Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
Tomorrow is the last day of our winter break and I have to say that I feel fully ready to get back to work. January is probably my busiest month and if I’m honest, I was not looking forward to starting back after the break.
And now I’m ready.
I can’t say that I fully shut down, but I did so far more than usual, and I think that’s part of the reason I feel so recharged. It’s a little unfortunate that I’m figuring this out so late in my career. For example, I didn’t ignore email, but I realized that there really isn’t much that can’t wait for a response this coming Monday or Tuesday. So I let it go. Earlier in my career I would have felt compelled to respond right away, often unintentionally inviting another email and more work… when the need for a response was not urgent.
Both ‘letting go’ and ‘turning off’ are cathartic, refuelling. Understanding that not just my body but my brain also needs a break is the reason I’m ready.
In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear shares the idea of getting 1% better. What’s fascinating about this is that the evidence of improvement is not something you see early on.
Going to the gym 6 days a week for 2 weeks will not have your muscles bulging out of your previously loose shirt, but 2 years later you might need a new wardrobe. Reading just 10 minutes a day doesn’t make you an avid reader in 2 weeks, but 2 years later you’ve read a couple dozen books.
The idea of working to be just 1% better is fantastic, and it has some great long term benefits, with no downside. However, there is one thing to consider and that is avoiding pitfalls that set you backwards. The simple example is that you are making great progress in the gym then you push too hard and get an injury. Now it takes months of rehab before you can get back to where you were before the injury. That’s a lot of days not getting 1% better. Sometimes these injuries are from pushing too hard, sometimes it’s from a simple movement that your body wasn’t expecting. These are understandable, and not always avoidable.
On the other hand, sometimes these injuries fall in the ‘you better never’ category, fully avoidable and preventable.
You better never pick up a football and throw it to almost your maximum distance without warming up with a dozen or so short passes first.
You better never challenge someone half your age to a race and go from zero to full speed in 12 seconds.
You better never do that Instagram challenge where you contort your body and try to pick something up off the floor with your teeth.
Essentially, you better never do dumb shit that your body used to do easily when you were half your age, letting your ego get ahead of your current abilities.
On a journey to be ever better, you better never choose to do something where 10 seconds of misguided effort sets you back months of consistent progress.
Intelligence is blind to ignorance. While it is true that the smarter you get, the more likely you are to realize how little you know; It is also true that the smarter you get, the less likely you are to listen to opinions and ideas which you do not agree with. You easily dismiss opposing views, you do not challenge the ideas as much as you challenge the intelligence of those that share them.
Imagine an upside down bell curve. On the X-axis is level of intelligence, on the Y-axis is knowledge of your intelligence.
I think both extremely intelligent and unintelligent people are aware of where they are on the scale, but most people are in the middle. They are somewhat intelligent, and yet blissfully unaware of where they are on the scale. They don’t know what they don’t know, and so they think they are more intelligent than they are. Their knowledge of their intelligence does not match their actual intelligence. I think here, where most people live on the scale, their egos get in the way. Not too many people think, “I am dumber than most people think,” while many would consider, “I’m smarter than people give me credit for.”
And so most people in the world think they are smarter than they are. For that reason, their political, scientific, economic, technical, social, and cultural perspectives are ‘correct’. For the same egotistical reasons, the views of others that oppose them are perceived as less intelligent. I fear that sometimes I too may be guilty here.
And so we live in a world we’re people are egotistically unaware of their lack of intelligence. Crazy conspiracies fool them. Legitimate conspiracies are dismissed. Intelligent sounding pseudoscience convinces them while counterintuitive facts and evidence get easily dismissed. They are smart enough to think they are smart, while scoring high enough on the Dunning-Kruger scale to be easily fooled. Smart enough to do their own research, but not intelligent enough to evaluate that research with intellectual rigour.
And so egos grow with intelligence, and in turn intelligence wanes when the ego interferes with the wisdom that should come with intelligence. Meanwhile, the best and the brightest, the ones who are truly both intelligent and wise, they know just how little they still know. They give up trying to convince the ones who let ego cloud intelligence.
They find themselves lonely, uninterested in bickering over opinions that dismiss and alter facts to win petty arguments. They are labeled as the crazy ones. Their wisdom ignored; they are helpless to bypass the egos and support intelligent growth. Because for most of the world the ego gets in the way.
