Good Life Project - Sir Ken Robinson | How Are You Intelligent? [Tribute]

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

In February 2006, Sir Ken Robinson (http://sirkenrobinson.com/) stepped onto the TED stage and delivered the most viewed talk in the history of TED, entitled Do Schools Kill Creativity. Viewed by than 66 million people, Sir Ken called on us to re-examine how we learn, and to encourage every kid, every person to seek out the myriad unique ways intelligence shows up in every one of our lives, then honor and build around it. To reimagine and even revolutionize the way we see each person’s gift, their brilliance, and create opportunities that nurture it, even if that means blowing up the rigid systems that serve some, but also utterly demoralize and sometimes even demonize others. He reminds us to ask not "how intelligent are you?" but rather, "how are you intelligent?"He devoted his adult life to creating and stoking the fires of a global creativity and education revolution. I had the amazing gift of sitting down with him in the studio a number of years back to not only explore his ideas, but also his personal story. Growing up in post World War II Liverpool, a fiercely-active kid who loved soccer and hope to one day play professionally (though, of course, he called it football), his dreams were cut short when he got polio at the age of four, forever changing the course of his life, leaving him with physical disabilities, and exposing him to the profound injustice that awaits so many kids labeled as “different.” His experience as a kid, in no small part, became the source fuel for his unrelenting devotion to recognizing, celebrating and supporting how each child, each person needs to come into themselves in their own unique way. I was profoundly moved not only by his work, but by his lens on life, family, creativity and service, and the story he told in the way he lived his life.You may notice I’ve been speaking about him in the past tense. Sir Ken Robinson passed away on Friday, August 21st at the age of 70 after a short battle with cancer. So, we wanted to share this “Best Of” conversation from our 2015 archives in honor of his life and his extraordinary will to make a difference, both a tribute and a provocation to explore how we all show up in the world, and commit to making meaning.You can find more about Sir Ken Robinson at:Website : http://sirkenrobinson.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/sirkenrobinson/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So in February 2016, Sir Ken Robinson stepped onto the TED stage and delivered the most viewed talk in the history of TED entitled, Do Schools Kill Creativity? Viewed by more than 66 million people, Sir Ken called on us to re-examine how we learn and to encourage every kid, every person to seek out the myriad unique ways that intelligence shows up in every one of our lives and then honor and build around it, to reimagine and even revolutionize the way we see each person's gift, their brilliance, and to create opportunities that nurture it, even if that means blowing up the rigid systems that serve some, but also utterly demoralize and sometimes even demonize others. He devoted his entire adult life to creating and stoking the fires of a global

creativity and education revolution. I had the amazing gift of sitting down with him in the studio a number of years back to not only explore his ideas, but also his deeply moving personal story. Growing up in post-World War II Liverpool, a fiercely active kid who loved soccer or what he would call football and hoped to even one day play professionally, his dreams were cut short when he got polio at the age of only four, forever changing the course of his life, as he described only months before the polio vaccine would come out, leaving him with physical disabilities and exposing him to the profound injustice that awaits so many kids labeled as different. His experience as a kid really in no

small part became the source fuel for his unrelenting devotion to recognizing and celebrating and supporting how each child, each person needs to come into themselves in their own unique way. I was profoundly moved not only by his work, but by his lens on life and family and creativity and service and the story that he told in the way he lived his life. You may notice that I have been speaking about him in the past tense. That is because the world lost Sir Ken Robinson to cancer just a few days ago. And it felt like a good time to reach back into our archives to share this deeply moving conversation with you as both a tribute and a provocation to explore how we all show up in the world and how we commit to doing work and making meaning. Really excited to share

this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power.

Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him!

Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. You grew up, from my understanding, in 1950s, 60s Liverpool, so kind of post-war, which was also a pretty interesting time in Liverpool. Yeah, I was born in 1950 in Liverpool. And it was a city that had been devastated in the Second World War. I mean, in the middle of the 19th century, Liverpool was probably the most important port in the world. Something like 60% of world trade went through the port of Liverpool.

It was the height of empire. I didn't realize it was that much. Wow. It was the height of the British Empire. It was the main point of entry for all the goods that were coming from the southern states to feed the mills of Lancashire. It was the height of the Industrial Revolution. So it was a huge import-export trade. It was the point of departure to the United States and also to far-flung parts of the empire.

If you had been around Liverpool in the mid to late 19th century, you'd have found this bustling port, huge wealth, great open parklands, magnificent houses, and a metropolis, a great cosmopolitan centre. When I was born in 1950, it was none of that. The docks were pretty much faltering. The passenger ships weren't going from there anymore. There was international travel.

And the empire had collapsed. And we'd been battered by the Luftwaffe. So we grew up literally playing in bomb craters and in the austerity of post-war Britain where food was rationed and we had high levels of unemployment, poverty. I'm one of seven kids and my dad had been unemployed for a long time because of the situation generally in Liverpool. I was talking recently to my own kids about their life, that as children you've no real grasp of what's

going through your parents minds hmm we had a great childhood so far as we were concerned you know we grew up playing in the streets of Liverpool we didn't ever feel poor we had every day okay we had a great family my dad was one of five kids so we had lots of family on his side, cousins and uncles. My mum was one of seven, in her case six girls and a boy. So you had a giant family. Giant family, yeah. When we gathered together, there seemed to be hundreds of us stretching in all directions. And Liverpool's a very funny place. I mean, I largely remember growing up and my laughter in good times. But of course, we knew later on that my parents were coping with all the problems you have coming with unemployment and a bad economy.

