Idea Sea

Confucius said: Studying without thinking makes you tired, while thinking without studying makes confused. He emphasized the importance of integrating reading and thinking. Another ancient Chinese philosopher said: read ten thousand books, and walk ten thousand miles. Here walking stands for getting experience. This sentence emphasized the important balance between reading and experiencing.

However, I think either of them tells a complete theory. I believe, the internal growth or maturation of a person comes from the emergent effects of integrating and interplaying three necessary activities: Read, Experience and Think. I call them Three Elements for Growth.

Confucius did not cover the importance of experience on reading and thinking, and the relevance of experience to improving reading and thinking. The latter neglected the importance of thinking. Neither of the two theorems is as extensive and complete as the Three Elements for Growth.

The growth or maturation I mentioned above is the unique growth or maturation that belongs to the individual person’s invisible inside, including intelligence, personality and capability, while excluding the growth and maturation of physical bodies. Such invisible inherent growth and maturation is the result of the interactions, fusions and emergences of the three elements: Reading, Experiencing and Thinking.

Here, reading means general acceptance and absorbing existing knowledge. It includes reading books, taking classes, communications with people, or observing the phenomena and movements in the outer world, etc. Experiencing means participating physically in events or activities. What is read may guide or influence the process of participating and doing things, meanwhile experience and reading can stimulate thinking. When you read, you often think in the trajectories of the knowledge flowing in the book. If in your thinking there are resonance and conflicts between your experience and what you read, the accumulative learning effect is much better than purely reading a dead book. In practice, if you can agilely use the knowledge obtained from reading and thinking, you may achieve more. In the mean time of reading and experiencing, thinking is important as it can determine what to read and what to experience. It is difficult to form unique personality and capability when you do things without thinking, or read books without thinking. Only if you integrate and fuse the three elements, you can achieve your unique personality, capability, intelligence, and charm inside, and other software embedded in the hardware of your body.

Three Elements for Growth: Read, Experience and Think. None of them can be absent.

[This article was first written in 2007]