Sir Ken Robinson, Hammer Lectures

it's my great pleasure tonight to introduce Sir Ken Robinson so Ken's done so much to promote a dramatic paradigm shift in education and recognizing the needs to individualize our approach and help nurture the unique strengths of our young people he's an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity innovation and human resources sir Ken's advised national governments in Europe and Asia and some of the world's leading cultural organizations including the Royal Shakespeare Company the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts the Royal Ballet the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts the European Commission UNESCO the Council of Europe the Jay paul Getty Trust and the Education Commission of the States in 1998 he leaded National Commission for the British government on creativity education and the economy he was a central figure in developing a strategy for creative and economic development as part of the peace process in Northern Ireland working with the ministers for training education enterprise and culture he was awarded the Peabody medal for contributions to the arts and culture in the u.s. and in 2003 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth the second for his outstanding achievements to education and the arts Sir Ken's written numerous books and I invite you all to join us in the Hammer bookstore later this evening for a book signing of his latest book the element how finding your passion changes everything please join me in welcoming Sir Ken Robinson [Applause] excellent [Applause] thank you good evening how are you that's good um I've been up since 5 o'clock that is not relevant to what I'm talking about I just want you to know that um this is punishing for me it's great to see you and and thank you for coming um and above all thank you to me I think for coming because be a bit pointless otherwise wouldn't it frankly though you're all sitting there and I'm not here um I'm actually ready you know you're supposed to say it's a great pleasure to be wherever you are you know even if it's not you know yet to say oh it's great to be here I'm often it's not it is actually great to be here because I live in Los Angeles quite seriously I was born in Edmonton I was born in England I should make this clear that I'm not an Angeleno but I live here in Los Angeles and we've lived here for eight years now and we love it I've been on a national tour for this book the element how funny your passion changed everything and tonight is the own well the first event actually in our neighborhood we live in Westwood so I'd be traveling all over the planet but tonight I just have pop round the corner so it actually is a real pleasure the book is about it something which I feel is rather profound it's about why it is that so many people this is my experience with so many adults have no idea what their true talents are that's been my experience that most people have no idea really what they're capable of you know what they're really capable of achieving they kind of bump along the bottom often doing work they've wandered into and yet not feeling very fulfilled by it do you agree with me and yet I also meet people who love what they do and who couldn't really imagine doing anything else you know who are transported by this thing they do and would probably do it for free if that was the only option they all so to speak in that element and the book is about what makes the difference what the difference is and what it means for everybody else and I think it's both important for personal reasons but for other reasons I'll come to I'm particularly delighted actually that's come out right now because we find ourselves at the end of the first week of a new presidency for which I'm pleased to accept personal responsibility thank you that's rather moving of you those who clap do get a discount by the way when the rest of you I don't care thank you the offer closed now President Obama talks about transformation and I believe that's what we have to all be concerned with it's what the book is about it's about not reform but transforming transforming our lives and particularly our public institutions and we moved here eight years ago me and my family and you may therefore make a connection which is this that our whole experience of living in America except for the past week was under the former administration now I don't wish to make a party political point here since the book is not about party politics but I have to say that one of the most exhilarating moments for me of the whole inaugural day was watching that helicopter take off [Applause] it was fantastic fact the most agonizing thing was when they couldn't seem to get the engine started go please we arrived here through two and a half months before 9/11 so my family our entire experience of America has been under the pass administration post 9/11 so um and we're still here you know so so there's something about the place that we do like and I'm hopeful of great things that will come instantly we arrived here on the 30th of June which is four days before Independence Day we had no idea I mean really get over it what a performance honestly people marching up and down celebrating the English have left I mean do you know how that makes us feel when we've just arrived yeah but nonetheless we were we moved here from from Britain with a big passion for education and that's part of what the book is about only part of what the books about but it really is about three big ideas I feel the first is that finding your element is essential to personal fulfillment for a life that has purpose and meaning and I find that very many people live lives which they don't find are fulfilling or purposeful and I feel we have to look hard for these talents because in a way if you don't find the thing that you're uniquely good at there's a sense in which you don't really know who you are and the book is about that about helping each of us discover who