School

Don’t Be The Best

Garth Beyer

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The problem with Ivy league schools or the problem with any Grade A school is the same problem as top, Grade A businesses. When you go into them, naturally you want to excel, to be the best, to have others in the school or business look up to you.

The problem with enrolling in an Ivy league school or any Grade A school is that once you’re in, it’s damn difficult to be the leader of the school, the smartest, the best or even part of the top ten percent of students. In an environment where genius is the norm, there’s seldom ways to get past that.

Do you see the complexity behind this? Let’s look at it from the business angle.

Perhaps someone knocks at your door right now and tells you that you are to start working with Apple’s design team tomorrow morning. You might be an extremely talented designer, but when you meet the team tomorrow, everyone will be extremely talented. You will all be gray. (Well, according to Ive, you will all be colorful. Alas, still the same.)

There’s a misperception between the school/business relationship I’m presenting.

Let me suggest you reject the Ivy league school and not work for Apple’s design team. Don’t be the best. Create the best.

Harvard doesn’t need you. Nor does Apple’s design team. But, Drexel University does. But, that Startup in town does. But, students at Purdue do. Microsoft does (ha).

It’s irrational and much less satisfying to be a big fish in a pond of equally big fish. What matters – and you might not realize this yet, but you will – is that to feel the happiness we all habitually seek in life we must make small fish into big fish, small ponds into big ponds.

Holding hands is great. I’ll kumbaya any night of the week. But extending my hand out to pull someone up – I’ll do that any hour of any day, all hours of every day.

There’s an ol’ saying: the only time you should look down at someone is if you’re reaching out to help them up.

Perhaps that was meant to be a motivator, a goal, a call to action.

 

Stay Positive & Are You There To Answer(?)

Photo credit and HT to Jesse Jackson for the saying

Making The Transition: The New World of Multitasking

Garth Beyer

Multitasker

One could suggest that after each blink, the student’s gaze is reset on something new: the lecturer, the slides projected on the wall, their cell phone, the person twirling their pencil one row up and one seat to the left of them, their homework for another class they have laid on their desk, a different tab on their laptop, or, finally, the note taking document they have opened on their computer. Multi-tasking is as much performing various actions as it is transitioning one’s focus from one task to another. Notice how I said transition, rather than refocusing – something to be elaborated on.

Understanding multitasking

Like many words in the English language, multitasking can have multiple definitions based on each person’s interpretation. Is multitasking the complete focus on two or more tasks? Is it a split but constant focus on two or more tasks? Or is it the complete focus on one task and quick transition to another task?

We can only direct our attention to one thing at a time. Although many things may be going on around us – intentionally placed there or not – we do not have the cognitive ability to focus on more than one task. According to Jon Hamilton with NPR, we’re all unitaskers.

If you are writing and listening to music, you may be filtering out the music while you write, but you’re not actually listening to the music and writing simultaneously. The institutionalized idea of multitasking – that you can focus on more than one thing at a time, efficiently – is a myth.

When doing two or more things at once, you can only ever be executing one thing at a time. (Executing being defined as “to perform or do.” Furthermore, to “perform” is to accomplish a task with a great deal of flair. A crappy written assignment because you were listening to music at the same time isn’t a performance. But singing all the lyrics – while you were writing – is.)

In the argument of whether multitasking entails transitions or the complete need to refocus to different tasks is a valid one. First, let’s look at the latter.

If you were to listen to an exciting story on NPR, but then the phone rings, you must refocus your attention solely because the interaction requires different cognitive processes to fulfill. Your brain must shift what sensors are being used and how it processes the data of a phone conversation.

It’s one thing to listen to a story, but another to handle a conversation. This entails re-focusing which requires a sufficient amount of cognitive energy, resulting in underperformance of the task being switched to. Much like there are transaction costs, there are also transition costs.

In essence, yes, in some cases, we must re-focus, but re-focusing is part of the transition and not a separate action.

The keyword here is “transitioning,” which implies a fluid motion, a smooth shift. Whether this can be trained and developed is another argument. For those who do it poorly, we justify it by saying that they had to re-focus, when really, they didn’t transition effectively.

