Whenever you find yourself rushing through life, take a step back and ask: “Why the rush? What am I actually working towards?”
Are you familiar with “the hustle”? It goes something like this…
You wake up. Check your phone. Brush your teeth, go to the toilet, and check your phone again. You get ready for the day. Maybe you go to the gym, do your meditation routine, or check your email… or all of that. You rush to your job or coworking space, where you spend the day working and scarfing down meals in between meetings. When you finally “finish” work (because let’s be real, you’re checking your email after-hours anyway), you go meet a friend or spend the evening watching Netflix or another activity that will help you relax. You go to sleep and do it all over again the next day.
It’s exhausting, but hey, at least you got sh*t done. You’ll get your break someday… right?
I used to think that this type of routine was exclusively reserved for people stuck in 9-5 jobs, and that’s why I quickly ran away from corporate. Since starting my own business a few years ago, I realized that this was not the case.
It seems that everywhere I go, people are suffering from the “hustle culture” pandemic. By hustle culture, I mean the collective urge we currently seem to feel as a society to work harder, stronger, faster. To grind and exert ourselves at our maximum capacity, every day, and accomplish our goals and dreams at a lightning speed that matches the digital world we’ve built around ourselves.
Don’t get me wrong, working hard is important. Being raised by a single immigrant parent who rose out of poverty and worked hard to build a better future for our family, I first-hand witnessed the value of being persistent towards your dreams, never giving up, and constantly striving for a better life. We can’t sit around expecting for our circumstances to improve without putting in the work and effort.
With that being said, I’m seriously questioning whether hours clocked in equals output produced. In both the corporate and entrepreneurial worlds, I’ve watched people run around like chickens with their heads cut off, rushing from one meeting to another, feverishly checking off tasks, and not making time for much other than work or other “productive” activities. Needless to say, under these circumstances, self-care becomes an afterthought.
It makes me wonder, how much of our work is genuinely productive, and how much of it is an addiction to being busy?
I’ve been experimenting with this in my business this year: I’ve worked 40+ hour weeks, as well as 15 hour weeks. I’ve noticed that there is actually little correlation with the hours that I clock in versus the money that I make. In fact, I’ve made twice as much income working half the time enough times to convince me that it’s not about the quantity of hours I’m putting towards my business, but rather the quality.
This year marks the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death. Widely considered one of the greatest polymaths in human history, Leonardo was an inventor, artist, musician, architect, engineer, anatomist, botanist, geologist, historian, and cartographer.
Though his artistic output was small, Leonardo’s impact was great, reflecting his deep knowledge of the body, his extensive studies of light and the human face, and his sfumato (Italian for “smoky”) technique, which allowed for incredibly lifelike images. Leonardo regarded artists as divine apprentices, writing “We, by our arts, may be called the grandsons of God.”
Twenty-first-century scholars at MIT ranked him the sixth most influential person who ever lived. Like Rembrandt and Michelangelo, he is so renowned that he is known by only his first name. Yet despite his fame, there are things about Leonardo that many people today find surprising.
1. Shady Parentage
Leonardo was born out of wedlock on April 15, 1452. His father, Piero, was a wealthy notary, and his mother, Caterina, was a local peasant girl. Although the circumstances of his birth would place Leonardo at a disadvantage in terms of education and inheritance, biographer Walter Isaacson regards it as a terrific stroke of luck. Rather than being expected to become a notary like his father, Leonardo was instead free to develop the full range of his genius. People surmise that it also imbued him with a special sense of urgency to establish his own identity and prove himself.
2. Physical Beauty
Leonardo created some of the world’s most beautiful works of art, including the “Last Supper” and the “Mona Lisa.” In his own day, he was known as an exceptionally attractive person. One of Leonardo’s biographers describes him as a person of “outstanding physical beauty who displayed infinite grace in everything he did.” A contemporary described him as a “well proportioned, graceful, and good-looking man” who “wore a rose-pink tunic” and had “beautiful curling hair, carefully styled, which came down to the middle of his chest.” Leonardo is thought to have entered into long-term and possibly sexual relationships with two of his pupils, both artists in their own right.
The paintings generally attributed to Leonardo number fewer than 20, while his notebooks contain over 7,000 pages. They’re the best source of knowledge about Leonardo, housed today in locations such as Windsor Castle, the Louvre and the Spanish National Library in Madrid. Their diverse content ranges across drawings—most famously, Vitruvian Man—notes of things he wanted to investigate, scientific and technical diagrams and shopping lists. They comprise perhaps the most remarkable monument to human curiosity and creativity ever produced by a single person. Yet when Leonardo penned them, they were just loose pieces of paper of different types and sizes. His friends bound them into “notebooks” only after his death.