But they didn't let us know about it. Did you ever go back and speak to them about what it was like for them at that time? I'm curious. Yeah. Well, the thing is that, as I say, I was born in 1950, and a couple of things happened that were big turning points. One was that in 1954, I got polio, which was endemic at the time. You know, there was a massive international crisis around the spread of polio virus. So I got it around the time that Salk came up with the vaccine, but not quite in time. And until then, my father was convinced I was going to be the soccer player in the family. We grew up right next door to Everton's football

ground, which is one of the main teams in the country still is and so he was convinced I was that gonna be the soccer player so I was it I was strong and fast and Anita told me later on I had you know a great sense of ball control and he thought this is the one in fact my youngest brother Neil eventually went on to be the professional soccer player yeah I played for Everton but in fact he and my brother John were both taken on by the team neil persisted with it john liked the life of it less so yeah so i got polo and that was you know devastating for the family i mean as a kid you're not aware of how devastating it is but i mean i can imagine now i spoke to them about it later on you can imagine your own four-year-old kid completely paralyzed and stretched out

in a bed surrounded by sandbags and you go overnight from being perfectly fit to being completely wiped down and some kids didn't make it at all so I was in hospital for eight months and I came out on two braces and in a wheelchair and crutches and I was tremendously cute I have to say people offered me money spontaneously in the street. So that was a big thing, obviously, for the whole family. I was the only one in the whole family to get it. So that was bad for them. I remember one year, actually, a friend of my dad's,

a guy called Stan Rankin, saved the day. It was Dickensian, this particular thing, that Stan had done very well. He had his own haulage business. And my dad had been a professional soccer player himself. He'd run pubs and had been very successful. But then the war intervened and he was being offered to be the manager of this very successful pub but he was then passed over by the Brewers in favour of a well-known soccer player who was looking to manage a pub. So my dad ended up working as a docker, longshoreman, but there was a whole period

of unemployment there and Christmas was looming. And literally on Christmas Eve, this guy, Stan Rankin, showed up at the house with a big hamper full of food. With a turkey and presents for us. There hadn't been anything. They were just wondering how they were going to get through Christmas Day and he showed up with it all. So it really was like a Father Christmas thing. So I don't exaggerate it. It wasn't that we lived in abject poverty, but it was difficult for them.

You know, we weren't as aware of it, but it was hard for them. And then in 1959, my dad was back at work and he had an industrial accident. He was working as a steel erector and he broke his neck. So he was completely paralysed.ctor and he broke his neck so he was completely paralyzed well he's a quadriplegic he was paralyzed from the neck down went out to work one morning this wooden beam they're working on

fell 30 feet the rope snapped and it broke his neck oh my god so he is the age of 45 so with seven kids and just back in work him and my mum suddenly found themselves completely devastated and it it wasn't expected he would survive the night he did and he went on to live for another 18 years but as a quadriplegic right so I mean even so I'm saying my recollection of it all was that we had great times as a family. But I'm older now than my dad was when he died. He died at 63. And with having kids you become, of course, much more attuned to what they must have been going through. Because even at whatever age you are really, until you have kids your parents are just your

parents they're a facility you don't really think of them having actual feelings and issues that dealing with which i think it's approaching your own complications right i think it's almost like until you actually you know if and when you become a parent yourself and you start to understand sort of like that this shift that happens then all of a sudden i think there's this something opens there's a channel that opens where there's a level of understanding and reconnection. I think it's no question of it I mean, you know even when my dad was lying in bed paralyzed We would start with him

Because it didn't affect his mind in a Structural way. I mean he was we just argue with him because I was a teenager, you know Yeah, and I was a student and what did he know? Right. And the same arguments any teenager would have with the parent.

Absolutely. And we all did. We just took him on. Fortunately, he was very funny, very smart, witty, and remarkably strong-minded.

And it's what got him. Quadriplegics, for all sorts of obvious reasons, don't have a long life expectancy. It's normally nine years or so, people, I'm told. It obviously varies in individual cases, but one of the reasons is that you need to move to keep your body fit. And if you're just constantly immobilized,

your body's working too hard. So people tend, they're prone to things like bladder infections and heart problems just through immobility. And he lived for 18 years, which is a long time, partly because he was so determined to. He was there for us all. So we never gave him any quarter. He'd be in his wheelchair or in bed, and we'd just take him on.

I don't mean it was a constant argument. He was just very funny. But if, as a teenager, I disagreed with him, we'd have the normal hammer and tongs argument that you'd have. And he died when I was 27. And I hadn't married at that point, hadn't had children, hadn't published any books. I was living in London doing a PhD,

living in a squat with old student friends of mine, you know, with long hair. I was not Jonathan Lee Swarovski, you see, before you know it. I was living this bohemian life in the early 70s in London. A life he couldn't understand at all. I used to bring people home to the house.

It was like Haight-Ashbury had visited Liverpool. He couldn't make any sense of this at all. Of course, now I'd love to just have an eye with him. Yeah. Because I understand that look in his eyes now that I didn't at the time. You know, that kind of weathered look that you get

when you've lived that much longer, you know, and you've done the things that he did and had to cope with the things he did cope with and the pressures that were naturally on him and the decisions he had to take you know you know as you become a parent you see it yeah you know everything changes um i mean it's interesting you know obviously you're a parent and with what you've ended up devoting much of your life to um education and creativity and just schools you know coming up in the family the way you did in the family dynamic at what point do you start to develop an interest because if you're 27 you're doing your

PhD um along the way were you have you always been immediately drawn to in some way education in some way the exploration of how people learn in schools or it was just sort of an evolution over time no the answer is no i wasn't and my parents had a huge role in it the reason is that having got polio i was certainly in terms of my life it's hard to overestimate the implication of that. Well, firstly, I didn't go on to become a professional soccer player. I've often said that, you know, that, but for that, I don't know, I may now be running a sports bar in Brooklyn somewhere, showing people my medals, hopefully.

The reason I say that is that what made the difference in my life was education. And the reason that happened was that, firstly, after I'd recovered from the initial impact of the illness, I was then paralyzed myself. My right leg didn't work, still doesn't. Left leg's all right. I used to, we still coyly refer to it as my good leg. You know, it's all relative, isn't it? It's pretty good. But I went into special ed. And I was in a special school.

I mean, they were less good at euphemisms then. It was called the, it was called, just called a school for the physically handicapped. They hadn't wrapped it up in anything at that time. So I was there for five, six years and at the time in the UK, state education, what we call public education in America, was at the high school level was bifurcated. You went to either a grammar school or a secondary modern school. The grammar schools offered an academic curriculum.

The secondary modern schools offered a more practically based curriculum. And which school you went to was decided at the age of 11 by a short paper and pencil test that you took called the 11 plus. And it was meant to offer an equitable route to people according to their abilities and dispositions. I mean, the theory was that if you were more suited to academic work, you'd go to the grammar school. If you were more suited to blue collar work and technical work, you would go to the secondary modern. And that was the rhetoric. And it was all very well intentioned, but it was all nonsense really because the fact is the 11 plus was an IQ test of a certain sort. And if you passed it, you went to the grammar school.

