Self-Education and Self-Perfection

Man's creative potentials are unlimited and inexhaustible. One never comes anywhere near the peak of one's capacities and one's brain usually performs up to a negligible fraction of its potential. While nature has generously provided each person with colossal credit, we draw from it less and less, being too lazy for the kind of intellectual gymnastics that can propel our capacities to the level of true talents and geniuses... No person is without talent. A person's education is said to have achieved its goal if the person in question has matured enough to have the strength and will to carry on educating himself for the rest of his life and to know to do so. Self-education is strenuous and requires continuous self-perfection. For genuine self-perfection, there must be a specific goal that a person sets for himself. The more lofty and noble the goal is the greater service it does to the individual and the society.(From 'Realize Your Potential' by V.Pekelis: Published Mir Publishers, Moscow)