we really are and a lot of stories in the book which I think will illustrate it the second there is a larger argument as it were which is this is essential for the health of our communities if you find lots of people aggregated together who are dislocated from a sense of purpose you end up with dysfunctional communities I spoke at the TED conference a few years ago and do you know that talk by the way do know that talk if you don't know it where have you been no but that talk the TED talk has been downloaded four million times which is fantastic except I thought it's fantastic till my son James that showed me a 90 second video on YouTube of two kittens who seemed to be talking to each other and that's been downloaded 17 million times so so you have to give a sense of proportion about this sincerely I distilled my fifty odd years of wisdom into this 20-minute talk all I had to do was look cute for 90 seconds and I don't got a row that really but Al Gore gave the talk that became the movie Inconvenient Truth arguments are crisis in the world's natural resources there is I believe it I think if we don't believe it were not paying attention but I think there's a larger crisis in the use of our personal resources that most people never discover thing they're good at and the result is dysfunctional lives and dysfunctional communities I came across I call this the other climate crisis I think there are two you may feel that one is enough honestly you know I I have one time of crisis thank you I'm good but I think this is as large and as profound and with the same origins its origins lie deep in the mindsets of industrialism and I believe in the intellectual ethos of the Enlightenment which achieved a huge amount but I believe it's dislocated us from some of our most important impulses as human beings and you see the devastation this reaches everywhere no here we are living in California a couple of years ago at the state of California according to published figures spent about three and a half billion dollars on the state university system not the whole system the state system evidently the government spent nine billion dollars in the same fiscal year on the step prison system does that make any kind of sense that there are more criminals wandering around in California potentially than potential college graduates doesn't I mean I know these two are not exclusive categories you know they there's a good bit of overlap between criminals and college graduates but but it seems to me to be a counselor of despair but don't you think that that there are more bad people I don't believe it I don't think there are that many bad people around you know I think there are people in bad circumstance who make bad judgments who make bad calls you know but there aren't that many Psychopaths truthfully actually you don't need that many quickly to be honest I mean one goes a long way I find that Newman if you meet two psychopaths in the same day that's a bad day isn't it ready honestly dear diary I got a story for you so I believe it's a major argument about human resources not just our individual resources but how we aggregate and the purpose in meaning we bring to our lives as a consequence the analogy they see to me is exact it does seem to me that as with natural resources human resources are often buried deep they're not just lying around on the surface you have to go looking for them very often there have to be certain conditions under which they will flourish and be thrown up I am from Liverpool in England and I'm at a school there and across the city centre is another school and one of the peoples there was Paul McCartney and I helped a little bit with this school and I received an honorary degree from the school which was given to me by Paul McCartney or Paul as I call him oppa I sometimes don't call him anything he just notes you know there's a kind of bombed anyway I asked Paul McCartney if he enjoyed music at school he said he hated music at school Paul McCartney he went through the whole of his education and nobody thought he had any musical talent whatever he does doesn't he one of the other students in the same class was George Harrison the lead guitarist of the popular music group The Beatles and nobody thought he had any talent either in music so this one teacher in Liverpool in the 1950s had half the Beatles in his class and he missed it Elvis Presley who went to school in Tupelo Mississippi was not allowed in the glee club at school they said he would ruin their sound Elvis well we all know what great heights the glee club went on to you know once once they've managed to squeeze Elvis out but this is my point to see talent is often buried deep it's not obvious on the surface we have to go looking for it one of the systems that's meant to help us discover it is education so one of the sub themes in the book but a major theme is that we need to transform education because so many brilliant people go through the whole of their education and never discover anything that they can really do well often their experiences of things they can't do well many the people look not old I'm not arguing that you know to do well you have to have failed at school I'm not saying that some of the people in the book did brilliantly well at school but many didn't many brilliant people left school thinking that they weren't very smart and that's not their fault it's because the whole culture of Education is not designed to identify the full range of human talents it's focused on identifying certain types of talent certain types of academic ability and it's now being compounded by this obsessive culture of standardized testing which is flattening out the diversity and individuality of our children on a national scale thank you very much and standard don't get me wrong with it I think standardized tests have an important role to play in energy well in any area really I mean if I go for a medical examination I want some standardized tests no I really do you know I mean I