We all know that one person who didn’t do well in school and isn’t ‘book smart’ but if there is a problem to solve he or she will figure it out. Or someone who’s a tinkerer, who dabbles in fixing anything from a small electric toy to a car engine… maybe they were good at school, maybe not, but they solve problems we would struggle with. This isn’t traditionally the kind of wisdom taught in schools. It’s born out of curiosity and ingenuity.
How can we make learning at school more like this? More like the problem solvers we are going to need. We aren’t going to out book smart AI. We aren’t going to write reports as well as a smartly prompted AI. But even a good AI isn’t going to figure out why a sink suddenly has low pressure any time soon.
Maybe that will come, but for now we are going to be able to out problem solve AI or at least be the ones that figure out what to ask AI to help us out.
So how do we maximize the learning at school to provide students with the kind of wisdom they need to be resourceful in an AI filled world? It won’t be with wrote memorization. It won’t be the review tests. It won’t be the book reports or the 15 math questions going home for homework.
What kind of learning experiences are we creating at school? Do they foster wisdom, systems thinking, and/or problem solving? Are we getting students excited about being learners and problem solvers? Are we creating environments for creators or compliant workers? Because the path of AI and robotics is quickly making compliant workers redundant.
I don’t know if we can explicitly teach wisdom, but we can create experiences where wisdom is valued and the right answer isn’t predetermined. We can design problems that require collaboration, creativity, and insight. And we can teach students to harness AI so that it serves us and we add value to what it can do with us.
Creating unique and challenging learning experiences, with students helping us design these experiences or even designing them themselves…. This is the path forward for schools. If a student spends the day only doing things AI can do better than them, what’s school really teaching?
Arianna Huffington is 74 years old and she just recently started a new AI business. She started the Huffington Post at age 55 and sold it 6 years later for 315 million dollars. In this The Diary of a CEO podcast interview with Steven Bartlett she shares this gem of a story.
The moral of the story is simple: Leaders need to take care of themselves, and get enough sleep, in order to be at their best. She says, “All the science now makes it very clear that when we are depleted we are going to make bad decisions.”
Then quoting Jeff Bezos, “I sleep 8 hours a night… I’m judged by the quality of my decisions, not the quantity of my decisions.”
As the new school year begins, take this as a reminder to take care of yourself first, if you really want to take care of your staff and students. It’s not good enough to only exercise, and eat well, and get enough sleep when you are not busy. You owe it to yourself, those you serve, and your job, to treat yourself well. It’s not selfish to put on your oxygen mask first, it’s how you get enough air to take care of others.
Build good habits and take the time to care for yourself first, when you are busiest, and it will become very easy to do so all the time. You will benefit as a person, as a friend, as a partner, as a parent, as an employee, and as a leader. It starts with you taking care of you.
I noticed it just as I was hitting ‘send’. My daughter had sent a Snapchat from a cottage she was leaving, a quick note to her family to say that she enjoyed her little getaway. I sent a response photo, a quick selfie as a replay with a comment like, ‘Hope you had fun’ written over the image. I didn’t pose. I didn’t concern myself with how I looked. It was only a quick picture going to my family, and so I just clicked the photo, wrote the text, and sent the image off to the group chat… knowing that it would disappear just after my family saw it. That’s the thing about Snapchat, unless one of my family saved the image in the chat, it would be gone after they look at it.
Except, for a split second before I hit the send button I saw something I didn’t expect. I saw a reflection of my grandfather in the image of myself. This was unusual, because I don’t really look like him. Sure, I often see reflections of my dad in my own reflection, we have similar traits and they seem to converge as I age, but I don’t have a lot of similar features to my grandfather, my mother’s dad.
I’d only seen this once before, years ago, and again on Snapchat. I used the aging filter and for the first time ever I saw a resemblance to my grandfather when I added about 25 years to my current age. But this time there was no filter, no gimmick, just a quick, unposed image of myself and a peek of my grandfather looking back at me.
It has been almost a quarter of a century since my grandfather passed away. Just over 38 years since the other one passed. That amazes me, because some of the memories of them still feel close. A friend recently shared this about aging, “The days seem longer, and the years seem shorter.” This resonates with me. A day seems to last about a day long, it doesn’t fly by, but the years have. My reflection in the mirror is somehow older than it should be. The man looking back has seen more years than I expect him to see.