If you failed it, you went to the grammar school if you failed it you went to the secondary modern it wasn't that you were required to do all kinds of technical things like you know wiring a house or sorting a car out and if you passed it you went to the secondary everyone knew if you went to the secondary modern it was because they'd failed the test so in special education there was no expectation that you would pass this thing but a couple of people came into my world and one of them was a man called Charles Strafford who was it turns out was an inspector for special education who visited the school one

day and saw something in me he was talking to me and recommended that I was moved up several classes and I was and and then I came under the influence of this woman a fantastic teacher called Miss York, who coached me for the 11+. So I took the 11+, and I was the first, I think I'm right in saying this, I was the first kid in that school ever to pass the 11+. So I then went into mainstream state education, into the grammar school. So I was on a different track at this point. Right. And it's amazing when you think about these

points of inflection, you know, where at four had you not gotten polo you could have been a professional athlete, you know, at this one window in time had, you know, one person not showed up, expressed an interest and seen something in you and then the second person not showed up and then said let's prepare you for this test yeah you know it's it's but literally so I mean I published a book a few years ago called the element finding your passion changes everything and I have a whole thing in there about mentors and coaches and it's true people sometimes come into your life without whom your life we've got a completely different

track and it's often because they see something in you that you don't see in yourself or they're in a position to make an introduction or to push you in a particular way and anyway that happened with me and i was put on this track i mean you have to remember what i'm saying to me it's worth remembering but at the time you my family, for no reason that they were responsible for, we were living a pretty low income life. And I qualified for welfare support. Nobody else in the family did. But because I'd had the polio, we got some extra support for me. And I mean, for example, we were able to get an inside bathroom fitted in the house.

Previously, it had been at the end of the yard. So we weren't looking for help from the welfare system, but we qualified for a small amount of it. And then my dad had his accident. But the brilliant thing about all this for me was that my dad and mum both recognised, and he used to really drill it into me, that my future depended upon me getting a good education.

When I passed the 11 plus, I went to the grammar school. I mean, this was Liverpool, you know, in 1961. The Beatles were playing at the Cavern. The Mersey Beat was just getting off the ground. And we were a couple years away from the British invasion of America. Liverpool was a very interesting place to be at that point. And one of my brothers was in a rock band, and they were rehearsing in the next room. And I was having to do my homework and I'm part of a big family and there's constant gales of laughter coming out of the sitting room.

My dad got a very small amount of compensation comparatively and it allowed us to leave this rented house in Liverpool and buy a house on one floor out in the countryside. And we thought we'd gone to the Ponderosa. Do you remember that? Remember that television series, Bonanza? We used to call it the Ponderosa. It's about an acre and a quarter of land.

And it was a visible amount of money at the time, but it would be very expensive now. But we suddenly got transplanted from central Liverpool into the countryside. And we had a bit more room. It's only because of the small amount of compensation he got was a lump sum we would never have got before but anyway my parents and particularly my dad kept drilling me on the need for me to focus on my studies and i didn't want to i'm not

i wasn't a natural scholar i mean i could do it but i'm just more more gregarious than that you know so i'm having all this all having all these good times in the front room and I'm in my bedroom doing my Latin homework. Right. And we'd clash about it. You wanted to be in the front room. Yeah, and we'd clash about it time and again. I'd come in and they said, have you done your homework?

I said, oh, come on. He said, it matters for you. You've got to do it. He said, what are you going to do? If you don't get an education, how are you going to make a living? What are you going to do? He said, do you know what kind of work disabled people get, which was true at the time.

It was absolutely correct advice. He said, you know, you will never make a living. So what are you going to do? So we used to have these, not all the time, you know, but it was a theme. He kept me at it and kept pushing me, and I'm tremendously grateful that he did. But, you know, I eventually did get through it all, He kept me at it and kept pushing me and I'm tremendously grateful that he did but

you know, I eventually did get through it all and then I went to Play the fantastic place called Breton Hall College Where I trained as a teacher and took a degree in education and got formally interested in the philosophy and theory and practice of education And I can look back and rationalize it now and say it's because, because. But it wasn't that really. For me, it was that I was just always interested in the next thing that was in front of me. And it's part of what I argue in The Element is that you create your life as you go along.

You don't plan. I mean, you can have plans, obviously. But you rationalise it backwards and say well It's because of that because of that but actually The whole process is one of improvisation according to what's in front of you and the opportunities you create and the ones you take The ones you move away from and it was over time I realized that and there were influences. Yeah, that my I knew that all my family could have passed 11 plus They didn't I knew that they're all bored with and dissatisfied with their education. They were. Even my education, I say even mine because it was supposed to be a great school,

I could see all kinds of limitations in it. And I was driven always by this sense that people have tremendous talents and they often don't discover them and that you do create your own life. So, yeah. So, I mean, if I look back, there is antecedents to it, but it would be an exaggeration to say that it was at the time it was because of that. It was more that I met interesting people along the way whose ideas fired me up, and I thought, well, that's interesting.

I'll look for that a bit. I wanted to do a PhD when I was at college, and I did. And I lighted on some interests that I thought I could focus it on. So looking back, I can explain it all. But looking forward, it's not like that at all, is it? Yeah. And it is so interesting that so many people try and plan out and map out, you know, the next, the next, the next, the next. And I've had so many conversations with so many people who I would say are the world considers from the outside looking in highly successful and are also deeply satisfied.

And very few of them have said this is what I thought it would look like if you had asked me 20-30 years ago. They say and very often it's completely different, you know, not even in any way shape or form on their radar. And there is so much preparation for and planning for, and this must be next, and this must be next. But I get concerned sometimes that that closes the door to serendipity, which very often holds the greatest possibility. I think it's exactly right.

It's a big lesson for parents, this, particularly in our current systems education that kids are being pushed down particular tracks in the expectation that this is the only road to success and fulfillment and the fact is everybody's life is different and you'd obviously we all do what we can and hope that we're doing the right thing for our kids. But often we do the wrong things. We assume that too often, I think in America, we assume that if you don't go to college and do an academic degree, your life is over.

And it's one thing that's led to a vast surplus of law graduates in this country. We have more lawyers in America, head of population. By the way, former lawyer. Well, that's it. I mean, it's very interesting, isn't it? When you went to college, you weren't anticipating this, were you? In no way, shape, or form.