I want to know what my cholesterol level is compared to yours on a national scale I mean I don't want it on some personal scale you know that my doctor invented in the car on the way over you know yeah your cholesterol is what I call level orange you know I don't know that but I think what's happened is that if you will take an analogous for your take catering there are two methods of quality assurance in catering one of them is standardizing which is what gives you the fast-food industry in the fast-food industry everything is standardized and guaranteed the same burger the same buns the same fries the same color the same chicken nuggets by the way what are chicken nuggets you know what are they I have examined live chickens in vain for their nuggets and they are not to be found honestly don't eat chicken nuggets at something so all of this stuff is actually guaranteed it's standardized and the quality is guaranteed it's all horrible by the way you know and it's all contributing to the worst outbreak of diabetes in the history of the earth but hey you know it's guaranteed the other method of quality assurance in catering is the Michelin Guide now the missionary guide is quite different the Michelin Guide doesn't guarantee what's on the menu it doesn't tell you what time the place will be open or who's going to serve you the missioning identifies criteria of excellence that are international and if you want your restaurant to be in the Michelin Guide you have to meet the standards which are much higher by the way than fast food and they figure out if you're good at by selling people long to know all about it and if you meet the standard you're in the guide and the result of that is that every mish in restaurant is great and they're all different and they're different because they're personalized and customized and what's happened in education is that we've been sold the fast-food model of Quality Assurance which is flattening out and homogenizing the individuality of our students and of ourselves those who went through it and what we urgently do is the international standardization process of something like the Michelin Guide we need to personalize and we need to customize so to me this is a big deal because it has a huge effect on the nature of how we educate ourselves and our expectations of our children when we came to America me and my family we were told that Americans don't get irony honestly we were told this and it's not true I know that's not true but you should know this is what people are saying about you yeah people are wandering around Europe going course they won't get it we're there poor people saying don't forget don't be ironic that is it's not going to work actually we were given a guide when we came to America called how to behave in America by our relocation agencies I'll get your copy by the way if we interested them if you're having social problems it may help I don't know there's a troubleshooting guide at the back you directly you could consult according to what your social problem is but it says things it said things like don't hug Americans unquantified don't talk Americans Americans don't like being hugged this isn't true is it no exactly it's one of those myths like the British are very reserved no we're not well lovely honestly you you'll get to like us and love us at some point but a we thought this was true so we were turning up when we first arrived or eight years ago we're going to these social gatherings and you know people would come to orders and we'd Stefan oh my god don't touch anybody oh no and you could see people think oh that's that British Reserve thing you know but it wasn't we were just following the code so we look for weeks we're like this whenever we went public we were like refugees from Riverdance you know and of course it turns out not to be true we found that people liked being hugged generally so we now hug people at random in the street and and they don't like it is what we're finding but but we realized that Americans get irony I did anyway when I came across the type of that legislation No Child Left Behind because whoever thought of that gets irony hello because this legislation is leaving millions of children behind now I can see that's not a very attractive name for a piece of legislation millions of children left behind I consider but it is what's happening it's a very well-intentioned piece of legislation but it's leaving millions of children in its wake because it has a narrow curriculum which excludes many of the areas in which many children will flourish it has a standardized approach to assessment and it ignores the one thing that ever makes a difference in education which is the quality of teaching there is not a great school on earth which isn't populated by great teachers and that's because education is a very personal business so the three big ideas that run through the book are it's essential for personal fulfillment that we find this thing that brings us to life it's essential for the health of our communities but it's also essential in our public services systems and the reason for that is I believe we're living in times of revolution and I really believe this is literally the case not figuratively we are living in times which have no historical precedent we can look back to other times and say well you know the 18th century is pretty turbulent well yes it was we've had two major calamitous wars yes they were we've had revolutions in Russia and China yes they were extraordinary but a global revolution on this scale which involves everybody and whose outcomes are totally unpredictable that's new in the whole of human history and we can't face this future with the old bag of tricks we can't face it with the old institutional habits and particularly the habits that we have in the way we educate our children it's why I'm saying it's not enough to reform our lives we have to transform them into something else you see the thing is a mad at time of revolution is that people