It was just a quick glimpse of my own reflection, but one that has me reflecting on how quickly time passes. One that has me appreciating those who have been part of my life, and are gone, as well as those who are here with me now. The years are short, but they are lengthened by the memories we form, the moments that are not just ordinary. If we don’t make efforts to connect with others and create special moments, then those moments are nothing more than Snapchat memories… gone moments after we look at them.
I recently wrote Certainty Versus Evidence, and concluded with, “Seek out wise people who are smart enough to be humble, and uncertain, and as curious as you are… And don’t let yourself get stuck in concrete thinking.”
It really comes down to the idea that we need to be willing to change our opinions and our point of view when more information comes our way.
This means:
We need to respectfully listen to alternative points of view.
We need to ask clarifying questions.
We need to challenge our own assumptions.
We need to be humble enough to recognize that we don’t know everything.
We need to keep learning.
It always surprises me the that changing of one’s opinion is seen as weak. To me it’s a sign of strength. Openly admitting that you’ve changed your mind based on new evidence is a superpower. It means you don’t have a fixed mindset.
The difference between this and being gullible is that you aren’t easily persuaded, but rather data driven. You aren’t blindly believing new information, you are discerning, measuring, calculating, and being inquisitive.
We aren’t having our minds changed, we are changing our minds.
It’s not hard to do this when your new opinion fits with the views of those around you, but if that’s not the case, a simple change of opinion could be very challenging. I think both Copernicus and Galileo would agree with me.
It’s a big step to openly change your mind on a challenging topic. It takes strength of mind and will to do so, and it is a sign that you are willing to learn and grow. Certainty is the enemy of understanding, compassion, and growth. Ultimately if we are willing to change our opinions, we are willing to change and grow.
We are living through an epidemic of certainly at the expense of evidence.
Selectively chosen facts are sprinkled on emboldened ideas that sit like concrete, embedded deep in the minds of people who are certain they are right. Contrary evidence is tossed aside. If it doesn’t fit my truth or my world view then, it’s wrong, it’s misinterpreted, it’s fake news.
When scientists discover galaxies that are too large for the age that they are, considering when they were born, early in the development of the universe… it makes them ponder the theories they hold. Scientists are excited by this puzzle. What’s at play here? Is it a challenge of our evidence collection or are there other theories that may be better? This is the thrill of being at the forefront of science. It’s the idea that we continue to learn and reformulate our theories and make them better.
But to certainty focused, evidence lacking, non-scientific ‘experts’ (in their own minds), this new data is a chance to mock scientists; To emphasize that ‘they don’t know anything’ about the universe. This new evidence isn’t scientific evidence but rather proof that all science is wrong. These new galaxies are evidence of a higher power, or worse, a flat world.
We have people selling water bottles that make hydrogen water that’s somehow supposed to be better than just drinking water. Every commercial for supplements or diets or exercise plans tell you how the evidence is clear and this is the product that will transform your life.
I recently saw this fascinating video about a bug that shoots acid from its butt as a defensive mechanism. It was a totally interesting and engaging video for over 2 minutes, then it started into an unexpected conclusion of Intelligent Design and became an anti-evolution propaganda video that I had to stop watching. But I did wonder how many people bought into this, and I peeked at the comments which were filled with comments like, ‘God is amazing’.
‘Follow your own Truth’, with a capital ‘T’. Cherry pick your evidence and strengthen your certainty. That’s what it seems more and more people are doing these days. The certainty epidemic is growing and it’s getting harder and harder to sift through the BS, and actually know what evidence to follow.
The only anecdote is to stay curious and ask questions. Seek out wise people who are smart enough to be humble, and uncertain, and as curious as you are… And don’t let yourself get stuck in concrete thinking.
Predicting the next total eclipse is not a simple math problem, having several independent factors. Yet as the video mentions, an ancient Babylonian tablet tracked all the solar eclipses from 347 to 258 BCE.
It makes me wonder about the wisdom of some ancient civilizations. What did they know, that has been lost to us? From medicines to space to science, what intelligence was previously discovered and has since needed to be rediscovered, relearned.
And what did the ancients know that we still don’t know?
