Passion

The Not-So-Simple Simple Process Of Becoming An Expert

Garth Beyer

Step 0: Choose what you want to become an expert in.

Step 1: Learn about it to the point you don’t make mistakes.*
Step 2. Do things adequately.
STUCK
Step 3. Follow your intuition.

After step two is complete – you’re mediocre and work has become more a routine than anything – is when almost everyone gets stuck. They get comfortable with meeting standards and not pushing any buttons for improvement. But there is no art in doing something right. The art is in doing something better than it was done before. Art follows passion and passion follows intuition which hopefully you follow. That is how you become an expert.

* No. I hope it’s obvious that I don’t actually mean that you don’t make any mistakes at all. However, there is a point in every position of your career path where you make little to no mistakes. This point arrives when you learn nearly all you can.

 

Stay Positive & If You Stop Being Surprised At Work, You’re Stuck

Garth E. Beyer

Start Schooling Dreams (Speech)

Garth 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

Doing Selflessly Selfish Work

Garth Beyer

Isn’t it funny how the most selfless articles you read are actually selfish (not in the bad sense of course!)?

We write what we want to write, and that which benefits us most – at the same time, it benefits everyone else even more. The articles that really hit home are the ones where you know hit home for the author.

Let’s not feel guilty about following our passion, taking actions for ourselves, and doing what we really want to do. So long as it get’s shared with others.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like shrunken heads. However, if I met someone who was extremely, completely, passionate about making them, I’m much more inclined to change my view of them.

 

Stay Positive & “Why the long faces”

Garth E. Beyer

You Can’t Go Through Life Thinking

Garth Beyer

that the one occupation you want is the only one you can ever have.

Nearly every day I walk down E Gilman Street and am mesmerized by the view of the city between two apartment complexes. It’s something I know not a single architect, when designing any brick of Madison had thought of. Who would care that someone walking down a street could see a piece of the Capitol and nine other buildings, all beautiful architecture, between two apartment complexes? I’m fascinated by it. Every time I see it I think how I want to be an architect; that I can design – really, truly, passionately design. I catch myself thinking that if I were to restart my life, architecture and free style dancing would be my two passions I would build my life from.

Of course I mentally slap myself right after thinking that I can’t do those things during my life, this life. Despite my ambitions to become a well-known published author, Pulitzer prize recipient for my journalism, and world-renowned PR specialist and creator of the worlds best PR agency, there are still plenty of years in my life to study architecture and dance and to become really good at it.

We all get stuck with this preconception that the career we have is the one we have for life. There is no turning back, it’s too late to become great at anything else. We also think that to become great in one thing involves focusing on it, and only it, all our lives, and maybe, just maybe we will die a professional and be remembered for what we did.

Let me tell you how it is. If you want to be a professional, you must have experience, and experience comes from doing, not from reading a book. When you first start off down the road of your passion, you read books, then you take actions. Why do we not think that while we are taking actions, we cannot also be reading books on something else?

You can’t argue that it’s damn near impossible to study marketing, study skateboarding, study a second language, and study family sustainability and expect to be a professional in every area in a year. You can, however, study skateboarding then when you are finished researching and reading up on it, start doing it and gaining experience instead of studying about it. Then, you start to study a second language. Once you are done studying the second language, you keep skateboarding, you start using the second language (gaining experience) and then you begin studying your next interest.

We can do a lot in one day but we can’t study a lot in one day.

I’ll be a pretty good architect someday, a great freestyle dancer too.

What else will you be?

 

Stay Positive & Dream Big

Garth E. Beyer

A few days after writing this post I was walking home from the café and found someone standing off the sidewalk in the spot with the best view of Madison. She was taking a picture of this view, my favorite. I told her how remarkable it was that she was capturing the view and we both agreed it was a breathtaking sight and close to the best in all of Madison. I’ll have to snap a pic for you next time around.

What Improvisation Is And What It Can Do For You

What Improvisation Is And What It Can Do For You

Garth Beyer

“Improvisation is motion.” – Bobby McFerrin

Improvisation precedes the understanding of something. It’s connecting who you are with who you want to be. It’s the bridge that you get to dance across. Improvisation is calling fear to you and making it your friend. It’s how you surface courage.