4. Outsider’s Education
As a result of his illegitimacy, Leonardo received a rather rudimentary formal education consisting primarily of business arithmetic. He never attended university and sometimes referred to himself as an “unlettered man.” Yet his lack of formal schooling also freed him from the constraints of tradition, helping to instill in him a determination to question authority and place greater reliance on his own experience than opinions expressed in books. As a result, he became a firsthand observer and experimenter, uninterested in serving as a mouthpiece for the classics.
10 Insights from Learning Sciences about How Learning Works
1. Learning is a process that involves effort, mistakes, reflection, and refinement of strategies.
2. Thinking deeply about the to-be-learned material helps students pay attention, build memories, and make meaning out of what they are learning.
3. Communicating high expectations and keeping learners at the edge of their mastery helps each student reach their potential.
4. Retrieval practice strengthens memory and helps students flexibly apply what they learn.
5. Spacing out learning, and interweaving different content strengthens learning.
6. Students are more motivated to learn when they are interested, have a sense of autonomy, and understand the purpose behind what they are learning.
7. Students learn well when they feel safe and connected.
8. Collaboration and social interaction can be powerful learning experiences because they encourage deeper processing and engage the “social brain.”
9. Students’ physical well-being, including nutrition, sleep, and exercise, impacts learning.
10. The entire environment, from space to temperature to lighting, can affect learning.
How You Can Apply These Findings in the Classroom
Knowing how learning works is all well and good. But how do you take these research findings and apply them in your classroom? Below are a few tips based on research from the Institute for Applied Neuroscience, for providing your students with the best learning experience.
Will networking help you build a successful career? I’ve never been sure.
Mostly, traditional networking seems to me like it takes a lot of time and effort.
Some experts say building connections is a practical strategy, in case you ever lose your job.
Other experts say you’re better off working and developing concrete skills than schmoozing.
A few weeks ago, one of my coworkers at Business Insider created a Slack channel called #lunch-buddy. Anyone who joined the channel would be randomly paired with another BI employee; the two would then meet for lunch, or coffee, or maybe just a walk, and get to know each other.
This initiative seemed to me a brilliant idea. Generally speaking, my coworkers are lovely people, but I know only a sliver personally. And when it comes to employees in other departments — say, product or finance — I’m curious to know what they do all day because, as it stands, I have no clue. (I imagine the feeling is mutual.)
I typed “#lunch-buddy” into the Slack search bar. And then I closed out of it. It was a Monday morning and, already, I was behind on work. I imagined that, by the time my buddy and I arranged to meet up, I’d be even farther behind. Inevitably, I’d wind up nibbling nervously on a sandwich while sneaking glances at my phone to make sure no one was Slacking me. This buddy business was not going to work out, at least not for me.
I should mention that, when the email about the lunch-buddy program went out, I was in the middle of reporting a story about networking. My specific goal was to figure out whether networking was good for your career, as so many influencers would have it, or bad. Good because you meet interesting new people who can introduce you to interesting new job opportunities, clients, and projects. Bad because you spend so much time schmoozing that you forget to, you know, work.
I wasn’t sure where I stood on the subject. As the lunch-buddy incident had made clear, I theoretically supported networking, but wasn’t very adept at practicing it. On LinkedIn, I posed the question to my connections. Unsurprisingly for a networking website, several people who commented said their relationships had always benefited them in their career.
And maybe they’d benefited mine, too. A few years ago, I was looking for a new job and mentioned as much to an old coworker (who’d become a friend) when we got together for drinks. Days later, she emailed me a Business Insider job posting that I’d missed in my search and, well, the rest is history.
Does that count as networking? I’m not sure. I like to think it’s better defined as being a human being with human friends who are willing to help you out.
As an organization, critical thinking is at the core of what we do, from essays and lists to models and teacher training. (You can check out What It Means To Think Critically for a wordier survey of the intent of critical thinking.)
For this post, we’ve gathered various critical thinking resources. As you’ll notice, conversation is a fundamental part of critical thinking, if for no other reason than the ability to identify a line of reasoning, analyze, evaluate, and respond to it accurately and thoughtfully is among the most common opportunities for critical thinking for students in everyday life. Who is saying what? What’s valid and what’s not? How should I respond?
This varied and purposely broad collection includes resources for teaching critical thinking, from books and videos to graphics and models, rubrics and taxonomies to presentations and debate communities. Take a look, and let us know in the comments which you found the most–or least–useful.
3. It’s difficult to create a collection of critical thinking resources without talking about failures in thinking, so here’s A Logical Fallacies Primer in PowerPoint format.
7. An Intro To Critical Thinking, a 10-minute video from wireless philosophy that takes given premises, and walks the viewer through valid and erroneous conclusions
To develop your authentic voice, you must cultivate three things: a strong sense of identity, which means doing work that is rooted in something substantive and personally meaningful; a consonant vision for your work, meaning a sense of the ultimate impact you want to have; and mastery of your skills and platform.