aren't aware of it often until it hits them full in the face what happens in a revolution is the things that you take for granted turn out not to be true what I mean by the things you take for granted are are the things that we think of as common sense the great enemy of self-fulfillment is common sense let me give an example it's hard to know what you take for granted isn't it it's hard to know what you take from how is it because you do take it for granted so let me give you an example something you may take for granted how many of you here are over the age of 30 great don't you feel better now if I haven't got that it that wasn't what I think you should be taken for granted those of you over 30 would you put your hands up if you're wearing a wristwatch restaurant you okay thank you how many of you here are twenty or younger all right can you put your hands up if you're wearing a wristwatch yeah now it's just I make this point you see those of you wearing wristwatches did you think about that this morning was that like an agony of indecision you know shall I you know shall I put the watch on again you know ready is it a watch E day I don't know I mean is what are the odds of somebody asking me the time I don't know I mean I mean this think I'll leave it till I've had my coffee I'll come back to this you know think about it later I'm too tired at moon you didn't that you just put it on as a matter of teen just strapped it on thought here we go because you take it for granted you need to wear this thing our kids people at you under 25 do not see the general need to wear a wristwatch some people wear them like some of you do but on the whole if you ask a roomful of teenagers mostly they don't worry swatches and the reason is they live in a different world to the rest of us they live in the world that is being transformed and revolutionized by digital culture a good friend of mine guy called Marc Prensky talks about the difference between digital natives and digital immigrants what it means is if you're of a certain age you know twenty-five let's be clear about it you know we were born before the digital revolution began and we kind of have secondhand secondhand sort of digital phrases but our kids were born before this began so they speak digital in a way that we don't and their lives are being transformed in ways we can't gather directly by digital relationships and digital opportunities you see they don't wear wristwatches because for teenagers and people in early twenties they've grown up with the time being everywhere it's on their iPhones on their iPods on their laptops it's everywhere they don't see the point wearing a separate device you know to tell all the time I remember my daughter saying to me you know why would you do that like it only does one thing Theresa it's like a single function device I mean like how lame is that you know no I said no no it tells the date you know as well so time revolution is when things are happening that upset all the things that we take for granted you see something we took for granted when those of my generation was that if you went to college and got a degree you were set for life that's simply not true now you know I mean I left college in 1972 I took it for granted I could get a job anytime I wanted one I didn't want one as it turns out it's 1972 I wanted to find myself you could do this remember in the 70s so I decided to go to India where I thought I might be and I didn't I didn't get to indirection I got to London where in fairness there are a lot of Indian restaurants you know but then I hung out there for a few years but I knew when I could want a job I just pop along and get one and I did because I had a degree you see when we were growing up a college degree was like Willy Wonka's golden ticket and now it's like the rapper you know and the reason is not because degrees are harder to get were hard to get then and they're easier now I don't I don't think that's true it's not because this generation is less smart they're a good good bit smart in lots of respect I feel they actually work a lot harder than I remember working at college the problem is that everybody's got a degree these days you know in the next 30 years more people will get college degrees than the total number since the beginning of history well you know college degrees are like any other form of currency they get devalued when there are more and more of them around and the world is changing so fast the great irony is he I think as I work a lot now with fortune 500 companies and I say to them and ask some of you if you run business are you impressed you know somebody turns up with a degree do you oh my god you know the very thing we've been waiting for you know let me show you the corner office your people will assemble shortly you know the irony is that people are going through this diet of standardized tests and rigidity or popping at the far end lacking the very things now that the economy needs you know people can think differently who can see opportunities and take them people who can work in teams you can communicate and the problem is not theirs the problem is we are locked into this old model so at the heart of the book the element is a plea for a different conception of human resources in ourselves and the people we work with so let me tell you what it is I find myself saying this a lot you know people achieve their best when they do the thing they love when they're in the element I thought well what is that exactly the inner element well and I've written a book about it by the way to save you having to worry about it it's two things at least the first is to be in your element means that you're doing something for which you have a natural capacity a natural aptitude you kind of know what this is I don't mean you know all of it but you're comfortable you kind of figure out you get this and for example one of the people in the book is that should professor at UCLA Terence Tao Terence Tao is one of the world's