In Ryan Holiday’s Courage is Calling, he writes, “It’d be wonderful if we cherished our heroes, if we rolled out the red carpet for our creative geniuses. Instead, we put them through the gauntlet. We torture them. We drive them away. Churchill was not only a prisoner of war in his youth, but at the height of his political career he was driven out of public life. His crime? In part, he was right about Germany. No one wanted another war. No one wanted him to be correct about Hitler’s menace. So it was easier to make him go away than to prove him wrong. For nearly ten years Churchill languished at his estate outside London. Or so his enemies thought. In fact, he was reading. He was writing. He was resting. He was making valuable contacts. He was waiting for his moment. ‘Every prophet has to come from civilization,’ Churchill would explain, ‘but every prophet has to go into the wilderness. He must have a strong impression of a complex society… and he must serve periods of isolation and meditation. This is the process by which psychic dynamite is made.’ Continue reading
Tag: Steve Jobs
My friend Sarah Kirby, who recently won the Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Early Childhood Education, shared something last week. She said she once attended a training session with a professional speaker. He told a story about a dad who gave his young son’s skates to another child when his son grew out of them. The son told his dad that he would have to get the skates back because he was going to be a record breaker and his skates would be needed for the Hall of Fame. His dad apologized to the other child, gave him some money to buy skates and took his son’s skates back. His son went on to become a world-famous speed skater and his skates are now on display. The dad never doubted his son. Even when he was just starting out.
That made me smile. When my 19-year-old son came to me two months ago and said he was going to run for mayor, my first question was, “Okay, what happens next?” Continue reading
My oldest was choosing post-secondary schools to apply to this past weekend. Time flies. I remember when he went to preschool and now, I will be the mom of three teens when my youngest has a birthday shortly.
Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.
When he asked me what programs I thought he should choose I reminded him to follow his heart. Take what interests you. What sparks your curiosity. There is no correct answer. Turning left or turning right can lead to a beautiful journey. Continue reading
Tim Ferriss was an early investor in Twitter, Uber, Facebook and others. He has written many best-selling books including The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body and Tools of Titans. He has a successful podcast where he interviews chess prodigies, actors, athletes, hedge fund managers, military leaders and entrepreneurs to dissect excellence and give listeners the inspiration to dream big and make things happen in their own lives. Continue reading
I have been thinking a lot lately about the day my ego died. I mean, we all have an ego. That part of us that doesn’t want to be embarrassed. Doesn’t want to look like we don’t know the answer. Cares about what other people think of us. Continue reading
I have been reading a lot lately and have come across the concept that skills lead to passion, not necessarily the other way around. Meaning you work on your skills and if you get really good at one of them, you will become passionate about it.
In order to do that, you have to try a number of skills on for size. You have to dip your toe in countless lakes. You have to take a chance on learning something that you haven’t tried before. Continue reading
Steve Jobs said, “Life can be so much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” Continue reading
I am currently reading Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation. So interesting.
He always wanted to make the first animated movie. And although he loved drawing as a young person, there weren’t really any courses he could take in that field so he took physics. He went on to help create the first computer animation applications and one day he was summoned to an interview with a guy who was interested in special effects named George Lucas. This was post the first Star Wars so it was a big deal. The first question Lucas asked Catmull was who else he should be interviewing for this job. And without hesitation Catmull rhymed off a list of others who were also leaders in the field. Continue reading
I saw a picture the other day of all the different cell phones that have been around over the years. It made me think about Alexander Graham Bell who was experimenting with getting sound to travel across a wire because his mom and his wife were both hearing-impaired. He changed the world when that first “call” went through in 1876 and the telephone was born. Continue reading