What the world wants and what school teaches

Interestingly with the speed that technology is growing, so are our brains. What we thought we were capable of in the tech world in 2001, is child’s play when compared to what we can do today. The same goes with our brains, cognitively speaking.

Today’s conventional wisdom notes that multitasking is a valuable talent when competing in the fast lane job market, especially if a position involves digital/online interaction. (What position doesn’t anymore?) Our jobs rely on being plugged in, connected; switching ports every 35 seconds. Why do we teach the opposite?

Not only do we teach the opposite, instructors do their best to prevent self-education and preparation for the real world in their class by calling on their assistant to watch the class and report who is on Facebook during lecture. Some install electronic spyware on students’ computers to monitor their attention. This may actually prevent self-education.

If you agree that teachers can or should manipulate a student through mere observation – playing the “I’m the master, you’re the student role” – look at a study James Kraushaar and David Novak put together. They installed monitoring software on their students’ computers (with their acknowledgment and approval) and when looking at the reports, found that students engaged in multitasking even knowing their actions were being recorded. The same goes for students who are threatened with a lower grade if they are caught on their cell phones – they still do it!

Instead of placing security cameras and bars on students’ internet browsers, why not create a class that leverages students’ desire to multitask? Have students tweet the lecture, getting them involved. Or give students a chat room to enter during lecture that they can talk to each other about what the teacher is lecturing on. Reward the top tweeter. Forcing the way students learn is a cop-out, a detrimental one, at that. Changing the way teachers teach is hard work. Hard, but worth it.

Those reporting that multitasking is an “epidemic” and “dangerous” to students are the ones advocating for the resetting of how students learn. Well, the traditional ways students learn just don’t work anymore. Instead of forcing kids to learn, change how we teach. This isn’t a chicken and egg situation.

A look at what is being multitasked in school

When multitasking your brain shifts its processing from the hippocampus (responsible for memory) to the straitum (responsible for rote tasks), yes, making it more difficult to learn and recall what you have learned, but who needs to remember what we can Google?

The negative consequences to multitasking don’t always apply when you look at what is being multitasked in school. Take, for example, a student that is studying for a test while listening to music, texting, and watching a movie. This is a terrible way to study, that is, if the test were tomorrow. But, what if you took into consideration that the test was still two weeks away? While studying this way may not result in complete memorization, it will result in a sense of familiarity to the information and that is good enough at the time.

I know students. I have worked, surveyed, and interacted with all ages of students to discover one vital study habit that those despising the act of multitasking overlook. Going back to our example of the student and her test, what if the test was tomorrow? I guarantee that, while the television and music may be on, her phone is on silent and she is filtering out the distractions. I have discovered that students can assess the degree of focus that they need to have to complete an assignment at a level of their own acceptance (as opposed to the teacher).

Beyond multitasking, students are catching on to Pareto’s principle – that 80 percent of their best work is produced in 20 percent of the time available. The end all be all of those multitasking is that, well, they basically get the same grade at the end of the year whether they multitask or not. The real perk is the social capital that is acquired because they multitasked.

However, there are still those that will argue that. For instance, cognitive scientist David Meyer said, “What [students] get out of their study might be less deep. The belief [among teens] is that they’re getting good at this and that they’re much better than the older generation at it and that there’s no cost to their efficiency.”

Seven years ago, this was true. Teenagers had just begun multitasking without knowing how to control it, assess situations that require focus, or understand the consequences (transition costs) of multitasking.

Now if you were to ask students if they thought they could do the same quality work multitasking as they would not multitasking, very few would agree with it.

Mentioned earlier, with the sophisticated technology emerging, our own brains are growing, evolving, and developing at an extremely fast pace. Instead of pulling from research done more than two years ago, I suggest researchers resurvey and retest students multitasking abilities now. They will discover that multitasking is a controlled factor with the majority of students and their study habits.

Suggestions have been made that we train ourselves to not look at our phone every 20 seconds, to stay focused, and to take our time on critical thinking. In a world that makes you feel required to do more and more things in a shorter period of time, why would school want to teach the opposite? We should instead teach students to think critically for shorter periods of time and to adapt to the world we live in. If we’re going to spend our energy on anything, let it be on moving forward, not backward.

