Good Life Project - Sir Ken Robinson: The True Story of an Education Revolutionary

Episode Date: April 27, 2015

In February 2006, Sir Ken Robinson stepped onto the TED stage and delivered a scathing indictment of the modern educational system, entitled "How Schools Kill Creativity." That talk exploded into the public's consciousness and has since become the most watched TED Talk in history, with more than 32 million views and more than 250 million people estimated to have seen it. While it may not have started the conversation on education, it brought a level of global attention to the problem like never before.In the intervening 9 years, Robinson has continued to speak and evangelize a different approach to education built not around order and conformity, but passion and personalization. And he's written a series of bestselling books with his newest, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution that's Transforming Education, featuring inspiring "schools done right" case studies to both learn from and build around.Even more remarkable than Robinson's fierce intellect and provocative ideas is where he came from. Growing up in post World War II Liverpool, he was stricken with polio at the age of four, forever changing the course of his life and exposing him to the profound injustice that awaits so many kids labeled as "different."In this week's conversation, Sir Ken and Jonathan sit down for a rare conversation about not only Robinson's ideas, but where those ideas came from, his childhood battle and then lifelong experience with polio and his extraordinary will to make a difference. He reminds us to ask not "how intelligent are you?" but rather, "how are you intelligent?"Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

education is meant to be the process by which we help people certainly understand the world around them but 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 so there are these moments in time where you see or hear or participate in something that just stops you cold in your tracks. And it's almost like everything has changed after that. One of those such moments happened in 2006 when Sir Ken Robinson stepped onto the now famed TED stage and offered his talk on education and the state of schools. And that talk has since become the most viewed TED Talk in the history of the event and has been viewed and estimated more than 250 million times in different ways and different groups around the world. When I saw that, I was blown away by

his ideas and the impact that it could have and the truth of his message. But I got curious, too. Who was this man? I'd never heard of him before. And I wanted to know more. And it's literally taken this long for me to actually sort of create the opportunity to sit down with him. And I did in New York just a short time ago. And we talked about not just his ideas around schools and education and creativity, which

are pretty well known, but we took a really big step back into his life, his childhood in Liverpool, some profoundly changing incidents that happened very early in his life. And that really set him on a course of just eternal impact and curiosity. So I'm really excited to be able to share that conversation with you guys. It's one that I haven't heard, which is why I so deeply wanted to have it with him. So I could learn where did this amazing mind, this amazing curiosity and these incredible ideas come from. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this

is Good Life Project. 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 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 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 always curious when I have a chance to sit down with somebody like you,

who's just really driven by burning question and topic. What's the backstory? Where did it come from? You know, what was sort of the genesis? And so I'd love to kind of jump back. 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, it was a city that had been devastated in the Second World War. I mean, in the middle of the 19th century, Liverpool was the, 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 realise it was that much. Wow. 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. It was also one of the main stopping points in the slave trade. So 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, 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 you know that as children you've no real grasp of what's going through your parents minds. 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. 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 and 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 had you did you ever go back and and speak to them about what it was like for them at that time i'm curious yeah well the thing is that i say i was i was born 1950 and a couple of things happened uh that were big turning points one was was that in 1954, I got polio, which was endemic at the time. 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. It still is. And so he was convinced I was going to be the soccer player. So I was strong and fast. And he told me later on I had 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. Oh, no kidding. Yeah, and 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 Podo

and that was devastating for the family. I mean, as a kid, you're not aware of how devastating it is but you 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 out 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. I mean, 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 it 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.

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. He was a quadriplegic. He was paralysed from the neck down. Went out to work one morning. This wooden beam they were working on fell 30 feet. The rope snapped and it broke his neck.

Oh, my God. So he was the age of 45. So with seven kids and just back in work, he and my mum suddenly found themselves completely devastated. And 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, 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, you know, with having kids you become of course much more attuned to what they must have been going through because you know to even at whatever age you are really up 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 they're dealing with which i think 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 not questionable even when my dad was lying in bed paralysed, we would still argue with him. Because it didn't affect his mind in a structural way. We just argued with him because I was a teenager and I was

a student and what did he know? Right, and the same arguments any teenager would have with a parent. Absolutely. And we all did. We just took him on. Fortunately, he was very funny, very smart, witty, and remarkably strong-minded. 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 is 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 determinative. 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 mean, I don't mean it was a constant argument it wasn't he was just very funny but if you know if as a teenager i disagreed with him we'd have the normal hammer and tongs argument you'd have and 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 London doing a PhD, living in a squat with old student friends of mine, you know, with long hair. I was not Jonathan Lee Suave, sophisticated, 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. And I used to bring people home to the house.

