Imagine the following:
Two scientists and a kitten. The scientists are wearing white lab coats. The kitten is not.
One of the scientists holds the kitten tight.
The other scientist asks, “You ready?”
The first scientist nods.
Scientist two takes a big swing and rushes his large man-hand towards the kitten’s face. He stops right before hitting the kitten.
The kitten doesn’t even blink.
The scientist stares hard at the kitten, then picks up a clipboard, and notes down the results. “Just as we thought,” he says.
The annals of science are filled with strange experiments designed to answer strange questions. Perhaps none is more strange than an experiment performed in 1963, by two cognitive scientists at MIT.
The experimenters took a bunch of newborn kittens. Put them in pairs. Kept them in total darkness. Only occasionally exposed them to light, under very specific conditions.
When it was time for the light, the scientists put a box around the kittens’ heads. This was so the beasts couldn’t see their paws.
One kitten, kitten A, then got to walk around freely.
The other kitten, kitten P, couldn’t control where it was walking. But thanks to a clever mechanism designed by these MIT scientists, kitten P was moved around the floor in a little basket in exactly the same way as kitten A was moving.
Result?
After 21 sessions of this bizarre treatment, all A kittens learned to control their paws properly, and to judge depth properly.
All P kittens on the other hand — well, you can guess. Bring a P kitten to the edge of a table, and the poor thing didn’t know to stretch its little kitten paws out. Take a swing at a little P kitten’s face, and it didn’t even know to blink.
The P kittens were Passive. The A kittens were Active.
The P kittens ended up Pathetic. The A kittens ended up Athletic.
There may be something in there that applies to humans also.
Read, study, observe what others are doing — you may learn something. Or you may not.
Practice, do, apply it yourself — and you are guaranteed to develop.
The choice is yours.
For specific opportunities to apply, go here: