Dear All,
This week’s Food for Thought adds to last weeks and is from
a young Steve Jobs, 1996, and is a lesson for life. There is something in these words for all of us and they can easily be shared
with all our students in homeroom.
“When you grow up you, tend to get told that the world is
the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not
to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, save a
little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you
discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call
life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change
it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can
use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
The minute that you understand that you can poke life and
actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the
other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most
important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and
you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make
your mark upon it.
I think that’s very important and however you learn that,
once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s
kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the
same again.
Most
people never pick up the phone, most people never ask. And that’s what
separates, sometimes, the people that do things from the people that just dream
about them. You gotta act. And you gotta be willing to fail… if you’re afraid
of failing, you won’t get very far.”
Steve Jobs.
Have a good Sunday.
Yours,
Adrian
It's very easy to say we shouldn't be afraid of failure, because people need a supportive environment where they feel safe enough to make mistakes as they're changing established patterns. This certainly isn't exclusive to students. In my opinion, many teachers don't change their instruction practices because they don't want negative repercussions if things don't go according to plan.
ReplyDeletePerhaps it would be easier to give this message to students if adult work environments supported teachers who are striving to change their teaching practice.