leading mathematicians at the age of two he found he taught himself to read from Sesame Street it's got a rather garbled accent but hey you know say he was - at the age of three he could do double-digit equations you see I can't do them now I don't know what they are but he was doing the age of three and teaching other kids maths at the age of eight he took a college entrance exam in mathematics and got 97% he got his PhD in maths at the age of 20 and at the age of 30 he won the field medal which is the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in mathematics and a MacArthur Genius award it's fair to say I think the town's gets maths you know you've got to got the hang of it I still have not quite got the hang of it I wrote I was to written it I was given a guitar as a teenager around the same time that Jimi Hendrix got his first guitar it worked out for Jimmy you know anyway on the guitar on it way it didn't quite for me so part of it is having this natural capacity for something knowing what this is and it's very different for also for all of us we all have very different capacities and we feel these opportunities in a very different way one of the problems is we often take for granted our own capacities we think well if I think this is easy presumably we all do actually we don't it's about how it resonates with you but the thing is being good at something which is essential to the element is necessary but it's not sufficient I lots of people who are good at things that they don't enjoy doing they happened to be good at it and so they won't often do this for a living they don't get much from it a great friend a man from way back was a concert pianist for years actually when I met her she was an editor of a book that I was working on and I asked her how she got to be an editor and she had up until a few years previously she'd be in a concert pianist and I said how come the shift and she said well she had been given a concert in London the Purcell room and at the end of the concert she went out for dinner with the conductor and the conductor said you were fantastic tonight Millicent and she said well thank you very much and he said but you didn't enjoy it did you and she said Wow how do you mean they said well you didn't seem to enjoy the performance she said well no I suppose not he said well I mean do you enjoy playing she said no not really no I don't suppose I do he said well why did he do it she said well I suppose because I'm good at it and he said you know being good at something is not a good enough reason to do it and she said she went home and thought about what had happened to a life and what happened was she'd been born into a musical family she'd shown a precocious talent she'd been encouraged she went through all the Guildhall exams she went to a specialist music school she went to the Royal College of Music did the music degree did a Doctor of Music degree and as the night follows the day she progressed on to the concert platform and said nobody's stopped to ask me if I wanted to do this and I didn't ask myself it just was obvious to everybody that I would do it but she said I never enjoyed it said I realized that what I really liked after that without this conversation was books said I love books I love the literary world I spend as much time there as I could I love to read I try to write I love being with writers I said I had been denied that and had denied myself that my whole life so she said at the end of that season I closed the lid of the piano and I've never opened it again I said I have never been happier or poor probably but she said this doesn't pay as well as what I did before but I've never been happier now this an important point to make you know that being in your element doesn't guarantee you're gonna get rich unless you had to be Warren Buffett who was good at something that he also loves you know which makes a lot of money but I think if we haven't learnt by now that wealth is no guarantee of fulfillment then you know we need to keep thinking you need enough money to get by of course and some people find that the thing they love to do also makes them wealthy but many people are doing things which actually will never make them wealthy but they love it nonetheless many teachers are like that I meet lots of teachers and I had great respect for teachers I worked a lot with teachers and they often say I always ask people what you do and you like it and teachers on set I just love this they couldn't imagine doing or doctors you know or or people in health care or actually people in any walk of life it resonates with them in a particular way big thing that worries me about this you see is were often steered away from these things by well-intentioned people all made to feel if we don't fit the mold that we're at fault I was in Danville in Northern California a couple of days ago signing a book actually I was signing lots of books really honestly I would not reveal I went all the way to Danville to sign this book you know there there were lots of people and I signed their books but as chances one guy came up and I was just signing it and I said what do you do he was in his early 40s he said I'm a fireman and with the fire service here I mean I'm a I just think that's a an aerobic occupation I said fantastic I said that when did you decide to that he said I've always wanted to do it he said it's funny what you're saying actually about that schools now people have put down he said I was always made to feel at school like this was just not a proper thing to be doing with your life you know that you should go to college he said I always want to do it he said I had one teacher at one point said to me that he actually thought I was stupid that I'd probably never amount to anything he said in last year he was in the car accident I gave him CPR and saved his life and his wife's life he said he thinks better off Mina but this is important point isn't it you know that if we live a life that's straightened by this