Information Revolution

1971 polymath economist Herbert A. Simon wrote maybe the most summarizing depiction of our digital neoteric conflict: “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

When multitasking (or being distracted), our brains process and store information differently than if we were to focus on the task at hand. This leads to memory interruption.

After sharing a piece of entertaining information with my coworkers, I tried remembering the article that I read it from. Alas, I could not recall what article it was. My inability to recall is not the fault of my memory, but of the input process leading to it becoming part of my memory. I was likely listening to music, reading two other articles, texting, and tweeting ideas while reading the article, resulting in a chopped up version of the memory.

There are two notes to make from this experience and the information revolution.

The first is obvious; I recalled the point of the article very clearly. That – not the source – is what is the truly important part, right? When writing, yes, sources are vital. But when people, especially students, are reading or sharing information, we can forget altogether that someone actually thought of the idea first. Whether that has positive or negative consequences is an argument made elsewhere.

Secondly, there’s a plethora of information that can be recalled in an instant when necessary. Why memorize the date of the civil war and its key players when you can Google it and have an even thorough (and certain) answer within seconds. If I wanted to, I could have Googled the idea I shared with my coworkers and found the article it was attached to. The unique attribute to searching information online is that you may end up finding more than one source stating the same thing, which, in essence, decreases the importance of the information and leans it toward the concept of “common knowledge.”

At the most basic level, we’re moving through a period of survival of the cognitive fittest. While some believe that our distraction is a “full-blown epidemic—a genitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought,” and if experts are correct in saying that the damage done will take hundreds of years to fix, why fix it? It seems quicker and easier to adjust the rest of the world to account for it.

Lastly, this article wouldn’t be complete without…

Noting that during this article, I replied to two texts, entered the Twitterverse, built a ramp for my coworker’s five year old’s leggo car, went on Facebook to ask my friend about her project on ADHD, changed my playlist on Spotify, listened to music, made an art piece of my name with stickynotes, checked the stats of the NHL playoffs, replied to a work email, brainstormed what to write about on my blog, and emailed a coworker about a Madison Police tweet that failed to acknowledge character limits. (“[…] man has been charged with the sexual ass”) Oh, and this was just in the first 30 minutes I spent writing this article.

This article is a product of multitasking. In a world of Nike inspired demands, is this article the most well written one you will read? You’re the judge. But it is finished, you did read it, and it’s out there for others to read and share. Maybe our attention deficit is changing the world, or maybe the world has changed so much that what it asks of us is to change with it. The paradox is, to do so; it will take a lot of focus.

 

Stay Positive & How Do You Multitask Better?

Garth E. Beyer

Photo credit

Bonus: Help is everywhere

“Mastering Attention to Transform Experience.” Worth watching.

Read what other students think in the comments section

As for the effect multitasking has on grades, you can find my answer to that in my manifesto on education: Start Schooling Dreams

The Question I Ask Every Student

Garth Beyer

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

Let’s Start Schooling Dreams

Garth 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

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

10 Lessons About PR You Won’t Learn In School

Garth Beyer

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)

My Ishmael

Garth Beyer

I know that a couple book regurgitations ago I said that I really disliked reading books a second or third time. Not so ironically, this regurgitation of the book My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is the result of a second reading. I knew it was an extremely powerful book and since I did not write a regurgitation last time, I wanted to write it before I gave it away for someone else to use as a tool to change the world.

The more books I read, especially ones by people like Daniel Quinn, the more I feel absolutely guilty of holding back the world when I put the book back on the shelf instead of giving it to someone else to read. Whether the person I give the book does the same or ends up sticking it on their shelf after reading it, at least I can say I gave a motivational tool to someone. I didn’t make it a keepsake. I helped the world become one person better than what it was by giving a good book to them. A good book can work wonders.

You will notice just how strong My Ishmael is as I write this regurgitation. Enjoy.

“Adults get real cranky if you quiz them about the scams they’re running on you.” (Pg 23) Real cranky, I might add.

 

If food became free, no more lock and no more key, what would become of thee.

You are food. You are who tradition feeds on endlessly.

But tradition holds the lock and you the key.- My own little jingle I came up with.