A strong, authentic, compelling voice is the expression of identity, guided by vision, and achieved through mastery. These three work together as a part of the lifelong process of growth and discovery. Developing your authentic voice is the result of lifelong layers of learning, experimentation, and failure.
While it’s possible to piece it all together over time through trial and error, I want to help you accelerate the process by building practices around each of these three core drivers.
1. Identity
Identity is primarily defined by the question “Who are you?” If I informally ask you that question, there are a number of ways you could respond. You could tell me about your childhood experiences, your job, your hobbies, your political views, or any number of other defining characteristics.
However you respond, it would be a story about how you perceive yourself and your place in the world.
In fact, your sense of identity is a collection of these stories. Whether the stories are true or false is somewhat irrelevant, because it’s whether or not you believe them that defines how you behave.
Regardless of what you profess to believe, your actions reveal the truth. When you act in a manner that’s inconsistent with your true aptitudes and passions, it can create frustration, and over time can lead to a sense that you’re not living up to your creative potential.
Thus self-knowledge is a critical ingredient of identity because when it is lacking you are more likely to compromise your true thoughts and beliefs. This is especially true when you are under pressure to deliver results.
You must have a rooted understanding of why your work matters to you, what makes it unique, and why you believe it should also matter to others.
I can often tell when someone is having an identity crisis, because the person will communicate in one of two ways: broadly, so as not to offend anyone; or so specifically and reactively (in order to appear confident) that he or she self-contradicts when the winds of public opinion grow unfavorable to the previous stance.
Your work must be rooted in something of substance so that you don’t blow with the winds of change or challenge.
2. Vision
The second part of the voice engine is vision, which is primarily defined by the question “Where are you going?” If you set out to build a bridge between two points on a river, you’d better first determine
The purpose of the bridge and the kinds of vehicles that will be crossing it
Whether you have sufficient resources and materials to complete the project
Whether or not a bridge is even the right solution to the problem of crossing the river
To apply this metaphor to your work, it’s important that you be able to articulate the kind of effect you wish to have, and how you want the world to be different through your efforts. You should at least have a sense of how you wish to connect with an intended audience, and how you plan to impact them.
Though you don’t want to become paralyzed with inaction out of fear of getting it wrong, your vision provides you with a set of guiding principles to help you stay aligned and measure your progress.
Many people falsely believe that brilliant contributors just follow their whims and let their “gut” decide from moment to moment where their work will lead them, but this is largely untrue. Though they rarely have all of their steps mapped out, the majority of the great creators and teams I’ve encountered at least have some sense of where their work is leading and the ultimate impact they want to have.
They have a “north pole” toward which to navigate, even if only in a general sense. This vision is what guides their efforts as they continue to refine and develop their voice.
3. Mastery
The final piece of the voice engine is mastery, which is defined by the question “How will you get there?”
John gives his ideas on how education should be framed and what he thinks makes for an educated person. He also details the characteristics of both an Amish education and that of the best boarding schools in the country.
I’ve read most of John’s books and this speech is the best framing of what it means to be truly educated. For parents who want to get started homeschooling their children, this is the perfect place to start.
The transcript is ~11,000 words with the video running 1 hour, 17 minutes. The excerpts, below, are 1/10 of the whole transcript.
(Note: All text, below, is John Taylor Gatto speaking)
Challenge Assumptions
One of the universal marks of an educated man or woman is that they know how to challenge assumptions. They don’t believe everything strangers tell them.
10 Kinds of Awareness to Build On
In the beginning of planning a curriculum, I think you need to consider ten separate kinds of awareness around which self-knowledge and self-awareness are built. The first is a personal reality.
We all need to know as much as we can about our relatives and our ancestors. What were their cultures? What are their cultures? What’re their situations, their goals, their struggles? Then, you need to inventory, by carefully testing your own talents and weaknesses, your own limits that come from your biological and cultural heritage. You just need to get a kind of profile yourself. it doesn’t happen in a week or a month; it’s an ongoing thing. I probably spend a little bit of time every day, at an advanced age thinking, about every single one of my relatives and wondering what part of me I can feel in harmony with that particular person.
Then, you need to have an intimate knowledge of history. I think you need to know local history, regional history, national history, and global history. Starting about 1917, the teaching of history in the United States was systematically and deliberately destroyed so that you wouldn’t be able to step back from your own life and figure out what on earth is going on.
On the other hand, I have some good news for you. It’s a fairly easy and greatly satisfying thing to self-correct that. So, an intimate knowledge of history that would include political history, and cultural history, maybe the history of labor, the history of science and technology, and other relevant forms, that’s the second thing.
The Amish Example
The Amish are a group of 150,000 well-mannered, prosperous, law-abiding people who came to America with little more than the clothes on their back. So they didn’t have any contacts to make the way easy for them and they have been persecuted by the state of Pennsylvania, the state of Wisconsin, the state of Ohio for the whole century.