particular conception of academic ability we deny the multiplicity of talents on which our communities in a fulfilled life actually depends that's partly why we have to open this out so it's about finding things that you feel naturally drawn to and things for which you also have a passion but you see what's important about this is that you can't know where this is going to take you one of the problems I feel that we have in our current way of thinking is that we are locked into a linear metaphor you know that this thing will lead to the next thing and if we don't do this then it's over education is the best example of if you don't go to college it's all washed up for you it's not it's not and maybe going to college now is not a good idea maybe go to college later when you've figured out something else you know that you want to do with your life maybe but this linearity is rooted in the industrial mindset which has shaped our culture and particularly our education systems and we take it for granted let me tell you some things we take for granted for example in schools one is that the most important things that kids have in common is how old they are yeah we educate them in age groups in batches you know all the four year olds all the five year olds all the six year olds you know like that's the most important thing they have in common it's not you know it's like the most important thing about them is their date of manufacture you know I was drawing something today I chose doing a radio interview and that the lady interviewing me said that has some when he was in the second grade kept getting into trouble and she went to see the class teacher and said what's the problem and she said he keeps getting up and wandering around so she had a chat with her son that evening said why did you keep getting up wondering said because I've finished and unfinished work I was going to see if I could help anybody else who is having a problem of them so they eventually agreed to put him on 4th and 5th grade work because his mind was moving faster but before they did that they're on the point of medicating in for having attention deficit disorder you know so it's about that the other thing is and a bad word the worst example if I can said I came across this not long after I moved to LA at this linear thing I saw a policy paper that was entitled with no tyranny College begins in kindergarten no it doesn't it doesn't you know if we had more time we could go into this but as time is short it doesn't kindergarten begins in kindergarten you know there's a wonderful guy who runs a theater for children in Dublin it's called the Ark he made a great comment a couple years ago to me said you know a three-year-old is not half a six year old a six year old is not half a 12 year old who they're three you know but you know in Los Angeles now and New York and other big metropolitan centers kids are competing to get into kindergarten competing you know being interviewed for ginder got it presumably producing resumes you know sitting in front of these unimpressed selection panels you're kind of flicking through it you know this is it you know you've been around for thirty six months and this is it you know if you've achieved nothing you know you've spent the first six months of breastfeeding what I can tell you is waste sure it's insane isn't it as a conception and I want to tell you what what I think would be an improvement on it in just a moment but this is the point to be in your element is about finding things that you are naturally good at and also that you feel passion about but there are other factors that play into this one of them is attitude it's not enough you know to discover something people that I many the big lines of you to the book also have certain castes of mind where they kind of feel entitled to something or their arrest isn't pushed against you know the dominant culture which surrounded them there are lots of things that stop people finding their way they can be personal fear anxiety you know you going to fall flat in your face it can be the pressure from friends social groups that surround you or well-intentioned parents and we we tell a story in the book I didn't get to meet him unfortunate but we tell the store in the book of Paulo Coelho who wrote The Alchemist has become the world's top selling authors his parents were dead set against him having a life as a writer and in his early youth they actually because he was insistent about becoming a writer they had him subjected to electroconvulsive therapy because he thought he was crazy three times and then they had him committed to a mental institution because he said he's obviously gone off his trolley completely and he survived all of that and pushed back and said I'm going to do this and he has become Paulo Coelho but often it's not that dramatic I mean very few of us would like to be you know given electroconvulsive therapy to stop this thing that we're interested in but it can be much more subtle but nonetheless constraining you know the raised eyebrow you know from a well-intentioned parent say what really you're going to do that he's serious or friends who just kind of dampen it down because you run against the grain of the popular culture or it could be where you are you know in the end it's all about opportunity you know there aren't that many pearl divers in the Sahara you know yeah not many rodeo is take place in the Arctic Circle you know it's about about opportunity to and finding your way to push back against the dominant culture to achieve that so it's about attitude it's about aptitude and it's about opportunity and it's also about this thing of passion but it's also about challenging what we take for granted about ourselves let me ask you something else that you may take for granted about yourself how many senses do you have don't agonize about this going five okay gone smell taste touch hearing sight any other one's intuition thank you right that's how we tell you think of it isn't it