The Personal Development “Beta Flash”

"Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.”-Socrates

Regardless of your goals and personal interests, acquiring relevant knowledge is universally recognized as a key to success. Of course, experience is paramount, and it is often said that “practice makes perfect;” but we can practice something wrong all day long, and we’ll be worse off than when we started! It would be more accurate to say that “perfect practice makes perfect”, and this is where quality education comes into play.

The term beta flash is borrowed from mountain climbing and represents a concept that is at the heart of personal development. When scaling a mountain, a “flash” is a clean, successful climb on the first attempt. The word “beta” refers to guidance provided to assist the climb, thus making it more likely to go smoothly. In this scenario, the quality of the guidance is directly related to the success and relative ease of the climb. The ideal outcome of all education would be a beta flash in the chosen endeavor.

If you're familiar with the Trivium method of education, you understand how to process information, evaluate its merit, and incorporate newfound knowledge into practical guidance for effective action. That action may simply be passing information along to others, but prudence dictates that we ensure the quality of our knowledge before sharing it, or employing it for practical purposes.

Gathering information is remarkably easy in today’s environment. In fact, there’s an over-abundance of information on any given topic, and sorting it all out can be daunting. We may be tempted to heed the advice of the first person we hear speak on a subject, particularly since most of our lives are moving at rapid pace, and time is a commodity all-too-dear.

But “short cuts make for long delays,” as a friendly hobbit once said, and spending some time critically analyzing information from an eclectic variety of sources will give us the best chance to achieve the beta flash that every hopeful upstart desires when embarking upon a new adventure.

We facilitate the climb by “standing on the shoulders of giants,” but discerning which are truly giants and which are mere impostors is something we must figure out for ourselves. Once we’ve honed our ability to interpret our intuition and employ sound judgement, we’ll find that our own inner guidance is the foundation for deriving benefit from the guidance of others.

Personal growth is an active process. The difference between learning and indoctrination is the participation of the student. Not only must we make the climb, but we must also decide which voices to heed on the way up.