by Ryan Mitofsky

Created on: January 06, 2008   Last Updated: September 22, 2008

Learning can be a powerful tool or a crippling adversary depending on the attitude approaching it. If one wants to learn there is almost no force that can prevent it from happening and if one wishes to remain ignorant the best teacher in the world will struggle to communicate. The education process is one of self empowerment that must be wanted and desired and not forced. An internal desire to know the unknown and to seek the answers for the questions that boggle the mind creates a vortex of information which then has to be filtered for personal relevance. For me, it has been a process of recognizing my weak points and improving upon them to balance my strengths to become a renaissance man.

Looking back my formal education throughout the public school system was almost a joke to me. I barely cared about what I was learning and I became an expert at procrastination and excuses because I had no desire to do any of the actual work. I learned by proximity of information and absorbed some of it simply because I was exposed to it but nothing really stuck with me and nothing really interested me. I then went on to college after that because that was the expected path of the oldest child and I started to follow in my father's footsteps going to his old school for a business degree. In this process I became depressed and failed out of school not because of my intelligence but because of my apathy. I didn't value my education and I didn't care that every time I skipped class I was essentially wasting several hundred dollars. None of it registered as a good use of my time and energy so instead I socialized and partied. I didn't care whether or not I attended class because I didn't feel like the classes helped me in any way.

After that phase of life I was working for my dad full time managing a restaurant. I started to realize that I had weaknesses that I could improve upon. I had a very difficult time being assertive and expressing myself in an honest way so that others could understand what it was that I wanted, specifically in disciplining my employees. So I looked into Fred Pryor seminars and decided to take one on assertiveness. It was a one day learning experience that changed my life. I was younger than anyone else there and very motivated to understand the material. I wanted change, I wanted knowledge, and I wanted power. As I began to realize that behavior was changeable and learnable I wanted to understand how I interacted and behaved so that I could be a more

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