Passion and Obligation

In my experience, there are two ways of doing most things: the easy way and the hard way. And when I say "easy," I don't mean "unchallenging." But here's the thing--when you care about something, it's a lot easier to do it. I'll give an example. Last semester, my favorite class was History 380: US Constitutional History and Law. I love law, especially the philosophy of law. I find it fascinating and very relevant. The class was supposed to be one of the most difficult offered by the history department, and in a sense it was--it required consistent effort and intellectual rigor on my part. It wasn't a class that one could just breeze through. It was challenging. But I didn't find the class all that hard, because I loved every minute of it.

And that's the difference. When you are passionate about something, it's not hard to get yourself to do it. But I find that when I don't care about something, I can't get myself to do it--at least not very easily. I have to talk myself into it, bribe myself (if I do this one assignment, then after I finish I'll do Constitutional Law homework!), and trick myself into doing it. But when I'm passionate about the work, even though it's work, the work is its own reward. I want to do it. I enjoy the challenge and the intellectual stimulation of it.

That's all well and good. But one of the things I'm trying to teach myself is how to become passionate about things that aren't particularly thrilling to me at first blush. For example, this semester I am taking a senior seminar course on what amounts to economic history in the 18th and 19th centuries. That's not exactly my favorite field of history. I like intellectual history, and observing how human thought and ideas affect the course of human events. The development of the Britain's industries and transportation infrastructure simply doesn't sing to me in the way that, say, Renaissance humanism does. So, in internet terms--wat do?

The answer, for me at least, seems to be that I need to find connections between what I have to do and what I love to do. When I do everything that I do out of a sense of obligation, I eventually become unhappy, bored, and stressed. I procrastinate, wear myself out by cramming at the last minute, and then don't retain anything. I need to find a way to become passionate about the things that I have to do anyway. So I have to learn about the development of industrial infrastructure in the 18th and 19th century. How does that development affect the way people view themselves and their surroundings? How do people react to these changes? And how did those reactions, in turn, shape the course of the Industrial Revolution?

I find that when I learn this way, I retain things much better. There are two reasons for this, I think. Firstly, and most obviously, it's a lot easier to remember something if you actually care about it. Secondly, learning through connections is a lot easier than learning through straight memorization. For example, in my constitutional law class last semester, I had to memorize relevant Supreme Court cases and their precedents, significance, and relevant details. That's a lot to memorize, and I did have to do some of it by rote--I made flashcards and drilled them. But more importantly, I also made connections. Most people know about Brown v. Board of Education, for example. Why? Probably because they're familiar with the stories of the civil rights movement, both before and after that landmark case. Brown v. Board is part of a larger network of concepts that includes Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., freedom riders, bus boycotts, and "I Have a Dream." All these things appeal to the emotions as well as the mind. We care about civil rights and racial equality. Things weren't always that way, of course--that's why the civil rights movement existed in the first place. And we're certainly not a post-racial society yet. But most people recognize that people have equal rights regardless of race, and the idea that a fellow human being might be forced to go to a lower-quality school (for example) because of something as irrelevant as the color of their skin is repugnant to us. So we tie the events of the civil rights movement together in an interconnected set of stories--the mention of one aspect of civil rights triggers a whole set of associations. This is a lot more meaningful than just memorizing, "Brown v. Board, 1954, mandated racial integration in public schools." Learning by association is much more effective than learning by memorization.

I notice this especially when I do essay exams. If I'm taking the exam on something that I've mainly learned through rote memorization, I don't do as well. I rattle off facts without much meaning behind them. But when I've learned through associations, I'm able to make sense of the big picture and its significance, and I do much better because I don't just know the facts--I know why they're important. And besides, that's a much more fun way to learn.