Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
Most people’s careers start with them doing the leg work for other people. Once enough leg work is done, they may or may not get the chance to have other people do the leg work for them.
From experience with the metaphorical and literal action of leg work I suggest that you always do the legwork, it keeps everything in perspective and allows for you to be a better leader and a better you.
Stay Positive & Do The Leg Work, Better Yet, Do The Whole Body
Garth E. Beyer
I cried a lot as a kid so it’s rare that I can remember a specific cry. The one I can recall is my first cry while trying to ride a bike for the first time. I remember my dad running behind me, keeping me steady. I yelled at him to NOT let go. He did. It ended up with me crying.
I’ve read a lot of analogies and quotes about life in relation to riding a bike. There’s something universal about teaching a kid to ride a bike; it’s not just a lesson about riding a bike, it’s a life lesson.
Step one: Make sure the kid knows that he is going to fall off the bike and if the kid is anything like any other kid, will cry and be afraid to ride again. Prepare the kid for it. Tell him what will happen. Do this at first.
Step two: then switch your words of honesty with words of encouragement immediately upon the first fall. Tell the kid that he is going to ride smoothly, keep the handlebars steady, pedal slow and thoroughly and will succeed.
Step three: Pat on the back. He’s done it.
The strongest feelings in this world are the ones that surprise you. This means that they can be any type of feeling: sad, lonely, happy, guilty, scared, proud, etc,. There is less of a feeling if you expect it, or in this case, if a kid expects to fall off the bike and hurt himself it won’t hurt nearly as bad if he didn’t expect it.
As we likely know, but often forget, once we fail, we are that much closer to success. We hold this expectation of falling off the bike again and hurting ourselves. But when we don’t fall, when the kid finally rides the bike without it resulting in tears, it’s the strongest feeling in the world; much stronger than getting it right the first time.
Success doesn’t move us, the feelings of it do.
Stay Positive & Feel More
Garth E. Beyer
You can tell a lot about a person by how they handle traded expectations. If told a movie is good, do they then watch it and search for the good parts, or do they try to contradict you by looking for the bad parts. Personally, I root for the people who find something interesting between. That’s just me.
Stay Positive & Trade Once, May Never Need To Trade Again
Garth E. Beyer
Your schedule, that is.
Monday: curiosity
Tuesday: open-mindedness
Wednesday: intellectual courage
Thursday: thoroughness
and to top the Friday off: Humility
Don’t worry, you won’t be graded. Although, I can’t stop you from grading yourself.
Stay Positive & “A” For Effort In My Mind
Garth E. Beyer
While in school you accomplish a lot, some of a lot of value, more so of little value, but you still complete a plethora of tasks. Traditionally speaking, the largest achievement is acquiring a degree.
I beg to differ.
The largest achievement is you starting your own business, releasing your first product, building a sales team, creating an online store, or transforming fans into a tribe that kickstarts your passion. All of which can easily be done by one method.
Find a way to get together with other students in a focus group. Schedule one meeting a week that is one to three hours long. Brainstorm. Simple as that.
You start to do that your freshman, sophomore, junior and possibly even senior year of college and you will, without a doubt, have achieved something far greater, overwhelmingly valuable, and more remarkable than a degree at the end of your time there.
There are other passionate people waiting to meet you. Call out to them, organize, and create.
A few weeks ago, with my upcoming (now partially released) eBook, Start Schooling Dreams, I presented a speech to my Toastmasters club on three chapters of SSD.
Responses: “Fantastic & engaging. Excellent job w/ including the entire audience.” I even curved some mindsets of people who regard themselves as true “schoolies.” Above all, every single person couldn’t help but note my passion for it. I truly am passionate about improving school/education/learning, whatever you want to title it. Without further ado, here is my speech. (I’ll start videotaping them from now on.)
*Welcoming Applaus*
Alright, I’m going to ask you just a couple questions and I reallllly want you to raise your hand to answer.
How many of you have a passion for something?
How many of you found this passion, whether it is just a hobby or an actual job, from school?
It’ll be easier for you all to see if I asked it this way, how many of you developed your passion outside of school?
Yes this speech is partially about where you find your passion, but more about where you don’t find it; school.
