School - Where Children Learn to Be Stupid
I don’t like school. I was always good at it. I got through high school with a 3.9 GPA. College with a 3.5. What does it mean today? Nothing. Because school teaches us that if you show up to every class, you ask questions, you study for the test and you turn in every assignment then that means you’re smart and not stupid. But it’s not true, I may be smart (which just means you’re quick witted) but I’m also stupid. Many of us are. Stupid has two independent qualifiers which are lack of intelligence or lack of common sense. Now, everyone is intelligent, minus the few with a severe mental handicap. Intelligence just means you can take information and apply it. So we’re all intelligent in some regard. Whether it matters or is applicable is a different debate. Common sense means you have good sense and sound judgement in practical matters. Every day I do something that doesn’t align with my long term objections. I’d say most people do. We want to lose weight but we still eat sweets. We know we should work out more and we don’t. We see something wrong but don’t tell our boss about it at the meeting because we don’t want them to look bad. We have a question and when they ask, “any questons” you like everyone else, keeps their hand down. Common sense is tough. Because it asks us to be better than we want to be. To practice what we preach. But we don’t. We were never taught to be practical in school. We were taught to listen, be quiet, behave and sit still. Something a child with ADHD, such as myself, found extremely difficult. So I’d get bad citizenship grades and have to go see the guidance counselor in elementary school but my academic grades were near perfect. If I would have went to harder schools, with more academically astute students, who knows where I would be today. Malcolm Gladwell says it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond than a big fish in a large pond and has data to prove it. It’s in his book, David and Goliath. Self awareness is huge. Knowing what you’re good at and what you’re not are necessary for success. The question I asked myself today, and you can ask it of yourself, is what do I want to do more of?
I’d like to write more, I’d like to talk to more people, I want to work out more, I want to have more life experiences. Most importantly, I want to learn more. Reading (listening mostly, because reading is tough for me) these books and watching speeches by people that have been insanely successful and influential to billions of people intrigues me. I don’t know how big my impact will be on the world but I do know that I’m going to be willing to fail in my attempt.
People You can check out:
Warren Buffet (Investments), Brian Chesky (CEO Airbnb), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Seth Godin (Authour & Marketing), Steve Jobs (Apple), Travis Kalanick (CEO Uber, Elon Musk (CEO SpaceX & Tesla), Gary Vaynerchuk (Entrpreneur), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
Inspired this writing: STOP STEALING DREAMS: Seth Godin at TEDxYouth@BFS