So everybody’s heard about the Amish, but very few people know the astonishing details, and here they are. Virtually every adult Amish-er has an independent livelihood as the owner of a farm or a business.
The Amish realized that new government schools were social separators built on the principle of mechanical milk separators. They whirl a young mind about until both the social structure of the parents and their coherent consciousness are fragmented. Schools separate children from their personal past and from the past of the culture.
Education, as the government called it, separated people from the daily content of life dividing the world into disciplines, courses, classes, grades and teachers who remain strangers to their children in all but name. Even religion in a government school, if it was mentioned, would be studied analyzed and separated from the family and from daily life. It would become just another subject for critical analysis. Specialists armed with books, separated from the Amish and culture and training, would be entrusted with rearing their children and would encourage their children to liberate themselves from the shackles of home. For what purpose? To jump where? In what direction? of course the school, after it breaks your kids away from you, has no idea.
Boarding School Model
Now let’s take a look at what the parents of the finest and most expensive private boarding schools in America want from schooling.
I’ve been studying their expectations for 20 years, now, in order to compare them with my own goals. And I think you’ll find this interesting even if you don’t agree with all of it. I’m talking about the twenty ritziest private boarding schools in America. Schools like Groton, and St. Paul’s, and Deerfield, and Kent. There are only 20 of them, and some of them say there aren’t 20, there are only 18.
But, I’m going to warn you in advance to take careful notice that none of the principles these wealthy parents seek costs the single penny to develop. I don’t think they know that. That everybody could do one or all of these things with their own kids just as well as Exeter or st. Paul’s could. And I’m going to give you these ideas in no particular order of importance. You decide which of these are important.
Elite private schools want their children to learn good manners and to display those manners to everybody, even the humblest person, without thinking about it. So their manners would be reflexive.
That’s because they know that manners will make their children welcome everywhere, even in strange settings where they’re not known, someone will recognize that this is a well-bred person. Now tell me, does it cost anything at all to teach people good manners? I run into ghetto kids who are as mannerly as anybody on earth.
Undiluted Hard Knowledge
The second thing elite private school parents want is hard intellectual knowledge taught to their children, undiluted; they don’t want it watered down. I never taught any kids younger than 8th graders. But I will tell you that we started in eighth grade with Moby Dick, and as soon as I found out that the school edition had all the hard words and ideas taken out, I just threw it away and went out and bought enough copies for my kids and myself with a real thing. I mean Moby Dick’s is as hard a book to read as I think exists. This is your tough book to read. And what I found was after an initial struggle, maybe it lasted two weeks, the truth is that the dumbest kid and the brightest kid were thrilled with all these ideas interacting with each other and they could see the difference between the plotline of hunting a whale and all the ideas that spun out of the interaction of the crew and the officers and the captain with each other. I mean, it was a thrilling thing to do and I the truth is by that time I had lived in New York for a while, I was tremendously bored with what they handed me to teach.
If you pick up a bestseller from 1818, that would be James Fenimore Cooper’s last of the Mohicans, and you make sure that it’s unexpurgated, you will find yourself struggling to read a book that’s casting off political and scientific and philosophical ideas. I mean you got to read about three pages before the arrow gets out of the quiver. That was a best-seller in 1818. It sold the equivalent of five million copies a book today. It would be an outrageous best seller. It was bought by dirt farmers, and it was read by their kids.
Learn to Draw
Not one of my favorite human beings but the reason Charles Darwin’s book made such an enormous impact was Darwin drew; there are thousands of drawings in the book. And they’re not Rembrandt, but they’re accurate enough that you can see what the thing is. So, developing the powers of accurate observation, it’s not a natural thing to do. We don’t naturally see what’s in front of us or hear what other people say, either. So, some emphasis on that.
Learn How to Handle Pain
This one is a big one: practice in learning how to handle pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, and intellectual pain. If you wonder where the tremendous American interest in sports came from it comes from the aristocratic boarding schools of England that it was translated over here it was done not to win a game but to get people familiar with the idea that pain isn’t very painful, unless you think it is. Otherwise, it just goes away.
What you learn from these things is that you do have, I’ll say the God-given internal resources, but these people knew that you had the internal resources to overcome these things, that it was only to the common people that they seemed impossible to do. Once you tried to do them, they were easy to do, or fairly easy as long as you were disciplined. As long as you understood there was danger, as long as you are confident in yourself. Well, you want those things for your children, anyway.
Homeschooling Hope
I’d say, just to swell your heads here, I think that the homeschoolers are the most exciting contradiction of the direction of the 20th century that I’ve ever heard, seen, or read about. That without the slightest bit of assistance you just grab your bootstraps and lifted yourself up and now that you’re you’re substantial enough all over that you can’t be pushed around so easily.