One more question, let’s imagine this room being occupied by a real teacher and packed with real students. And the teacher asks a question, how many of you are passionate about this class? *No hands go up… people laugh at the realization*
Education is racing … to the bottom. And I want to cover three points out of my 35,000 word manifesto I’ve written called Start Schooling Dreams. Since the Pygmalion affect, impatience, and accidents are three separate chapters in my book, I’m going to make it easy for you to catch my transitions.
Whenever I ask you a new question, I’m going to lead into the next topic and I’ll expect you to acknowledge by raising your hands or nodding your head. Does that sound fair enough? [Yes… that was a question]
Pygmalion Effect
I took a sociology class a couple of years ago and I loved it. Particularly, I loved asking questions in the class. Not just any questions, specific types of questions. Questions that couldn’t be answered, questions that made you think. But one day, I asked a question thinking I was being sly again, but I got an answer back. And that answer still scares me to this day.
We were learning about the Pygmalion effect, also known as the Rosenthal effect. It refers to the observable fact that the greater the expectation of a student, the better they perform.
I raised my hand during one sociology lesson and asked my question …
“Are teachers taught about the Pygmalion effect?”
I wasn’t the only one shocked at the answer, all the students and even the teacher were taken aback.
Am I wrong to think that a single teacher can’t have a powerful and positive expectation of only 30 students?
I have seen teachers tell other teachers how a student is a bad student, how they don’t listen, or that they aren’t very smart. I have also seen the teacher whom that was told to, change their behavior toward that student when she entered their class. As a result? The student became worse, listened less and became – dare I say it – even dumber.
All the while, the few “bright” students got brighter because the teachers challenged them and expected them to be “perfect” students.
Want to create passionate learners in school? Expect passionate learners.
Want to expect passionate learners? Hire teachers who understand the Pygmalion effect.
Impatience
Who here is impatient?
Wonderful, I admire that. Impatience is a valuable talent to have and it’s a hard talent to acquire when going to school because school initiates patience. You have to be patient and wait to get to the next lesson and you have to wait until the class you really love that starts at 2:00pm. Worst of all, you have to wait until the class you despise is over. Day after day.
The most successful people on the planet can’t handle being patient. Younger versions of the most successful people in the world will, instead of memorizing facts in the class, exchange it with practicing their passion, planning to ship their product their letter, their art, and so on.
Teachers are meant to spark impatience but so few do. Out of the 30 plus teachers I’ve had, only one has wanted all the students to learn, to dream, to find and go after their passion. Only one out of 14+ years of school.
The need of the student isn’t to learn information; it’s to be motivated to learn it and the best way to motivate that is to spark impatience.
Accidents And Questions
Which came first, the dumb caveman or the fire?
Either way, the discovery of fire was an accident but that accident made a dumb caveman look smart – of course, after it made him seem dumb for touching it and burning himself.
What matters is that breakthroughs used to happen very often. It has died down, not because of everything that can be discovered has, but because we reprimand those who make accidents or constantly ask questions. Without the curiosity and the mistakes of the caveman, we may never have evolved into who we are today.
The biggest successes in history were accidents or resulted from consistent questioning.
I found two great examples to share with you.
Will Keith Kellogg had accidentally left some boiled wheat sitting out and it went stale. Instead of throwing it away, Will and his brother Dr. John Harvey Kellogg put it through the rollers to make long sheets of dough. Once it went through, they realized the dough had turned into flakes which they decided to toast. Soon after, they chose to run the same experiment with corn and in 1906 the Kellogg’s company was created, along with the internationally known Corn Flakes.
Richard James, a naval engineer attempted to invent a spring that would stabilize the sensitivity of ships equipment. When a spring he had worked on fell off a shelf and continued moving away, the idea was sparked. With help from his wife, they decided to name the invention Slinky and have sold over 270 million globally.
Scientists, engineers, philosophers and alike, all became famous due to the questions they posed and accidents made. They would ask why until they either found an answer or created one.
Setting things on fire and seeing what happens is helpful too. If you think about it, you can’t be smart until you are dumb.
Now that we know what it means to be smart, what is success?
School is all about success but it’s taught us to love success instead of teaching us of what we are doing. School has said, “Here is success, follow this curriculum to get it.” When school really needs to be saying, “Where is success? How will you get there? How can I help?”
In school, the result holds significance. At the end of life though, is it the results we have attained that makes it a life worth lived, a significant life, one that was lived to the fullest?
