Let me say that learning from books is a great thing that we have all benefited from greatly!  If fact, it would be a sad, sad world if we didn’t have books to learn from.

It’s how we learned the majority of what we know!  Without the existence of book learning, we’d probably still be hunting with bows and arrow to a large degree.   Without books (or any form of reading and learning system), we couldn’t have standards or controls to maintain things.  Yes, learning from book is a very important need in our lives.

But…, are we stifling our creative selves within?  By reading what other tell us to do or think, are we kind of experiencing a mass brainwashing effect?  In some ways, if we all read the same materials that everybody reads, do we have the possibility of becoming more like human lemmings?  Where we blindly follow our discipline off of a cliff?

I think that book learning is great, but you have to think and do our own experiments in life too.  Or try to do something that doesn’t involve following instructions in a book!  Check out the picture of very large (almost life-size) Transformers that a laid off machinist created after losing his job.  He didn’t follow a book to create these mainly Halloween displays, he just did it.  Later he did design a book that explained how he did it, and instruction to do the same, but wow, that’s pretty incredible.

Transformers

I bet this guy is now kind of a local hero (especially to his son and the kids in the area) in his neighborhood, if not his community.  Of course he’s been on the news too!

The point is, that the guy that made these replicas of the Transformer (robots?) didn’t do so because it was in a book, or that it might not be possible.  he did it by experimenting and thinking.  While his example doesn’t solve any real problems in society, it does show that we don’t have to be lemmings following a preordained route to become a member of the mediocracy.

We all dream, but perhaps we should all dream and do.  In the computer world, dreaming without action is call Vaporware.  Step out of your societal rut and experiment in life!  Personally, I did my lunch experiment and while it required more spreadsheet time and a bit more thinking than normal, the end results were very rewarding!

At age 42, Benjamin Franklin was rich and retired!  He then proceeded to become an inventor.  He could have become even richer, but he was already one of the rich men in America, so he never patented his stuff and gave it away to society for free.

Your experiment doesn’t have to be earth shattering!  Start out small, then build up to larger and more grand experiments!

What say you?

MR