B is for Brainpower

Excerpt from Pat’s best seller A is for Attitude: An Alphabet for Living.

"He’s no rocket scientist." How many times have you heard this or a similar dismissive comment? Well, it’s not a very smart thing to say. "He" or "she" doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist to succeed, nor do you. However, you do need to make the most of the mind you have.

Believe it or not, a friend of mine is the daughter of a rocket scientist. Her father was one of the NASA scientists who worked out the equations for the first successful lunar landing. She always felt awed and intimidated by her father’s intelligence; she never felt she could measure up to his brilliance and so she didn’t even try. She did so-so in school, took so-so jobs, and had a so-so existence.

Then one day, she got lucky: Some of her managers recognized that she was capable of far more than she realized, challenged her to step up to her potential, and offered her a promotion to management. At first, she resisted, saying, "It’s way over my head!" But her boss would have none of that, answering, "Jump in, the water’s fine, and we won’t let you drown."

So, she took the job, succeeded in boosting the morale of her team and leading them toward their first profitable year. As her success surpassed everyone’s wildest dreams, her rocket scientist father said proudly, "Finally you’re doing something that really uses your brain."

The real benefit wasn’t more money or a more challenging position, but that finally my friend knew she had a brain to use.

Keep learning. Pursue more training, degrees, adventures, and travel: each in its own way stretches your mind and helps you to keep your brainpower well fueled. For instance, when you travel, you have the opportunity to embrace the world’s offerings, to meet new people and learn their culture, to discover special customs and traditions, and even to find new tried-and-true ways to handle your everyday affairs.

Then, too, when you are thrust into an unfamiliar situation, you are often forced to become more resourceful, to think in new ways, and to move outside your comfort zone: As you travel through large cities and small villages and see bright lights and barren back roads, your horizons are being continually widened and you return to your own life recharged, refreshed, and infused with new wisdom and perspective.

Your brain is a complex and sensitive instrument, finely wired with the divine circuitry that enables you to find and express meaning, deal with pleasure and pain, calmly cope with both emergencies and the routine, and fully sense all that surrounds you. Like all instruments, it needs regular tuning to stay in shape. Challenging yourself to create fresh approaches to old problems, to explore unfamiliar places, to debate and dissect received truths, to spend time with people whose wisdom forces you to stretch, to grapple with complex information – all these activities will help you to develop your intellectual property. And that property is one of the most precious gifts you possess and share.

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