It was like, hey, Ashbury had visited Liverpool. I mean, I don't think he could make any sense of this at all. And of course now, I'd love to just have an hour with him. 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, 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, as you become a parent, you see it. Yeah, everything changes. I mean, it's interesting. You know, 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 was this 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. You know, 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 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 you know an inequitable route to people according to their abilities and dispositions i mean the theory was that if you were more suited to academic work you go to the grammar school if you were more suited to you know blue collar work and technical work you would go to the secondary modern and that was 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. Got it. And if you passed 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 wiring a house or sorting a car out. 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 plus so i took the 11 plus and i was the first i think i'm right in saying this i was the first uh kid in that school ever to pass 11 plus 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. At this one window in time, had 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. But literally so. I published a book a few years ago called The Element, how finding your passion changes everything 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 would be on 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 that at the time, 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, you know, we weren't um looking for help from the welfare system but we qualified for a small amount of it and and then my dad had his accident but the brilliant thing about all this for me was that my dad and mum both recognized 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 and 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 of 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? We used to call it the Ponderosa. It's about an acre and a quarter of land and it was a reasonable 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 was only because of the small amount of compensation he got. It 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 wasn't a natural scholar. I mean, I could do it, but I'm just more gregarious than that. So I'm 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. Yeah, I wanted to be in the front room.

Yeah, and we'd clash about it time and again. Come in, and they said, have you done your homework? I said, oh, come on. He said, it matters for you. You've got clash about it. Yeah, I wanted to be in the front room. Yeah, and we'd clash about it time and again. 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?

You know, 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 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. And then I went to a fantastic place called Bretton 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 rationalise 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 you create your life as you go along you don't plan i mean you can have plans obviously yeah but you rationalize 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 that over time uh 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 are these 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 and I did and and I lighted on some interests that I thought I could focus it on so 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. 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, you know, 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 of education, that kids are being pushed down particular tracks

in the expectation that this is the only road to success and fulfilment. And the fact is everybody's life is different and you 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? I mean, 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. It was about the best job you could have in college. And we sold the company to a bunch of incoming freshmen when I graduated. 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 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, you know, 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.

But, 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. You know, I want a kid to be loving and happy and have a sense for what their element is. You know, what's going to 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, you know, like 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 I first came to L.A., 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 or 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. 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 was about finding good baseball players. And that's what the mattered. And the whole public education system was about finding good baseball players. And that's what the selection criteria were about. And that if you didn't get through into the National League, you were 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 that would be absurd. 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 on, the whole idea is ridiculous, think it through 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 an audience, I asked 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 you know what the course of their life had been and had they planned that

and it's just wonderful the things they came back with you know people say one guy said he was uh you know he'd taken a law degree uh but now he's a professional magician and he dabbles in linguistics this woman who said uh 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. We're just bored out of their minds and sort of forced to go because this is what people of our status or whatever in our community do. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

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 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'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. I love your sort of exploration of the word intelligence and, you know, the sort of bifurcating or saying, you know, like, 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 how intelligent are you,

but how are you intelligent? What form does it take in your case because i see it all the time you know 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 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. 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, 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 enough. I was in

I think it was in Austria a couple of years ago and I was talking to the 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 were talking about this, about the diversity of intelligence. And he said to me, you know, but what evidence, you say this, but what evidence is there 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-panelled room. We were 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? It wasn't spirited in 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, I just think, well, I'm only saying what should be obvious to everybody. So I guess the question is why isn't it you know because the way we're educated right

it's like a vicious cycle right um we're sort of taught to value a certain thing that that thin slice of what like this is what matters this is what's intelligent and then we propagate that and the choices that we make well truthfully 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 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. It could be 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 always predict it, but we can anticipate it. We can dwell in the future. We can not always 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 they consist in certain world views things that we just simply take for granted you know if you 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 no matter what time of year 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 exactly you know you're talking to a designer when they've shaved their head and

they're wearing big glasses that's right and dressed in black that's right yeah and you know it's tribal behavior and um 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 form them, the ideas of intelligence that we gain 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. I mean, 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, like 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 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 if you're not smart like that, then you can maybe do some practical job. But they're really smart people, the ones who work with their heads. And you see, probably to some degree, well, 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 because 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 uh deaf kids who couldn't hear properly, people with various effects of polio.

