THE major reason I really do not relish buying new phones is the effort it takes to transfer files and data.
So, it was a long time ago since I got the last one. It’s much easier now, very easy really, since there are the Cloud services. When I had the iPhone7 seven years ago, Cloud was a roundabout service, it was better to do without. Just use bluetooth to transfer, but still it takes time to set everything up.
Now there’s iCloud, perfect, really. You are just supposed to shift from your laptop to your new phone, except that... for the first time since my Motorola days, I lost a phone (yes, dears, I’m ancient, I even saw Minerva Linotype printing machines running and I once thought an IBM electric typewriter with a daisy wheel was a really cool equipment).
In this day and age in the Philippines, that is one of the worst that can happen because a phone has a sim card, and the horrors of transfering to a new phone with a new sim card can be daunting.
I have been stuck trying to bring my life back to normal for two full days now. First for my Android, and next for an iPhone. Life is starting to return to normal, sans a huge bunch of files that were inadvertently filed as in app and not in iCloud and the Facebook, which keeps on either logging me out or suggesting that I follow their security procedures that would lead me to create a new password. After five changes, I quit. You can see the long list of unread email messages from Facebook warning that an unknown device is trying to access my account, or that I logged in at this and that place, when time and action would point to me in Davao City.
Those are today’s inconveniences and we just have to live with it. In exchange, you get seamless shift from phone to laptop, depends on where you are. I usually use my phone to write articles and letters when I’m mobile or not at my desk and shift to laptop when I have a work desk. The convenience is just perfect for a person who can get stuck in a meeting or training or a car the whole day.
In between is the setting up. That part sucks. But I’m not about to give up and return to the old ways. I still have a lifetime to write and train, I cannot afford to let go of such convenience and be reliant on techie young ones to do the tasks for me.
That brings me to the young ones who cannot be bothered with a lifetime of learning. It makes me wonder for how long their sass and papogi like Kpop stars can carry them.
For all the conveniences of gadgets once set up, books still hold the key. Books that bring new knowledge or deeper understanding, not sex fantasies and gore. I’d concede to ebooks, for as long as you read them and not just stuff them in your gadgets unopened, for show.
Read, learn, and... teach. As Prof. Richard Phillips Feynman, an American theoretical physicist, and 1965 Nobel Prize winner once said: “If you want to master something, teach it.”
Here’s what you can learn from this professor called the Feynman Technique: Choose a concept you want to learn about
Explain it to a 12 year old
Reflect, Refine, and Simplify
Organize and Review.
Filipino Pranic Healing founder Grandmaster Choa Kok Sui said something similar to that in underlining the deep teachings that Pranic Healing carries with it: “When a teaching system is very advanced, you know this by its potency and simplicity.”
We can learn from these two esteemed men. The depth of your knowledge is not in how highfalutin your words are but how simple you have distilled deep teachings to make it understandable even by a regular 12-year-old. Read, learn, teach.
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