When I left for Australia, we were only three years into independence from the British. I went there at the end of 1959. I reached Sydney in early January of 1960. So, this was quite an interesting time in Malayan history as at that time there was no Malaysia and I was a Malaysian born under the British flag. In these times, education was okay but there were no really good universities over there. I suppose that is why my parents thought of sending me to a different place for my education, although my grandparents would’ve preferred if I had stayed back. So, that was the process of acquisition of knowledge. You acquire knowledge and then having acquired it, you consolidate it into yourself. Having learned something, you then apply it, which is the knowledge application. These are the three stages of one self’s education

We know for sure that you have this graph or a chart where you so beautifully explain the three stages of knowledge acquisition. Can you explain the concept of that chart to us and what exactly it represents? Also, you’ve always talked about this invisible intellectual ceiling. Do tell us about that too.

Yes, the Invisible intellectual ceiling. You see, we acquire knowledge at different stages in our lives. We acquire secondary education, then go on to universities and acquire the tertiary tier education, the bachelor’s degree as it commonly is known. So, what happens is that people let this fact in their head that they’ve attained a certain level of education or knowledge and then they start functioning at that level. What happens is that over a period of time, you start to slide down from that level because your growth stops and slides into mediocrity. So, what I do is that I make sure that when this starts happening, I take my X-axis and Y-axis from the graph and make that level my zero. This helps me go upwards again as the level I thought I have achieved, has again become zero and now I have a certain other level to achieve. This helps me keep myself going. People generally don’t revisit what they’ve obtained resulting in a downhill slide. This is what I call the invisible intellectual ceiling.

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