It's often, I said it in the element, I said in my classroom at elementary school, it was like the barroom scene from Star Wars. We were just like a whole range of people in various states of decrepitude. But nobody was interested in that. We were interested in whether people were interested or not, smart or not, in particular ways. But the thing that struck me about it was that, looking back on that, is that 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. 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 your body's fighting itself all the time you know to to make a movement you have to relax one set of muscles automatically in terms of 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 you know people would listen to him and think that he was he was mentally impaired in some way because he wasn't articulate. Now, we could understand him because we were 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 were other people who, and it's a classic thing, if people are hard of hearing, often people 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 and i think at the heart of that is that if you have if if we have a cult 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, 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, what drives me on this, 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. 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 MindDrive, 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 MindDrive is this wonderful experiential education program in Kansas City where they take these kids where the world basically says unteachable, unlearnable.

You know, 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 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 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, you know, 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, okay, 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. 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 ask me about my theories. And I say, well, firstly, they're not mine. I stand in a long tradition of people who have been arguing for a different way of thinking about education. But 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 get asked 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 standardisation, not because of it. And so I get politicians say to me, how do we solve these problems of education? And part of my answer is, it's in the book, you know, stop causing them. Stop causing them. How about that? Don't do that. And to me,

it hinges on a very important distinction that you're 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 um and this is a tremendous uh 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 to your own 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 are the industrial patterns. So you get kids like the 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 you know 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 can do that. I can't perform heart surgery. 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 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. 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,

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Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. It's funny you bring up the maker, Farrell. So 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 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. You know, there's some, there's a, like a switch that just flips in them. So when you're sort of looking at the universe of schools now, you know, 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 what are the big levers um looking forward in your mind that have the potential to make you know for for if we want to invest in this um 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 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'll see that they 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 uh curing cancer in this case

we know what works we 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. And but to understand that, 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, you know, 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. I mean, 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 penalize them. Now, I say that because the standards movement is dominated by standardized 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. That's a big business. One of the most popular sports in America. A $9 billion business. The US domestic cinema box office generated revenues of about $11 billion. 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, up to, going to cost states up to $8 billion in extra tests and testing. This is like, you know, an oil field for these companies. They just keep drilling new holes and pumping more revenue out. You know, 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 not 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 tests that we've seen this case in atlanta recently where teachers have been sent to jail for finessing the system it's 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 it's incredibly disheartening and frustrating and it seems like there's so much machinery locked around it but on the other hand when when you know you read um your new book and you get exposed some of 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.

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 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. 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%?

You know, there are parallel cases here, like, for example, the 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 and illness because they were vaccinated. I'm not saying that the whole drug industry is anything other than something that has brought great benefits to humanity. There's 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 and 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 have 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. There are some people who 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 basis of the scantest sort of evaluation.

You know, 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 off 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 favours. education has 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 used the phrase revolution

in sort of speaking about how this, you know, creating a revolution in the way that schools speaking about how this you know creating a revolution the way the schools are that education is shifting and um and to me that implies that a huge part of this is from the ground up and that's 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 the the subtitle of the book in america is the grassroots revolution is transforming education the uh the uk edition they went for a slightly different subtitle which is revolutionizing education from the ground up yeah either way revolution is in there at some level yeah and i think it is that in 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 making it sleeker there's something fundamentally wrong in the uh in the model that needs to be rethought but the the good news it's it's all around us and there i say in the book you have a choice there 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 that say, well, we're not going to do 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 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.

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 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, what does it mean to you? To live a good life is, 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 and 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 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 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 into which is a world that came into being only because we did you know it's a world of our own consciousness that's that came to being when you didn't 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 fulfilment, that if your life is impelled by anger and frustration,

that you haven't fulfilled or tapped into your own talents, you're more likely to be a destructive force in the world around you. It's a balance between the two that you need to strike. I mean, we hear it every day on aeroplanes 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 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. You too, John. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Hey, I really so appreciate if you would just head on over to iTunes, take a couple of seconds, and let us know.

Share a review or rating. Always honest. And if you found this episode, the conversation, valuable and you think other people, maybe friends or family, would enjoy it and benefit from it, go ahead and share it with them as well. And as always, if you want to know what's going on with us at Good Life Project, then head over to goodlifeproject.com. And that's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. 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 ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming,

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