Becoming well rounded

There's an entire industry of conventional content delivery that imagines we are not even slightly well rounded. This industry includes textbook and every other kind of print and educational media publisher. Preachy professors and pedantic academics of every stripe count among the members of this industry. Content delivery includes anyone else in a position to tell us what we need to know and how to think about it.

I imagine everyone is already well rounded even if we're not all "well educated". We all have wide and varied experiences with different food, music, locations, people and more. We've got tons of experience with caring for other people, pets, plants and other living things. We've been on the receiving end of lots of attention from others and engaged in changing how we get treated. We've started many and completed some projects, creative endeavors and social pursuits. We received boatloads of feedback from people, results of our efforts and our own self-assessments. We've all tried many things that did not work out as we expected, hoped or intended. We've all learned from our failures, setbacks and surprising successes. We've taken the time to upgrade our explanations of how the world works and our predictions for what happens as a result of our actions. We've learned to keep secrets, earn others' respect, maintain trust levels, use honesty and much more of the complexity of relating to other people. We've all got more facets than anyone can count.

In a world that works for us, we would bring all these well-rounded experiences to bear when we are learning something new. We would not be learning something to become well rounded. We would presume we already are and use that as the basis to assimilate new information and experiences. We would naturally compare what we've just received to what we already know and recall the new stuff by its tie ins to our well roundedness.

Convention content deliverers cannot adopt this outlook of mine. Each member is too focused on his/her particular expertise and the material to be covered. None of our well-roundedness counts in their world. It's does not deal with the subject matter. It's not in the form of respected expertise. It appears unrelated to the content they deliver. In the world of well-roundedness, conventional content deliverers seem to be flat as pancakes and as shallow as puddles.

I know from my own experiences that preparing content to deliver is hard work. My mind goes into task mode tin order to maintain intense focus and shut out distractions. On this basis, I presume that conventional content deliverers are consumed by binary thinking. They rule out the possibility of everyone already being well rounded in terms of the clear contrast between work and play, experts and amateurs, or knowledge and ignorance.

Thus it is very unlikely that anyone could become well-rounded by consuming the content delivered by experts. Getting seen as "not already well rounded" cannot help this endeavor. Getting treated as uninformed and lacking expertise creates labels, profiling and stereotypes that work against well-roundedness. Getting the content deliverers' own "flat and shallow" condition projected onto us consumers of their content can only undermine well roundedness.

With that preface said, my advice for becoming well-rounded is to realize everyone already is exactly that. When we accept that and let that serve us, we will become even more well rounded, resourceful and responsive. Imagine that!