Or at the end of life, is it the journey, the actions we took, the decisions we made, the experience we accumulated, the adventure we enjoyed and the understanding of it all that makes life, well, … Life.
The definition school has for “success” is all too wrong. And I knowing the Pygmalion effect, sparking impatience, and creating an environment open for accidents and failure are just three ways education can begin to change for the better. Let’s race to the top.
Stay Positive & If You Haven’t Already …Here Are The First 14 Chapters!
Garth E. Beyer
1. That, Which
Google is a search engine that newspapers cannot ignore.
Les Hinton is publisher of the Wall Street Journal, which operates a pay model on its site.
** Which is often used for extra clarification on something in a sentence.
2. While
While advertising executives desperately search for the best ways to target audiences through Facebook and Twitter, there’s another social media format that is proving to be a highly effective tool for reaching consumers. [Incorrect] (Text pulled from Website Magazine, March 9, 2010)
Advertising executives desperately search for the best ways to target audiences through Facebook and Twitter. Now, there’s another social media format that proves to be a highly effective tool for reaching consumers. [Correct]
** Using “while” at the beginning of a sentence will often create a run-on sentence with too many parts.
3. Over, More than
The builders put an awning over the roof.
Website Magazine has more than 140,000 readers nationwide.
** “Over” is spatial. “More than” relates to quantity.
4. Too many verbs
City officials will work with the DNR to try to obtain a state grant. [Incorrect]
City officials will work with the DNR to obtain a state grant. [Correct]
(Text pulled from Northside News, Feb/March 2010 issue)
** Too many verbs confuse the reader and add words that take up space.
5. Its, They
The Northside Planning Council will hold its next meeting on Feb. 24.
The boys are going to play basketball with their friends.
(Text pulled from Northside News, Feb/March 2010 issue)
** “Its” is used for things. “Their” is used for people.
6. Insure, Ensure
To ensure the event went well, we prepared for 150 people.
The company was insured against losses.
** “Ensure” guarantees events and conditions. “Insure” is used in reference to finances.
7. Effect, Affect
John’s new position affected the future of his students. The effect was long-term.
** “Effect” is often used as a noun (effective). “Affect” is often used as a verb (influence).
8. Then, Than
Lucy is better than Ethel because she’s funny.
If I go running this morning, then I can eat cake.
** “Than” is used to indicate difference. “Then” means next or consequently.
9. Can, Able to
By using a real-time Web search engine, you are able to see the day’s hot topics. [Incorrect] (Text pulled from Website Magazine, March 9, 2010)
By using a real time Web search engine, you can see the day’s hot topics. [Correct]
10. Media, Medium
Do the media need to pay attention to the Web?
The Wisconsin State Journal is one medium.
** “Media” is the plural form of medium. Many mediums are media.
Other words
Commonly misused punctuation
1. Spacing after period
One space after a period. Previous rule of two spaces was due to typewriters.
2. Ellipses
We will always remember John … oh the memories.
** Ellipses are sometimes used to show emphasis. If used, there should be one space between the word and the start of the ellipses, and another space after the ellipses.
3. Semicolon
It was hot and sunny outside; Johnny went to the pool.
** Use a semicolon when putting two clauses (thoughts) together in a sentence. Oftentimes you can replace the semicolon with a period.
4. Comma
Once the year comes to an end, most of us anticipate receiving tax refunds.
Johnny likes soccer, basketball, baseball and swimming.
** Use commas when there is a pause in the sentence. If you say the sentence aloud, and there is a natural break, add a comma where the break occurs. Also use commas when listing things.
5. Punctuation in quotes
The instructor is providing information on “commonly misused punctuation.”
The instructor is providing information on “commonly misused punctuation,” and giving examples.
Consumers in online forums post such targeted questions as, “What should I look for in a laptop?”
Does Dr. Williams always say to his students, “You must work harder”?
** This is the most often misused form of punctuation. Periods and commas ALWAYS go inside quotations. Other forms of punctuation are only used inside the quotations if it’s part of the text that is being quoted. If it is not, then it is used OUTSIDE the quotes. Also, only put quotations around text that is pulled directly from something. Don’t use quotations for emphasis.
Thanks to @MaureenAlley for creating this.
