Today, I am exploring the idea of enlightenment as a lightening of mental load through experience, study, and cross-training.

First let’s dig into where this comes from, for me. I have three major guiding principles that inform my actions from moment to moment.

Seek Enlightenment: Evaluate whether this knowledge or effort makes future endeavors easier.
Fear is a tool: Recognize fear in myself as a mechanism that guides me away from failure.
Don’t sweat the small stuff: Embrace life as it comes and learn how to dance with it.

I try my best to apply these three principles to things that I feel may be keeping me from what I want out of life.

Seeking Enlightenment…

With Guidance

This journey began with difficulty but built over time, came to represent the core of my education, or in other words how I learned to learn. My mother played a crucial role in my enlightenment. Before ADD and ADHD were widely studied. She taught me at a very early age that I had a “jazz” type of mind, and that the music may take off onto solos from time to time, but that I could always find a way to bring it back and contribute to the melody. Jazz, when let run free without any training can easily get out of hand, but a little music theory and exposure can teach you how to find the hooks that keep it cohesive. Before college, she introduced me to Gregg Shorthand, which transformed my note-taking speed. Subsequently, my mother-in-law introduced me to speed reading from an original set of Evelyn Woods tapes, enabling me to tackle multiple chapters of textbooks in a single evening. Speed became my friend and saving grace. While I couldn’t retain all the information in one go of course, the ability to engage with lecture concepts each week was invaluable, enhancing long-term retention through repeated exposure.

Through Experience

Returning to the “enlightenment” idea, I use it as a centering mantra now. My key strategy in school was leveraging my long-term memory. The counterpoint to that is that I might forget what you just said 30 seconds ago. Armed with that understanding of myself, I realized quickly that class time would be wasted if I wasn’t prepared to learn on my terms. So, “seeking enlightenment”, for me, evolved into a need for rapidly filling experience and knowledge gaps. My ability to memorize concepts and organically build on them became my “cheat,” making schooling the big test or experiment, that I used to hone the skill of seeking enlightenment.

Through Study

Enlightenment is classically defined as:

A state of awakened understanding, transcending suffering, and desire for spiritual liberation.
An 18th-century philosophical, religious, artistic, and political movement rejecting traditional ideals and emphasizing rationalism.

I aim to maintain a personal perspective, something between the deeply meditative and the politically charged growing pains of society. On the meditative side, Personal reflection whether through silent moments or journaling, mindfully connects us with our purpose. Philosophically, external reasoning also has its merits. Yet, the challenge lies in finding a balance that aligns with one’s internal values. Not to mention the want or drive to do these things. Lack of motivation is the killer of all momentum.

Now that all said, I by no means think that I have it all figured out, but I do have a way to ensure that I am getting the most out of my effort, no matter what I am doing at the time. Being able to reflect on the things I do, and have done, helps me to lighten my load for the next time. In my work and hobbies, I try to automate as much as possible. If I have to perform the same task more than twice I take time to see if it can be automated or a better process applied. Even if it’s just parts of a task through templates, jigs, scripts, process definition, or muscle memory. All of these things can work together to make tasks run smoother and more reliably.

That at times can manifest as a poor choice, if my automation is flawed then the task it does is flawed in the same measure every time. That’s fixable but not a non-issue. In the beginning, I dedicated a lot of time to automation and my daily efforts suffered for a bit, that was a minor setback in the long run and ended up being a net gain in the end, but it was still something worth paying attention to.

Through Cross-training

Finding the connection between my work and my hobbies helps to solidify some of the concepts or shine a light on them from a new perspective. I am a fan of strategic games that require a lot of forethought and am not so great at tactical adjustment in certain scenarios. I try to do things outside of work that are seemingly unrelated but try to find the overlapping concepts that make me better at both. For example, painting takes patience, consideration, and a certain level of acceptance of imperfection, just like managing people.

Conclusion

To bring it all home, I think my definition of enlightenment boils down to the lightening of one’s mental load. The less I think about doing a thing the more smoothly it gets done. This may include a few older familiar concepts we have all probably heard in our lives at one point or another:

Practice makes perfect
Walk before you run
Work smarter, not harder
You’ll get faster with experience
Use tools that make the work easier
Time is money
Idle hands are the devil’s playground

Each of these may have a different connotation but ultimately they all push toward the same direction and outcome. I have just tried to condense them into one quick reminder I can say to myself if I feel I am wasting time or effort on anything.

This is a separate series from my usual Accessibility content, and I will be sharing more from time to time, providing insights into me, my process, and my motivations. Let me know what you think or challenge my perspective. Let’s talk about it.

This post was refined with the help of OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com

Enlightenment may not be what you think!