What were you anticipating when you went to college? You know, I honestly didn't know. I was the lemonade stand kid. I was always an entrepreneur. I was a little bit of a hustler. So I spent much more time actually building my first real business in college than attending class. What was it? What was the business? It was actually sound and lighting and mobile disc jockey and clubs and events and stuff like that which was about the best job you could have in college and we sold the

company you know to a bunch of incoming freshmen when I graduated. So when I You can sell a company like that. Who knew? No idea. So when I went to law school, for me it was more, I knew that I just hadn't really participated in the academic side of my undergraduate work. And I was just really curious what I was capable of. And I kind of figured, no matter what I do with that, I'll end up, it'll equip me well to do something. And I did practice for about four or five years. But it became clear that it wasn't the path for me.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him. We need him! Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming,

or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. You know, it's interesting. We're having this conversation in New York City, and that tracking starts in preschool here. You know, I remember hearing the conversations when kids are three years old about what preschool, you know, parents are trying to interview their way into to set their kid up for Harvard. And that's just not my orientation.

I want a kid to be loving and happy and have a sense for what their element is. What's gonna light them up? And beyond that, I don't really care a whole lot. And so it's so fascinating to be in sort of the heartbeat of this place where this is almost the city where the fast tracking is fierce and hard and public. And just to not buy into it and to almost feel weird because you're a bit of an outlier if you don't. That's right. You're seen as eccentric. I remember writing about that when I first came to LA, where I live now.

There was a report that came out. I mentioned it in one of the TED Talks I gave. It was called College Begins in Kindergarten. I think, well, actually it doesn't. Kindergarten begins in kindergarten. But you know exactly what he's saying, that kids are being interviewed for kindergarten at the age of three. I mean, what exactly are they looking for?

Right. I couldn't fathom what they were actually trying to figure out. You can picture these selection boards sitting there thumbing through these resumes, these thin resumes, saying, well, this is it. You've been around for 36 months and this is it. This is all you've done. I mean, it's outrageous.

I mean, I'm a big advocate of kindergarten of preschool education but this whole premise that life is linear that you can plan it completely in advance and that you should and that there's a single route to to the top and it means going to the's a single route to the top. And it means going to the right school and then to the right college and then taking the right degree. I mean, you can see why some people would think that's true, but the evidence is everywhere that it hardly ever works out that way. That people bounce off in all kinds of interesting and curious ways.

For some people, it works out. You know, but it would be like, I'll picture this, you know, if schools were obsessed with sport, and schools should provide properly for sport, but, you know, if schools were just about sport, but more than that, schools were really just about baseball.

That's what really mattered. And the whole public education system is about finding good baseball players. And that's what the selection criteria are about. And that if you didn't get through into the National League, you're just a hopeless case. And if you're not good enough at baseball, there are remedial programs in basketball and football and swimming and golf. But these are really for the kids who don't make the cut. And, I mean, that would be absurd.

In the area of sport, we accept there are multiple talents, multiple pathways, multiple ways of gaining fulfillment and becoming a success. But we do that in education. We have a very narrow view of the mind, a very narrow view of intelligence. And the whole thing is driven by getting kids to the Ivy League. I mean, I'm from England. And there the obsession is with Oxford and Cambridge. That's the high watermark, the gold standard.

And we had a secretary for education, the last one, last but one, who made a whole speech about how the government has really got to focus more and more, because he thought this was being egalitarian, on getting more working class children to Oxford and Cambridge. And I thought, have you lost your mind? I mean, Oxford and Cambridge anyway admit a couple of thousand people every year. There are millions of kids. So what's going to... The whole idea is ridiculous. Think it through.

What are we going to make it so everyone goes to Oxford and Cambridge? And in the absence of doing that, how do you explain to all these people who don't get that? If that's the intention of the entire system? The fact is, the world depends upon all kinds of talents, all kinds of people living all sorts of different lives. It's what the element books are about. And I remember when I

did a sequel called Finding Your Element, I asked people if they, I do now actually in front of audiences, I ask people if they're doing now what they thought they'd be doing when they were 15, and hardly anybody is. Particularly people in their 30s, 40s, 50s. I tweeted about it and asked people if they could say what the course of their life had been and had they

planned that. And it was just wonderful the things they came back with. People say one guy said he'd taken a law degree, but now he's a professional magician and he dabbles in linguistics. This woman who said that she'd spent her first part of her life as a professional actor, and now she runs a Dutch cheese shop in the Scottish Highlands. That's fantastic. Does that count? Of course.

Right. Permission, please. That's how that works. And it isn't to say don't encourage people to go to college or don't make plans. But what people become, what they do as a lawyer, depends on the talents they discover within themselves and the opportunities they create. And it's a much richer conception of how education should work. Because a lot of people end up feeling demeaned by their education. I just feel they didn't make the cut.

Yeah, I completely agree. Or justaned by their education. I just feel they didn't make the cut. Yeah, I completely agree. Or just bored out of their minds and sort of forced to go because this is what people of our status or whatever, our community, do. I love your sort of exploration of the word intelligence and the sort of bifurcating or saying, we tend to define intelligence one way, but it's not about, you know,

like, are you intelligent? But, you know, what's your exact language? What is your intelligence? I remember saying, yes, that people often, because we're obsessed with things like IQ, people think you can give a number to your intelligence.

And so the question is, how intelligent are you? And my case is that intelligence is highly diverse. It takes all kinds of forms. So the better question is not, the question is not how intelligent are you, but how are you intelligent? What form does it take in your case?

