Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
There are two types of majority students. There are the ones that have no clue what they want to do and ones that do, but don’t do it. Whether the reasons are family based, fear based, or fund based, I use one question to truly get students to think about what they authentically want to do or what they could be doing with their passion.
If school was taken from you, what would you do?
Stay Positive & Ask It. You Will Be Amazed
Garth E. Beyer
There was a time that I was information-crunching. I was spending every moment of the day taking in information, knowledge, lessons, and Ted talks. I was underlining, highlighting, and dog-earing pages. I was recording, bookmarking, and clipping. This went on for about a week and a half. Constant intake.
Then I felt I reached my limit and it was time for output. However, by then half of what I read, I forgot. All the soundbites I collected, well, it was hard to build on a perfect statement. Some of the passages I highlighted, I had no clue why I highlighted them. And of course, the scribbles in the spines, I couldn’t even read them.
There was once a time that you took in all you could, perhaps before you started writing a paper for one of your classes. Once you read up on everything, only then did you have the OK to go.
No more.
Intake and output is a daily balance, no longer is it weekly, monthly, or yearly. Becoming successful in any part of your industry is about balancing the amount of intake and output each day.
Stay Positive & It’s A Daily Thing (Learn → Apply)
Garth E. Beyer
Even though I’ve worked on writing this for nearly a year, and worked on researching this for 16 years, this may not work.
Just over a year ago Seth Godin asked everyone, “What do you think we ought to do about education?”
Well, here is my answer: Start Schooling Dreams (click the link to download)
Start Schooling Dreams is my 35,000 word manifesto answering the question. It’s completely free and I will be working on creating different formats of it to suit your liking – I simply couldn’t wait any longer to give it to you.
I want to make one thing clear before you open up and start reading. The goal here is to start asking questions and you’ll hopefully realize this very quickly as you read. This also means that I want you to ask me questions. Let’s get a discussion going, let’s connect, let’s change what school is for.
Feel free to print this out, email it to friends, family, teachers, random school administrators.
After you start reading, I encourage you to come back to this page and leave a comment giving a shout out to “that one teacher.”
Lastly, thank you for giving this a shot, for facing the obvious, for making time to act. I truly appreciate all you’ve already done, all you’re doing, and all you’ll be wanting to do. What do you say? Let’s Start Schooling Dreams.
Stay Positive & Yea, Things Are Going To Change
Garth E. Beyer
We constantly view the food chain from left to right or bottom to top, with each animal to the right, triumphing or feasting on the animal to the left in order to survive and grow.
The same goes for the professional food chain, which we try to soften by calling it a hierarchy to establish a sense of “order” rather than “dominance.”
There’s a plot twist to this view of positional establishment – rather a perfect 180 degree twist.
In the professional world, it’s not about feasting on the work of those lower than you. (Although some people decide to take this dark side to development, alas, it pays to recognize that whatever success they acquire is short-lived) In the professional world, it’s about feasting on the work, the success, the ways of growth from those above or to the right of you.
Climbing on the shoulders of giants isn’t a “bad thing” when the giants help you on to their shoulders. It’s what I call the progressional hierarchy of the truly professional world. It is a food chain, if you want to call it that as well, which brings us to greater heights in our lives, in other’s lives, and in the world.
In the wild, growth is developed through the consumption of all that is lower, slower, less necessary, and less important.
In the real world, growth is developed through gathering all the knowledge and experience of those who are above us, bigger than us, better than us, more educated than us, and – dare I say it – more passionate than us.
Stay Positive & They Are More Passionate … For Now At Least
Garth E. Beyer
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
Yes, it’s finally finished, but I can’t give it all away at once.
In light of three events,
1. Today is my birthday and I want to give you all a gift.
2. This is my 300th post, which means that this is important (to me and you).
3. I never pass up a chance to express the impact Seth Godin has made on me. He persuaded me to write and share my thoughts on education.
Below you can click to download the PDF version of the first 14 chapters of my upcoming eBook Start Schooling Dreams.
Start Schooling Dreams Ch. 1-14
Stay Positive & Next Week I Will Release Another Batch Of Chapters
Garth E. Beyer
If you would like to get the second batch of chapters early, email thegarthbox@gmail.com
Last night I was honored to listen to John Mose, Senior Vice-President of Public Relations at Cramer-Krasselt in Milwaukee, give a presentation to PRSSA Madison Chapter. The next few posts will be highlights of the presentation with my own commentary for an added texture.
1. Writing is important. Really.
You can land a position by presenting writing examples. You can get promoted by writing up proposals. You can get honored by writing the best press releases. You can be respected for writing media pitches. You can have the advantage of knowing what writers want to write about by being one yourself. Writing is everything.
2. Clients care about details.
You can skip the details when you are writing a plan out because you know them. You can skip the details when you pitch to your boss because your boss knows that you know them. You can’t skip the details when you pitch to your client because regardless of any title or background you have, your client won’t care. They want the details.
3. Understand and consume media. Read!
If you’re like me, reading all the articles in a newspaper is hard. The idea of opening a magazine to have my eyes blasted with absurd and uninformative ads repulses me. One word: literature. Other than that, I love reading articles online, but my eyes can only stand looking at the screen for so long. I’ve written about adaptation and this is when you have to get used to consuming all that you can. I’m making progress, you can too/need to.
4. At an agency, you are the product on shelf.
“Companies don’t cut the product that makes money.” – John Mose
5. PR can’t solve everything.
I’m leaving this up for debate. I have yet to meet a PR Professional other than John to say this. PR Specialists – being one myself – live by the adage If there is a will, there is a way.
6. Better to be fast than perfect.
My spin off of this that I have tweeted a few times, and rarely do I ever tweet something twice, is Be first, but be right first.
7. Be ready to sell some aluminum siding.
Similar to the next lesson; you never know what you may have to sell.
8. Know difference between a good-looking horse trough and an ugly one. You have to go out and be, do, or buy some crazy things.
You never know what you may have to do.
9. It’s okay to have non-traditional experience if you can make it interesting.
Took a year off? No problem, make the reason why fascinate me. Spent that last six years working a job that has no respective value? No problem, find and share what value it did hold. Every topic that you believe will work against you on your pursuit of becoming a PR Specialist, find how to make it interesting.
10. Study something else.
It’s time to confess something to you.
Everything you have read so far on this blog has come from experience, self-learning, or books and classes that are not directed at PR. I have to say that any and all future posts will be of the same context.
John advocates that you study something else, something you are passionate about, because the real world is the education center for PR. I couldn’t agree more.
(HT to John Mose)
