I’m going to sound like a narcissistic jerk today, but in doing so I want to illuminate something about me that, in my admittedly little experience, seems to be almost nonexistent in the entire human race. Now, when I say this I’m not going to imply that I’m better than everyone else here. There are plenty of people whom I am perfectly aware I will never be able to play in the same league with, let alone meet on the same playing field.

But as far as I know, there are one of two things that make me “different” from most other people, and that is my intuitive grasp of virtually everything I take on. Either I am naturally skilled at picking things up more easily than other people, or other people simply haven’t realized their full potential. Perhaps it is a combination of both here. Now, if you had asked a younger me, I would have said I was simply gifted with innate knowledge and leave it at that. But recently, I’m inclined to believe that everyone is more capable than they realize.

Here’s what I mean. Let’s say I’m talking to somebody who claims to be incredibly bad at math. They barely scrap by with ‘D’s in their classes and are happy with that. Whenever I explain a mathematical concept to them, they leave that conversation with understanding. It may take me a while and a few different approaches to teach them what they aren’t understanding, but it isn’t as though they are incapable of learning. In fact, often it’s that it simply wasn’t explained to them in a way that ‘clicked’.

I’m not saying “everything is way easier than people make it seem”. (And even if that was my point, I certainly wouldn’t put it so pretentiously.) Rather, a lot of people don’t try because they don’t believe in themselves.

It’s here that I’m going to bring up what I’m coming to call the “driving metaphor”. When you learn to drive, you learn to multitask. A good driver must pay attention to the road (and cars) in front of them, as well as around their immediate area, they have to watch their mirrors, watch their speed, and be mindful of the gas and brake pedals and how much leverage each is given. Most drivers can also have full conversations and do other things while they do all these things, as well. All of these things become subconscious. At a certain level of experience, you no longer have to think about watching your mirrors or your speed, etc. If you asked a driver, “Hey, what are you paying attention to right now?” they might include a list of all those things, but before you asked that question, they wouldn’t have put any consideration into their actions.

This metaphor basically describes exactly how I live my life. It’s all through intuition, but if asked, I could tell you the exact reasoning for my actions. I can’t tell you how I wrote ‘X Masterpiece’ (though I wouldn’t call any of my works masterpieces), but I could describe to you all of the reasons I wrote each paragraph and line of dialogue even if those reasons weren’t consciously going through my head as I wrote them.

The fact is, many of the Learning! posts I’ve done in the past have been loose topics I wanted to talk about with no plan on what I’d be writing. Often, I don’t even realize “Hey, this is how I develop characters!” until I’m actually talking about how I develop characters. A lot of the wisdom that comes out of my mouth is knowledge I didn’t consciously know I had. When I’m teaching people and they ask questions, I come up with a valid answer on the spot rather than say “I don’t know”.

It may sound like just spouting out the first thing that comes to my mind isn’t knowledge, and in a way you’d be right. But really the things I’m surfacing is stuff I already know, but simply had not the mind to speak. Imagine if I asked you how you form specific letters with your mouth. You don’t think about lightly biting your lower lip to make the “F” sound, but if I asked you how to make that sound, you could explain it to me.

Going back to my original point, I don’t think a lot of people live life this way. They live in a cloud of self doubt and self loathing that I have never in my life experienced. It’s one way I consider myself one of the luckiest people, but that’s a can of worms I’m not going to talk about today. In conclusion: you may make good actions based on unconscious knowledge or feelings like I do, or you may not. But either way, we’re all capable of greatness. You’re not bad at anything. You may not enjoy it, or your brain may not learn the way it’s being forced to, but I believe any one known thing can be taught to a majority of the population. You could be taught rocket science. It may take a few years, and it could be frustrating, but all it takes is a means of transferring that information into your brain. It isn’t as though your brain is unable to store that knowledge.

Disclaimer: Again, this could be totally wrong. For all I know I’m no different from every other person on the planet, in which case I must be a narcissistic jerk. This is just an unfounded theory I’ve been thinking about lately.