Because I see it all the time. People who, one of my brothers I talked about in one of the books, who hated academic work at school. He had every reason to hate it. It was boring in his case with his school. It wasn't the thing that interested him. But from the age of eight or nine, you could put him in front of an engine, a motorcycle

or a car, and he could just fix it. It was like an engine whisperer. And in fact the teachers used to bring their mopeds and their motorbikes to the house for Derek to take a look at it when he was 11. He'd be spending all his time doing drawings, technical drawings of the inside of engines and he just got it, he just understood it. And now he's that way with mobile phones. He just knows that stuff. I could look at this thing all day long and it wouldn't make any sense to me. It's obvious, you know, I was in,

I think it was in Austria a couple of years ago, and I was talking to the, it's a regional politician. I was there to give a talk at a conference and he asked if we could meet and we met in this 16th, 17th century building, an old castle. And this was the local office of the government. And we're talking about this, about the diversity of intelligence. And he said to me, you know, but what evidence, you say this, but what is that that intelligence takes many forms i looked at him i thought you know we're in this building that had been standing up for several hundred years

built by masons and designed by them we were in an oak paneled room there we're sitting at a beautiful carved mahogany desk there was the latest MacBook thing on his desk we had Mozart being piped into the room there were beautiful paintings on the walls hand-woven carpets on the floor I said it's everywhere where do you think this stuff came from this there wasn't spirited in you know by some celestial being people made these things and they conceived of them and they wrote that music and the people playing that music and people created the pigments that were possible,

that were needed to create these paintings. And it's everywhere. If you look around outside the confines of traditional education or conventional education, we live in a world created and designed in part by people. We have extraordinary technologies and sciences and theories and languages. It's everywhere. It just happens for historical reasons and cultural reasons

that our education systems have focused on a narrow sliver of all of this stuff and decided that that's the ultimate measure of all forms of achievement. And it's plainly wrong. I always feel like, you know, the stuff I write and talk about, you know, I just think, well, I'm only saying what should be obvious to everybody. Yeah, so I guess the question is, why isn't it? Because of the way we're educated. Right, yeah. It's like a vicious cycle, right?

We're sort of taught to value a certain thing, that thin slice of what, like, this is what matters, this is what's intelligent, and then we propagate that in the choices that we make. Well, truth be told, Jonathan, I think there are a couple of... There are lots of things going on here, but one of them... You know, in a way, the answer is embedded in the problem that, you know, that human beings, if I can speculate like this, are clearly

different in some respects from the rest of life on Earth. In most respects, we're not, but clearly in some ways we are. We don't have other creatures building great cities like New York City. We don't have other creatures in some other parts of the city in their own recording studios doing this sort of thing. We don't have live podcasts by dogs. Although that could be coming soon. Coming soon to a city near you. The reason is that, as I see it, is that human beings have qualitatively different forms of intelligence from the rest of life on Earth.

That we have, among other things, powerful imaginations. We can anticipate the future. We can not only predict it, but we can anticipate it. We can dwell in the past. And we have all these practical powers that we think of as creativity, which is about putting your imagination to work. We live in a world of languages and ideas and theories and ideologies. We live in a world of cultural practices and artifacts and in other words we don't see the world directly very often we see it through habits of mind. We see it through the concepts at our disposal, the ideas that are available to us. But over

time what happens when we live with other people, we influence each other deeply. And we, I mean, the word we have for that is culture. We create a way of being together. We create cultures. And they consist in certain world views, things that we just simply take for granted. You know, if you've lived your life in New York City,

there are tons of phrase, habits of mind, sensibilities that you recognize wherever you meet in New York or anywhere in the world. You think you're from New York. I meet people from Liverpool all around the world and I can tell right away. It's partly how they speak. Of course, that's a big part of it. But there's also a look in the eye, you know,

there's a kind of irreverence about them. We just look for people who are always dressed in black. That's right. Exactly. You know, you're talking to a designer when they've shaved their head and they're wearing big glasses. That's right. Dressed in black. That's right.

Yeah. And it's tribal behavior. And then there are these sort of metacultural practices that things that affect entire countries and one of them is education our education systems are marinated in the ideas that that form them the ideas of intelligence that we gained from the Enlightenment ideas that have been shaped by the growth of intelligence testing, the scientific method, and the practices of organization that we got from the Industrial Revolution.

Schools are organized like factories still. I don't mean that in every respect they behave like factories, but things go on in schools that don't happen outside of them much by keeping everybody by age group and taking them through the day in groups of 30 and 40 and doing 40 minutes of French then 40 minutes of math we don't do that outside schools it's a it's a batch production method which gets in the way of learning very often but we've all been through it and so what I mean is there are powerful cultural ideas and one of them is that intelligence is really the capacity for a certain type of academic work that that's what smart means and and if you're not smart like that then you can you maybe do some practical job but they're really smart people the ones who work

with their heads and and you see probably to some degree, I can say it's more than probable. I know it to be the case that looking back, my feelings about that have been intensified by my own experience in special education. So I was surrounded by people who had all kinds of physical difficulties. People with cerebral palsy, people with heart conditions, people who are partially sighted or blind were in my class at school. Deaf, kids who couldn't hear properly. People with various effects of polio. I said in the element, I said in my classroom at elementary school, it was like the barroom scene from Star Wars., we just like a whole range of people in various states of decrepitude. But we were, nobody was interested in that.

We were interested in whether people were interested or not, you know, smart or not in particular ways. But the thing that struck me about it was that looking back on that is that in, generally speaking, we have this rather narrow view of intelligence, which we associate with certain kind of linguistic and mathematical capabilities. And if people have problems with that, they assume that you're not very smart. And so, for example, there was a kid in our class who had cerebral palsy. He couldn't write or hold a pencil. Because the thing with that form of spasticity is that your body's fighting itself all the time.

To make a movement, you have to relax one set of muscles automatically in turn as the other ones. Well, if your body's not doing that, you're constantly struggling. So just doing what we're doing now, to be able to speak, involves dozens of unconscious actions. Relaxing and flexing muscles and opening your throat and moving your tongue around. You can't do that consciously. You'd never get a word out if you thought about it. But if you're badly affected by cerebral palsy, as he was, you can't get your face to do that.

So it's hard to come out with articulate sentences. It's not he's not having articulate thoughts. He just couldn't get them out. And the consequence is that sometimes then people would listen to him and think that he was mentally impaired in some way because he wasn't articulate. Now we could understand him because we're used to it. And he could write actually quite well by gripping the pencil in his foot. I often wondered whether that was actually handwriting or not. It's an interesting theological point, isn't it? But he was actually rather good writing with his foot.

But there are other people who, and it's a classic thing, if people are hard of hearing, often people will get intolerant of them and start speaking to them as if they're just not very smart because they, in other words, the disability creates the problem. Right. And it creates a public assumption that because of this disability, something in the brain is not sort of. Yes. And the problem is not in the person who's coping with the problem.

It's in the attitudes that they create around them. And I think at the heart of that is that if you have, if we have a narrow cultural idea of ability, of intellectual ability, if you have a narrow view of that, you end up with a correspondingly large conception of disability. Because you see people can only, you think, well, if you can't do this, then you therefore must be less able in some respects. And so people get put into remedial programs.

