Hi, my name is Sam and I’m suffering from something.

Its
resilient and highly contagious. And once it had taken over of
my mind its almost impossible to eradicate. What I’m
suffering from is an idea, that’s has been fully formed and
fully understood. The inception of this idea began in my third
year of university. My Operation management professor was
teaching us about this drab topic regarding a Japanese
management philosophy known as Kaizen. He told us kaizen
means to continuously improve or more specifically, the idea
that a small improvement now can lead to substantial
improvements in the future. After the lesson I thought “Hey,
that was kind of interesting” but I didn’t really think much of
it… for a while… However, for whatever reason… that idea
stuck in my head and slowly… in following months the idea
became viral. The idea soon infiltrated my wants and my
needs. All my values and desires. And eventually, it began to
inspire and instigates all my behaviour. And now I
involuntary accept it as my dogmatic life philosophy.

I have a love and hate relationship with the kaizen mentality,

and it has changed my life in many ways. It gave it weird
obsession to actively seek and consume any skill or
knowledge that I felt was going to improve me in anyway and
I hunted it down with unfaltering focus. For instance, back in
high school I have always felt like I was slow reader since I
had so much trouble finishing my exams on time. I just
couldn’t read the questions fast enough and English was
second my language. Its something I never thought to change
until I adopted the kaizen mentality. This idea compelled me
to improve myself not matter how small the benefit. So one
day, when my mind decided that I wanted to be a faster
reader. Excitement began to fill me, and I went home and
spent hours doing research about how to improve my reading
speed and I stumbled upon a technique called Speed Reading!
I spent a good 3 months actively learning its principles and
techniques until I could master it. The result, after all the
hours I spend acquiring this skill I could now read 4 times
faster than with a same level of comprehension. And I didn’t
just stop there, I applied this philosophy to every facet of life
that I felt I was weak at… I felt I was a slow typer, so I
learned to touch type and tripled my typing speed. I felt I was
horrible at grammar, so I read at several book grammar and
became better at it. I even felt like tying my shoe took too
long so I learned the fastest way to tie it! “Tie your shoe”.

But the kaizen mentality isn’t all good. I also think it can be
curse sometimes. As I’m never satisfied with the knowledge
I’ve accumulated, and I will never be. I think its a sad thought
that I have accepted that I cannot know everything to know
about this world. It’s impossible… Learning things takes
time. And… the more time I spend learning things the more
it brings me away from people I care about. In addition, to
learn something doesn’t always mean you master something.
Tying a shoe can take a few hours to master but to master the
principles of a single focus in medicine can takes decades.
Knowledge also fades when its not stimulated. Depending on
the skill I learn it can become harder and harder to recall the
less I practice it. Knowledge is also a massive distraction. I
can spend hours on end reading Wikipedia articles and
watching YouTube videos about history, science and people.
And have the entire day pass by. But, the greatest fault of this
Philosophy is the accumulation of useless or inapplicable
knowledge and skills. If you take your phones out and go to
www.samuelsoriano.com. You will find my website, this
isn’t a prebuilt site like wix or squarespace. I made this site
from scratch after spending hundreds of hours of watching
and reading material on how to code. All for a website that
have no real use for! I have no pictures to post or any content
I wanted up. I just thought you know what would be cool, just
in case? A website. So, I made one and it exist. Some more
examples of useless skills I learned include solving a rubix
cube, whistling with my fingers and skipping rocks at a
perfect angle.

Overall, for all its faults and all its benefits I am in all thankful
for this idea, it was gift.

One of the side effects of this philosophy I recently become

aware of is the joy I feel sharing the things I have learned to
people I care about because by doing so I feel that I can make
their lives a little bit better.
I’ll leave you all with this this final thought, it is because of
this resilient and almost impossible to eradicate idea is why
I’m back to toastmasters. I want to improve.