From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I took the fact that I felt I wasn't good enough as a challenge. This is where I give some of my early bosses and mentors a lot of credit. They invested their time in my training and development.
Focusing on education about the past serves a dual purpose: it humbles us by revealing our past missteps, while simultaneously broadening our perspective on what is achievable. Ultimately, it's this duality that encapsulates the invaluable role of education in shaping our future.
Every failure has lessons it can give us- and knowing failure is possible and monitoring where you expect it to occur, allows you to divert your attention to the necessary observations and actions to carry out the positive.
When you're blending digital and physical, you'd better know how things are made. When I talk to my students it's shocking how few of them have ever been to a factory, and how few of them know what a CNC machine is or how goods get from A to B efficiently.
We are all born creative, but most of us learn to become uncreative. Education systems often suppress the natural creativity we're born with rather than nurturing it.
We've had a collective gap of imagination around economic bridges. Lincoln used the government as a battering ram to bring opportunity to those left behind. The country was modernising, industrialising, and Lincoln wanted to empower people. We did that. Franklin Roosevelt did it with the GI Bill. We know how to build bridges; we just don't build them.
I learn every single day from my girlfriend, my family, from graduates coming into the business… I try to learn relentlessly.
In the 1960s, NASA commissioned a study to identify creative geniuses for hiring, and found that 2% of the adults they tested fit the bill. A few years later, someone thought to give the same test to four- and five-year-olds—and 98% of them qualified as creative geniuses. The researchers blamed the school system.
I'm a school drop-out that is now teaching professors and doctors around the world; all because of a naïve woman's wish for her child to live.
I should be just as excited to find out I was wrong as to prove I am right. Perhaps I should be even more excited about being wrong, because if I am always proving myself right, I'm just affirming my beliefs and not evolving them… and that's not learning at all, is it?
You couldn't design a situation more hostile to human learning than a typical school. We learn not to be creative, because everything is about turning us into good factory workers. That's why these systems were created: to make us into factory workers who produce more stuff, more money, more stuff, more money.
Swimming transcended mere physical activity. It served as a conduit for life lessons, embodying the essence of its beauty. It taught me discipline, respect for others, and how to navigate the fine line between friendship and competition. Upon arriving in Germany, swimming became my sanctuary during a time when I had no other home. It provided a common language that allowed me to connect with others effortlessly, facilitating a smoother integration into German society.