And my understanding of it always was that I could see it, that people had immense natural talents of other sorts that just weren't being tapped in. They weren't seen to be relevant. They weren't being tapped into. So, you know, on the one hand, yes, I mean, what drives me on this? I mean, I still get irritated about it, more than irritated, really. I do think it's not an exaggeration to say it's a human rights issue, that education is meant to be the process by which we help people certainly understand the world around them, but also understand the world within them. And it's really only when we understand more about the world within us that we can engage

fully with the world around us. And if we don't enable people to dig deep into their own natural resources, if we end up giving the impression that there's nothing there to dig for or that what they've got isn't worth very much, it's demeaning and it's disempowering. And education is meant to be the opposite of all of those things. Meant to be. When in practice, it was never quite conceived that way. But in my view of it, it should be all of that. Yeah.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X,

available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. So let's go there then, kind of shift gears and talk about the state of education and also some of what you've been writing about and sharing with some of the ideas in your

new book. And I love some of the case studies as well, one in particular because it's a friend of mine. So Mind Drive, who you actually lead fairly early in the book with Steve's partner, Linda Buckner, is a friend of mine. And I remember, and for those who don't know, you can read about it in the book, but Mind Drive is this wonderful experiential education program

in Kansas City where they take these kids where the world basically says unteachable, unlearnable. The way that Linda once described it to me is there's a road that runs down the center of Kansas City that the locals know as Murder Road. And if you live on one side, you're very likely well-to-do, and you're fine. If you live on the other side, your chances of getting out of high school let alone you know surviving are not great

and they take a lot of those kids from that side and then where school just mainstream education has kind of said we're done we can't we can't do anything to help you and created this incredible environment where kids learn math and physics and communications and all this stuff under the context of working with their hands and building a really cool electric car. You know, so when you see things like that, you know, and then you see so many other kids. You know, it raises so many questions for me. One, you know, this notion of unteachable. I mean, what a big fiction. What a just mass. Is that an excuse because we just can't figure it out?

Is it just because the system is what it is and it's so heavy and so complex and so hard to change that people just don't want to have to deal with it? But when you see some of the examples that you share in the book, which I think was so inspiring to me to see, and you realize, immediately one of the big, big things that jumps out at me is that there's no such thing as unteachable. There's no point at which you say, OK, we give up. I agree entirely.

I mean, one of the reasons for writing this book was that, well, you know, first, a lot of people have seen the talks I did on TED. And so naturally, if people agreed with my diagnosis of some of the problems, they often say, well, so what's the answer to this? And I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about all that and not just thinking about it, but working practically. I've spent my life working with schools and school systems and school districts and governments on the transformation of education. And I remember saying in the book that a few years ago, I was speaking at a university in Illinois,

I think it was, and I was there to speak to all the students and over lunch one of the faculty said to me, you've been at this a long time, haven't you? I said, what's that? He said, you know, trying to change education. I said, I have, yeah. He said, what is it, seven years now? I said, how do you mean seven years? He said, you know, since that TED talk.

And I said, yes, but I was alive before that. You know, that was just a moment, really. And I know a lot of people might know me through TED, but I was at TED because all the work I'd done before I ever got to TED and since on education. And to me, it's axiomatic. And so people sometimes say, ask me about my theories. And I say, well, firstly, they're not mine. I stand in a long tradition of people have been arguing for a different way of thinking about education but secondly they're not theories it's what works and so this new book Creative Schools I felt I had to write to show that this isn't a theory it it it's what works that you as you say you take kids who in the current system are failing and are feeling that they've failed and you change

the system and they start to succeed and the problems are more in the system than in the kids i often say to politicians i can ask the politicians was in like as we talk in america there's a process going on to reauthorize this legislation, No Child Left Behind, which is founded, tragically, on the whole process of standardization and testing. And one of the consequences has been it's exacerbated the numbers of kids who aren't graduating from school, certainly the ones who are disengaged from it. There's massive turnover of teachers in the system. Head teachers often move on after a couple of years. I'm not saying it's all a mess. There are great schools. That's what the book's about. Great schools and great teachers, but they're often great in spite of this dominant culture of standardization, not because of of it and so I get politicians

saying to me how do we solve these problems of education and part of my answer is that's in the book you know stop causing them stop causing them how about that don't do that and it to me it hinges on a very important distinction that you pointing to between learning and education. The fact is that kids learn voraciously, they want to learn, babies learn, they learn to speak within a couple of years in most cases. And this is a tremendous capacity that human beings are born with, we're learning organisms. Education is an organized process of learning, you know, the assumption behind an education system

is that there are things that kids won't learn on their own without proper assistance they may be too complicated to learn or there's a whole cultural background that people need to be engaged with i mean you know we teach kids mathematics because it's a we're building on a huge tradition of mathematical knowledge and concepts and practices. It would be wrong to expect every newborn child to invent their own system of mathematics. I mean, why would you do that? It can't happen and there are cultural things we need to acquire. And also there's an assumption that there are things you wouldn't learn if it was left here on devices. There are things we want people to learn. But then we

organize these systems to do that in such a way that it often gets in the way of learning, these rhythms or the industrial patterns. So you get kids like the ones we talk about in Kansas City who have not done well by the system, but change the system and they start to thrive. And it's no more than recognizing that if you engage kids curiosity if you get them to work collaboratively if you give them actual challenges to figure out and if you respect and support them then they behave very differently and one of the limitations for me in this whole academic preoccupation scores is that

people have come to think that academic means intelligent. And actually academic work is a particular type of intellectual work. It's about theoretical and scholarly activity, normally in language or mathematics. Well, it's a good thing to do. And I did it, I like it. I did a PhD, I was a university professor.

I'm not here to knock it. But it's not for everyone. It's not better than anything else i mean i i can do that i can't perform heart surgery you know i couldn't design a spacecraft i couldn't write an app in the real world there's a tremendous interaction between theory and practice and what's happening in groups like MindDrive is that they're taking practice as the leading edge. There's still a lot of theory involved.

