Intellectual Perseverance is not only having the mind that
another person may be right whether it be male or female, black or white, but
also a person who people expect you to be racist towards. I have always had the
poor judgment of not listing to everyone and thinking that only select people
who are wealthy or have power are to be intellectually revered, while the
opposite is true. As a student, I need to have intellectual perseverance to look
past the status of a person and take in the information because everyone can
have something intellectual to say.
In my studies, information that has always stuck in my mind
has always come from a person I revered as a highly intelligent person. I
lacked the intellectual perseverance to look past the person and dive into what
they were trying to teach me. The future student in me needs to take all
information into consideration because all information is important not just
who it comes from. Information is important but also knowing the deeper
relation to other information.
Knowing information is only half the argument. Anyone can be
full of random information but only after the application of perseverance can
we connect the information to have a whole thought. The problem I have always
had as a student is only taking part of the information and not trying to put
the information together as a whole forming rational thoughts. While the small
parts of information are important, the point to studying anything is to
understand it as a whole and connect that whole to other thoughts. Connecting
one thought to another is always confusing.
What I find are some of the hardest obstacle when coming to
terms with persevering through new information is combining it with old
information. The critical thinking website says, "A sense of the need to
struggle with confusion and unsettled questions over an extended period of time
to achieve deeper understanding or insight."(Valuable
Intellectual Traits) Struggling
with a combination of a new idea such as how a crankshaft and a camshaft may be
two different actions but they work towards the same goal. The crankshaft moves
the piston and the camshaft works off the crankshaft to open valves for the
piston. You have to know how each one works but in the end you have to know how
they affect each other to know how a piston engine works.
Perseverance is not only about combining new ideas and
thoughts on a deeper level but it is about overcoming what you have said no to
in the past, not only as a student but as an individual. I have always thought
that a good leader only needs experience. The irrational thought that
intellectual perseverance can only come through experience, but intellectual
perseverance starts before that. To learn anything new you have to be willing
to go through the struggle of working it out and getting through the hardships in
your situation. People have the irrational fear of starting a new job because
they don't want to be looked down upon as they learn new information. I think
that with the right perseverance you can take on any job and can strive to make
that job better.
Reference:
"Valuable Intellectual
Traits." Valuable Intellectual Traits. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Aug.
2015.
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