Way back in the day, I had this cool calculus teacher.
He was a retired engineer, and he loved to teach.
He was over-the-top enthusiastic about certain things.
Once he derived a famous math identity.
One that related “e”, “pi,” zero, one, and “i,” the imaginary number.
Ask any mathematician and they’ll tell you about the elegance of that equation.
All the fundamental mathematical ideas on one equation.
When he derived it, he stood back, looked at the board, and then to the class.
“God is not a mathematician, God is an artist,” he said.
For most people, for most of the time, math is complicated, frustrating, confusing and something they only deal with when they have to.
But if you can wrap your mind around it, it can be breathtakingly elegant.
On the one hand, it’s pure, inflexible, and a dry tool that’s use to describe actual things.
On the other hand, it’s a deep philosophy whose language is the nature of reality.
If you know anything about colors and color matching, there are mathematical relationships between colors that match.
Yet at the same time, we look at those matching colors, and if they are arranged by a competent artist, they evoke indescribable feelings.
From the outside, our biological beings MUST follow the laws of chemistry and physics.
But from the inside of our brains, the human experience is something artists and writers and philosophers have been trying to describe since the dawn of time.
One of the more useful skills you can cultivate as a human is to switch from inside your experience, where you can feel the full range of your emotions, to outside your subjective experience, so you can make rational and objective choices.
The better choices you make from outside, the better your experiences will be from the inside.
Consider this one of the “meta skills” that make all other skills better.
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