They've still got to work it all out. They've still got to work out the electrics. They've got to apply all this stuff. And to apply it, they have to understand it. But if you put practice at the leading edge, then kids who have been alienated by dry theoretical stuff suddenly come to life and they can see why it matters. It's why the make affairs have been spreading so by dry theoretical stuff suddenly come to life and they can see why it matters. And it's why the Maker Fairs have been spreading

so much across this country, why robotics competitions are getting people in their thousands to come and take part of the weekend because they're intriguing and practical. Yeah, and it's funny you bring up the Maker Fair also. I'm a regular attendee with my daughter. Oh yeah? But it's amazing to see, you know,

kids of all ages, and they will lose days, weeks, months. They'll work harder than they've ever worked on any, you know, like math assignment or something like that. Learning essentially the same thing they would have to learn in school, but because they're doing it with circuit boards or with, you know, whatever, with wood or with, you know, the things that they have to, in an applied way, like you said, in a practical way, they can't learn enough fast enough. There's a switch that just flips in them.

So when you're sort of looking at the universe of schools now, I guess it's a complex question to try and say, how do we solve for this problem? Because I guess it's a lot of layers of problems. But what are some sort of like, what are the big levers looking forward in your mind that have the potential to make, you know, for if we want to invest in this, the exponential shifts? Well, one of the core arguments in the book

is that we have to personalize education, not standardize it. And what I mean by that is that kids have very different talents and interests and abilities. They're all different. How many kids have you got? Just one. Well, you know, your child is a unique moment. Every child is a unique moment of talents and interests and abilities

If you've got two if you have any more you will see that there will be completely different from each other I mean, they'll be alike in some respects, but they'll be different and One of the ways we get education to shift is to recognize it's about people not data and kids come alive when we engage them and their interests. It's what happened to me. It's what happens.

It's not a mystery. I always feel this with education, that this isn't like curing cancer. In this case, we know what works. We know what the problem is and we know what works. It's just we don't do it on a wide enough scale. And the reason I focus in the book on learning initially, I mean, the chapters in the book on learning, on teaching, on the roles of principals and parents, and the reason for

that is that what I'm arguing in the book is it is possible to change this system. In fact, it is changing. It's a living system and it's evolving. The reflection points here. But to understand it, you have to grasp what type of system it is. It's not a mechanical system. It's what theorists call a complex adaptive system. But the heart of it, if we're interested in education, is understanding how learning works and the conditions under which kids will flourish. So I'd start with that. And what I argue for in the book is that we should shift from these mechanistic data driven metaphors to a more organic metaphor. It's much more like gardening than engineering to get kids to learn. It's about creating conditions for growth and I try to set out in the book what those conditions look like. But the heart of it is that, that you're dealing with growing living people. And every child like you, like every adult, we're all unfinished business. We are born with immense natural capacities and we may find

them or not. But there's always this potential for growth and for learning. One of the problems is, I think, that the politicians, not all of them, but too many of them, get it all back to front. They think that they can make education improve by going to some kind of command and control mentality, just telling people what to do. So around the world, you've got this standards movement going on. Education is now a global imperative. And it's right, it should be. But there are three big bits to education. There's the curriculum, which is what we should be teaching, teaching, which is how we aim to get people to engage, and assessment.

The right way to think about this is that the, for me anyway, is that the thing that makes the most difference in the quality of learning is the quality of teaching. So we should invest in teachers and their training and development and recognise that's quite a long term business. Secondly, you need a broad curriculum, not a narrow one. And then you need forms of assessment that make that engaging and interesting, motivate kids and reward them

rather than stultify them and penalise them. Now, I say that because the standards movement is dominated by standardised testing. And I was looking at some figures here for the book and I find it amazing and people do to understand just how profitable and enormous the testing industry is. Just think about America. I mean for example I think a lot of people believe that the testing business is just a benign supportive service that's offered by some companies in the interest of helping children do better,

or that it's something that educators have put together themselves. If you look at it comparatively, the National Football League in America, the NFL, in 2013, in terms of revenues, was a $9 billion business. That's a big business. One of the most popular sports in America. A $9 billion business. The U.S. domestic cinema box office generated revenues of about $11 billion. So that's bigger than the NFL. The education, testing, and support

sector generated revenues of $16 billion. The testing industry is bigger than the NFL or Hollywood. And there are several big players who dominate it. And they generate profits, not through producing instructional materials, but by generating tests. And the way they keep generating more is that they encourage more testing and more standards. The common core that's just being introduced in America is likely to cost, on one estimate at least, going to cost states up to $8 billion in extra tests and testing. This is like an oil field for these companies. They just keep drilling new holes and pumping more revenue out. This isn't about helping kids succeed only. I mean, I know

a lot of people in these companies and they're often very benign, but the fact is there's a massive profit motive in all of this. And the result is the kids are either being tested or being prepared to be tested. Teachers' jobs are on the line if they don't get these kids through the test. We've seen this case in Atlanta recently where teachers are being sent to jail for finessing the system. It's a malign practice, and it's not necessary. It's not anything really to do with education. It's to do with profit.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, it's incredibly disheartening and frustrating, and it seems like there's so much machinery locked around it. But on the other hand, when you read your new book and you get exposed to some of the programs out there, it's incredibly inspiring. And like you said, it does feel like we're

nearing this inflection point where the conversation, people are getting more frustrated with what's going on. Yeah. People are getting the conversation around standards is there's pushback now and it's getting more and more vocal and stronger, not just on all levels, not just on, you know, from groups where people would say, well, but they have an interest in pushing back because there's money on the line. But just generally people are feeling something's not right here. It's, it's, we've tried the

experiment. It's not working. And then when you see all these examples that you so beautifully point out, it does feel like we're reaching this point where, like you said, it's not a matter of us not knowing what works anymore. It's a matter of us saying, okay, how do we take the 1% that's working and how do we figure out how to make the transition to make that the 99%? There are parallel cases here, like for example, the drugs industry. A lot of good has come from big pharma, no question about it. We've developed some extraordinary treatments which have helped relieve all sorts of pain, discomfort and disease for people. I am a person who benefited from it. I mean, I personally wasn't saved by the vaccine, but I did go on to have all these other injections

and lots of people were saved from a lifetime of paralysis illness because they were vaccinated. I'm not saying the whole drug industry is anything other than something that has brought great benefits to humanity. No question of that. At the same time, there's a vast amount of profiteering in there as well. And in some respects, it's been a malign influence. I mean, for example, there are huge profits being made from antipsychotic drugs, drugs for treating various forms of depression. Some people need them. There are clinical cases of depression, clearly, that are different in kind from people just being down. But, you know, for the most part, there are vast profits to be made

from not relieving depression, but giving people medications for depression. All sorts of areas in which drugs are being developed gratuitously and generating huge profits along the way. I mean, I've, on a personal rant, for example, about the over-diagnosis of ADHD in our schools.