 

 

“Another rule of thumb you can use to identify the people of your culture is this: They perceive themselves to be members of a race that is fundamentally flawed and inherently doomed to suffering and misery. Because they’re fundamentally flawed, they expect wisdom to be a rare commodity, difficult to acquire. Because theyre inherently doomed, they’re not surprised to be living in the midst of poverty, injustice and crime, not surprised that their rulers are self-serving and corrupt, not surprised to be rendering the world uninhabitable for themselves. They may be indignant about these things, but they’re not surprised by them, because this is how they expect things to be.” (Pg 40)

I recently wrote a regurgitation on a book of history that persuaded me to comment about how history must to be taught in a way that teaches us “how” and “why”, not “what” happened. My Ishmael does part of it in the sense that he knows the future depends on understanding how we came to be the way we are.

I have always said that people want you to succeed, they really do. After reading My Ishmael, I realized why they do. People are meant to live successful lives. If we can just get enough people to ask themselves (ask yourself now), “Am I successful?” If the answer is no, then the way you’re living isn’t right and that effects everyone. You can’t not share success, so you must define what successful is and then try to live it that way for all of humanity to become wealthy. -And not the type of wealth that involves money, I’m speaking about the intangible kind of wealth-

 

Quinn notes how we perceive ourselves as being deprived of essential knowledge so special we can only access it through supernatural means. When really, essential knowledge comes from understanding and you don’t need superpowers to understand anything, just some time and a desire to actually understand it.Until that desire is declared, we will continue thinking of ourselves as wisdomonically impoverished. (Yes I made that word up)

Wisdom plays a huge role in Quinn’s reality that no invention ever comes into being fully developed in a single step from nothing. Wisdom is having an understanding of everything that has lead you to your current thought. It may take a billion ideas and theories before you become wise on a single subject just as it may take a billion projects and prototypes before an invention is fully developed. Most importantly, give it another year and the wise will become wiser and the inventor more inventive.

 

“Whatever grows without limit must inevitably end by overwhelming the universe” (Pg 62)

Quinn was sure to note that nothing comes into existence from failing and I had to add, ‘but anything can fail and become nonexistent.’

On the note of failure I must proclaim that anything that makes failure hurt will help you succeed.

“We know how to cope with everything that has already happened but we dont know how to cope with what has never happened before” – Daniel Quinn

Humans are passionate but inconsistent. [I’d like to quote myself on this…]

“I sense that more and more of you are becoming alarmed about your headlong plunge toward catastrophe. I sense that more and more of you are casting about for new ideas” (pg 127)

Quinn on school: “Do you know why students ask so many questions about their (the teachers) hobbies?” Because the teacher expresses real passion about it and even if the students don’t have any interest in their hobby, they are sung into listening from the teachers passion in telling.

School produces no value or skills because if they did, you would enter the job market competing with siblings for the same jobs that they worked to get by doing the menial jobs, the grunt work. That may be unfair to you, but I feel that the fact that it comes down to this is unfair.

“Imagine what a twelve-year-old with a musical bent could learn at a recording studio. Imagine what  twelve-year-old with an interest in animals could learn at a zoo. Imagine what a twelve-year-old with an interest in painting could learn in an artist’s studio. Imagine what a twelve-year-old with an interest in performing could learn in a circus.” (Pg 164)

I have to agree with Quinn that if people were free to follow their passions, there would not be a single occupation that someone wouldn’t pursue.

Note: One of Quinn’s golden nuggets is definitely his explanation of the ‘make products to get products’, ‘give support to get support’ charts. Highly worth reading just for that.

“A problem shared wildly is no problem at all” (Pg 183)

Quinn’s 7 point plan — One: the revolution won’t take place all at once. Two: it will be achieved incrementally, by people working off each other’s ideas. Three: it will be led by no one. Four: it will not be the initiative of any political, governmental, or religious body. Five: it has no target end point. Six: it will proceed according to no plan. Seven: it will reward those who further the revolution with the coin of the revolution.

 

A positive revolution can only occur when you give something better than what a person already has. By giving something better, they lose interest in what they we’re just doing. I suppose that is a background theme to why I write; I just want you to know of all the possibilities and options that are open to you in hopes that you will let go of the destructive habits well all indulge ourselves in. I give you my total support. No reservations.

Humans are taught to expect little from life. Can we change that?

 

Stay Positive & An Experienced Intriguer And Confidence Trickster

Garth E. Beyer