Saturday, February 21, 2015

150-159: Tech Support for Your Brain

158, Applied Psychology, is a very popular call number and includes many 'self-help' books. Best of all, it's heavily represented in the audio section of my library, so while I am driving I can get a cognitive tune-up!

I just finished David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell, which was really intense. He told story after story of folks who faced terrible adversity and from it acquired skills and strengths that enabled them to achieve great things. If I were writing an SAT essay about whether failure is part of success or some such uplifting thing, I could pretty much just summarize this book. Didn't I like it, you ask? Yes, if by "like" you mean "found interesting and thought-provoking." By "like" you probably don't mean "listened to while crying over the Irish Troubles and the London Blitz," though, so I can only recommend the book with reservations.

The most obvious question it makes one ask oneself is: "Do I have any weaknesses that are actually strengths?" One example in my case is my chronic low-grade depression. Before you rush to fix my brokenness, hear me out! Listening to this book reminded me that, although I would prefer not to have this condition and would never wish it on anyone else, it does give me a superpower: there are days where I just don't care. On some days, mind you, just some, I don't care what movie we see, because I'm not going to enjoy any of them. I don't care whether you hate me, because I hate myself. I don't care whether I live or die, because it's all the same to me. Therefore, I can be an unusually easy person to negotiate with, I can take all the blame for the problem at hand so we can move on to actually solving it, and I can take physical risks for causes I believe in. And I already know 3 or 4 pretty good ways to talk someone off the ledge, because I have that conversation with myself on a regular basis.

So, you see, I don't need to be repaired. I'd return this condition to sender in a flash if it were that easy, but I have figured out how to work around it. I appreciate the listening ears and encouraging words that have kept me going over the years, but ultimately my "desirable difficulty" has been like Paul's in the Bible. Gladwell quotes him as another David who defeated Goliaths: "Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me." (2 Co 12:9)

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