And, you know, I'm not arguing, never have argued that there's no such thing. Some people do argue there's no such thing as ADHD. But more and more kids are being diagnosed with ADHD in our schools. And often it's on the base of the scantest sort of evaluation. You know, if kids sit there fidgeting and staring out the window in no time at all, it seems, in some parts of the country. Somebody's going to reach for a prescription pad and put them on Adderall or Ritalin. These are multi-billion dollar profit-making drugs.

And I just don't believe it. I don't believe it. And a lot of paediatricians don't believe it either, that all these kids are being prescribed have got some disorder. Actually, the disorder most of them have got, I think, is childhood. They're sitting there, they're getting bored. I mean, if you sit kids down hour after hour, day after day, doing test prep,

what do you expect is going to happen to them? Get them on their feet, move them around, get them doing physical education, sport, practical things, things that kids do when they're not being warehoused in schools. And a lot of these symptoms disappear. But you see it too in the fast food industry. We know that the fast food industry is also contributing to a massive growth of diseases, of obesity and diabetes.

And the reason we can't just rein it all back in is because there are vast profits being made here by a few corporations who control it. So when you say, how do we roll back the issues in education? I think it is important to be realistic here, too, and say that this isn't just a benign landscape where everybody's trying to do the right thing and do good there are massive vested interests in all of this among people who are making great profits from it people who are answering favors you know education's become very politicized but at its heart we could fix this and we can fix it by giving responsibility

back to actual schools and training teachers properly, which is what countries like Finland have done. And Finland is outperforming America on almost every measure. They started their reform movement around the same time America did after, you know, in the Reagan administration, when they introduced a nation at risk. That was the warning light. Things were not going right in American education. And it's that really that led to No Child Left Behind. And America went down the road of standardization.

Finland, meanwhile, went down the road of personalization. And it's a much better system overall. And now people say you can't compare Finland to America, but actually in terms of principles, you can, in terms of what works and what doesn't. And I guess that's also, you use the phrase revolution in sort of speaking about how this, you know, creating a revolution, the way the schools are, that education is shifting. And to me, that implies that a huge part of this is from the ground up.

And that's what we're seeing. And that's, I think, where a lot of the greatest hope and the leadership is going to come from. Well, actually, the subtitle of the book in America is The Grassroots Revolution is Transforming Education. The UK edition, they went for a slightly different subtitle, which is Revolutionizing Education from the Ground Up. Either way, revolution is in there at some level. Yeah, and I think it is that in the sense that we have other sorts of social revolution going on. And in other words, that we can't fix this simply by repairing the way we do things now and making it sleeker.

There's something fundamentally wrong in the model that needs to be rethought. But the good news, it's all around us. I say in the book, you have a choice. You can make changes in the system, you can make changes to the system, or you can make changes outside of the system. And a lot of the examples in the book cover all three.

They're examples of changes in the system. The thing is that although I'm kind of ranting a bit about policymakers, I've worked a lot with policymakers, but it's not all about them. I did a whole strategy in the UK about 15 years ago with others on how you would have more creative schools. The thing is, it is a complex and dynamic system, and there are many points of flexion. It's not just what policymakers do. It's what school principals do. It's what parents do it's how they behave it's how teachers behave and in most schools there are habits

that are not mandated they're just customary and you can stop it right now you don't have to divide the day into 40 minutes nobody's telling you to do that people just do it because they always did that and there are schools in the book they said well we're not gonna do that anymore see what that anymore. See what happens if we take subject barriers away. How would it look? So there are schools like High Tech High that have been doing that. I mean, Montessori schools have always behaved that way. So there are things people can do.

I think I close the book with a quote from Gandhi about be the change you want to see in the world. It's like any social system. If you're perpetuating it, then you are the system. And if you change what you do, you change everything for the people you affect. So that's why I'm saying in the book, the revolution, don't wait for it. Don't wait for somebody to say it's okay. Start doing it differently.

No, I love that. I want to be super respectful of your time. I think we're a little bit long, so let's come full circle. And I always wrap asking the same question with everybody, which is the name of this is Good Life Project. And the idea is an exploration of what are the pieces of the puzzle. So when I just offer that phrase to you, to live a good life,, I often make this point that we all live in not one world but two. There's a world that existed before we got into it, a world of other people, of historical events and circumstances, of objects and things, the world that was there before you were born, the world that exists whether or not you do.

And so part of living a good life is, I think, to live in the world of other people in a way that is constructive and helps them become fulfilled in a way that does more good than harm to them. And certainly that's part of my mission for education. I think life is, not I think, it is clearly very short. I did an event a few years ago with the Dalai Lama who made the comment here

that to be born at all is a miracle, and I think it's worth remembering that. We're here pretty fleetingly, 90 years with the following wind maybe. And I think if you can feel that your being on the planet has on the whole supported and helped other people and been a beneficial influence rather than a malignant one, then that's one measure of having lived a good life. But there's another world that we live in too, which is a world that came into being only because we did. It's a world of our own consciousness that came into being when you did and will end when you do. And my experience of it is that you're more likely to do good in the world around you if you spend time exploring the world inside of you too, that you have a responsibility to your own fulfillment that if you if your life is impelled by anger and frustration that you're you haven't fulfilled or tapped into your own talents

you're more likely to be a destructive force in the world around you that it's a balance between the two that need to strike i mean it we hear it every day on airplanes about put your own mask on first i think that is right it's become a popular metaphor for a good reason. The event I did with the Dalai Lama, it's called World Peace Through Personal Peace. And the point is, you can't bring peace to the world if you're angry. And it's not an argument for being passive, or it's not an argument for being passive or it's not an argument for being undemanding but to live a good life you have to i think feel fulfilled internally as well as then aiming to do beneficial things externally beautiful thank you so much i really enjoyed the conversation oh you too jonathan thank you very much a real pleasure thank you very much. A real pleasure.

Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life?

We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes.

And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him.

We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.