that the world would be a better place if we would be willing to support personal strengths. Instead, we try to force everyone through a schooling system that demands conformity. We try to ensure that the population consists of as many mindless drones as possible.

I am not a fan of the modern world. I would much rather live in a society where individuality isn’t feared. After all, how can the numerous societal problems ever be repaired if everyone is identical to the same people who created these problems?