I have to take after Bobby McFerrin’s example to show how powerful improvisation is. He tells his students to sing nonstop for ten minutes. They can sing whatever tune they want or make up their own, it doesn’t matter, but they must keep singing. All of his students want to stop within two minutes. They think of different reasons why they should: they start to think how dumb it is,  they think how stupid they must look and sound, they start to think they are singing terribly, they start to think that everyone around them thinks they are unworthy and making a fool of themselves.

Within just two minutes it feels the world is screaming at them to stop, but they don’t. They continue singing for ten minutes everyday for three weeks and by the end, the best way I can describe it, is that they find their voice.

This exercise can be done within any realm of passion: singing, writing, dancing, climbing, drawing, or even milking cows (purple cows).

For many, success is a huge sought after factor, day in and day out.

For a select few, harmony is more important.

Improvisation leads to harmony.

 

Stay Positive & It Just So Happens That Harmony Leads To Success

Garth E. Beyer

Doing What Matters And Doing What Doesn’t (so much)

Garth Beyer

The problem a lot of people run into when they are finally having a full-time schedule of productivity is that they are so busy doing things that really matter, that they feel unable to make time for the things that still matter, but matter less.

This is one of the biggest fallout’s for people who feel on a roll. Just because you reach a new level of success and productivity, doesn’t mean that you can say goodbye to previous engagements and expectations.

Take the hierarchy of needs for example … you can work your way up, but being on the third level doesn’t mean that you stop building the first and second.What does this mean to you?

It means that yes, you still have to do the grunt work. Every so often you have to pick up the broom and sweep yourself, you have to make those phone calls and send the emails just to keep up the contact with people who still matter, you have to provide input for others instead of receiving the input, you have to find yourself grunting now and then.

 

My suggestion: They say Sunday’s are for rest. I say that one day a week of grunt work is all that you will ever need to do. Get in the habit of it now so that it never stops you from reaching the heights you work so hard for.

 

Stay Positive & Steve Jobs Used To Grunt Everyday (no wonder he was so successful)

Garth E. Beyer

It also does well to note that the more you find yourself grunting (doing the grunt work), the greater understanding you have of how success and progression works. Obvious, but easily forgettable.

You Really Don’t Want To Do What You Love

Garth Beyer

I’m getting a couple of articles published on Under30CEO. Meanwhile I am beginning to write for the Clarion (school newspaper). Also, I attended the PRSSA kick off event tonight and will be going to the Madison chapter of Society of Professional Journalists next week. This is the life of a person going into PR. I want to schedule the meetings with those who lead these organizations and others, I want to be a critical part to the clubs and organizations progress, and I want to connect with everyone I can so that I can learn everything they know.

Secretly though, I don’t want to. I was nervous about submitting the articles to Under30CEO, it took me over a week to convince myself to email the chief-in-editor for the Clarion about a position, I thought I missed the PRSSA event and simply shrugged with a tad of self-dissapointment, and I’m still telling myself that I’m going to the SPJ meeting to connect with people; I don’t need to be connected with someone before I go. To be straightforward, part of me didn’t want to do any of the things that I love doing!

We all want to do what we love, our passion, what makes us most happy to be doing. Yet, even those things make us put on our brakes, question our reasoning, evaluate the risk, let nervousness prevent us from action, and remain passive while the lizard brain takes control. Doing what you love is hard work and though you may want to do it, you will always also not want to do it.

My motto is that you’ll never get anywhere if you don’t do at least one thing a day that you don’t want to do.

Remember, you may not love what you do – and that’s okay, it’s not the point – the point is to love having done what you did more than anything in the world. Eventually, you’ll grow to love doing the things you both do and don’t want to do. It’s about creating habit. Keep doing what you don’t want to do and you’ll end up loving every minute of it.

 

Stay Positive & Commit To Never Skip A Day

Garth E. Beyer

Personally, at the end of the day I will be happy no matter what as long as I did something I didn’t want to do because I know I’ll have made progress whether it appears right away or not.