Poet Ted Hughes, commenting on what happens when a person puts pen to paper, wrote, "you meet the terrible resistance of what happened your first year at it when you couldn't write at all." For years in the '80s, Hughes would judge poem contests and noted that the poems had gotten strangely boring as time progressed, although the poems were beautifully written with nary a grammatical error with many reaching seventy pages. This was around the time where home computers had penetrated into the household.
This is unsurprising, however, as many recent neurological studies have added strength to Hughes hypothesis, saying that the mere act of hand-writing activates part of the brain involving memory and thinking more than typing on the keyboard. But why is that? Typing on the keyboard makes it easier, more efficient to write, which is good but not necessarily best. This principle applies to many everyday things.
Walk into any gym and they will be packed to the brim with fancy machines to aid in working out. These machines work, there is no doubt about that, but they don't produce the same kind of functional strength as pure weightlifting would with dumbbells and barbells. Likewise, these machines produce a solid physique, just as the poems possess a strong understanding of the English language, but they lack the strength or creativity to back it up.
It is perhaps our human desire to develop ways to make life easier for ourselves, because why would we voluntarily want to have a difficult or challenging life? We wouldn't. However, it is this challenge, it is the difficulties that we face that make us grow as people. When we encounter difficulty we are forced to step back, figure out what we want and then devote resources to attain that goal. A rather personal example is my new weightlifting regime.
I was insecure about my squat and my legs because I had always struggled to do them with a knee injury I had as a child. After a session at the gym where I struggled to even do the bare minimum, I knew that I couldn't stop fooling myself anymore. I developed a schedule around improving my legs and my squat and it has worked wonders. Whenever I face a weight I'm struggling with, I keep trying until I get it perfect for multiple repetitions.
In a study done by scientists at the University of Amsterdam, they conducted several trials to learn how external obstacles affect our thought process. One experiment had two groups of people solving an anagram puzzle, one group was the control, while the other had random numbers read off while they were trying to solve the puzzle. Those in the experimental group actually demonstrated better cognitive ability. This was because they were likely to make mental associations and connections. The researches concluded that when people are faced with unexpected barriers they are more likely to widen their range of perception to look at the larger picture.
Take, for example, the creation of the first airplane. Wilbur and Orville had essentially nothing, not even a college degree. They ran a small bike shop in a small town in North Carolina. They had an idea, and seemingly infinite obstacles to achieve their goal: limited funding, lack of education, a small crew, and the biggest one was probably that they had a limited understanding of engineering. However, they weren't the only person that tried to build the flying machine. Samual Langley was a well known and respected engineer.
Educated at Harvard and friends with many bigwigs, he was sponsored and given millions of dollars to try and create a functional flying machine. He had all the resources he could ask for at the tip of his fingertips and failed to create this machine. However, a small crew headed by two bike repairmen was able to. It was precisely these difficulties that allowed their passion to thrive because they had to actually work for it, they had to apply everything they had to this project. Langley, on the other hand, not so much.
There are infinite examples, stories, personal anecdotes that could be presented to prove this point, and that's because it is nearly universal. Having obstacles pushes us to try harder, it motivates us to achieve, to create, to innovate. Without difficulty, we lose what makes us truly human, our drive to make more. We have the world at our fingertips in the world of technology, which is good in many respects, but sometimes write out that essay for English or work with the free weight section over the machines at the gym.
These difficulties don't have to be big, but when presented they can allow for greater cognitive ability producing products that can really make an impact. Hughes wisdom about the simple act of putting pen to paper, a trivial obstacle, will only become increasingly more important as technology continues to dominate more and more of our everyday lives and take away the traditional obstacles that have allowed us to remain uniquely human. So challenge yourself every now, look at it as a way to motivate, to improve, not as a pesky annoyance.