maybe six centers in it the sixth sense now there's something different about the five senses and the sixth cause the five senses that we first mentioned or what physiologists would call real senses you know there are organs that do it eyes ears if they're compromised you know you're not quite as good as you were intuition is a bit different it's not quite clear what does intuition you know it's a kind of spooky sense isn't it that girls have more of this is the plan you know so we got like five real senses and a spooky on I came across a great book recently called culture and the senses by an anthropologist based here in California called Kathleen Lin Gertz she'd spent a lot of time with a group called the unlock evade peoples of southeastern Ghana they had never thought that they had five senses this isn't some recalcitrant group you know it's an advanced community but they'd never thought had five senses now that's interesting right there you see in our culture we can't everything don't we we live in the world where we think if you can't count it it doesn't count and this counting we can date back again to the Enlightenment where we started to classify Linnaeus was classifying the natural world and we classified our own senses so okay they bought instead okay five senses what are they and they count them out and the people of the aren't really very essential II said well what about the other one they said well how do you mean the other one and I said well the main one why don't you count the main one now this is a real sense that you have got that is conducted by organs in your body it's not a spooky sense and if you can't do this you can't function you know it is if you think about it you may not know that you've had the time to ponder I'll tell you is time is short this is the sense of balance now balance is fundamental to your functioning in the world it's fundamentally you're sitting there getting in the room getting out of it again actually it's more important in some ways than the other senses if your site is compromised but your balance is okay you can function if your balance is compromised by alcohol or infection it's very very hard to get by in the world and yet we don't count it and the reason we don't count it is because we've grown up in the world where we've been told insistently we have five senses and a spooky one so it's now become a closed question we don't need to revisit we thought we did the senses when we're in kindergarten that was all dealt with we don't even go back to that a physiologist by the way will tell you you have nine senses not six I won't tell you what the other ones are you can work it out or we'll we'll work it out together later on somebody who displays this I came across this great guy we have in the book called Bart Connor have you heard about Connor Bart Connor I met him in Oklahoma and when Bart was six in Morton Grove Illinois he found that he could walk on his hands as easily as he could walk on his feet I mean that to him was what maths was to Terence town you know he could just do that it wasn't much used to anybody you know but it it won him social points and then he found as he got a little bit older that he could walk up stairs on his hands as well well again you know it wasn't a great career advantage it didn't see him at the time but he said you know it kept him in in the kind of social frame you know if there were parties the house and the conversation lolled you know you know his dad would say Bart just demands thing there yeah his mother however paid attention to this and a couple of years later I think when he was around 8 she suggested to the gymnastics teacher at school that they take part to the gymnastic Center down 10 so they did and Bart said he walked into this Center he said I can't tell you the feeling I had he said it to me it was like a mixture of Disneyland and Santa's grotto he said you know there were ropes and trapeze and vaulting horses and wall bars he said it was totally intoxicating I see here again I do not have that feeling when I go into gymnasium you know when I go to de Mazen I want to get intoxicated you know but anyway he went in there and he because he loved it so much he went every day for the next ten years and ten years later he walked onto the mat at the Montreal Olympics representing America and the male gymnastics squad and he became the most decorated male gymnasts in American history he now lives in Norman Oklahoma he's married to Natick common edge recall they have this amazing gymnastics School in Norman Oklahoma and he and NADRA become leading figures in the world Special Olympics movement which has helped to liberate the physical capacities of tens of thousands of disabled Olympians it's a wonderful trajectory but it also illustrates an important point apart from the capacity and the passion it illustrates something else which is profoundly important about organic development he did not know and nor did his mother know what would become of investing in this capacity they had it was just clear that his mother that this was important about Bart and it was to be encouraged it wasn't actually had a grand plan you know I'd that very she was thinking about hang on bark and do this there's this girl in Romania you know we move it right you don't know what she did was encouraged something special in him and what that did was create a relationship with the world that Bart was living in which fed his talent and enriched the world he moved into that's what I mean about organic growth a healthy organism lives reciprocally with its environment and shapes and enriches the environment on which it depends and it's true with us too if we're fulfilled we in which the environment which feeds back in which is our own lives but we can't plan the outcome I mean most of us had no idea what we would be doing at this point in our lives I guess I mean you compose a narrative when you come to write your resume I mean I do that you know I mean I listen to my resume I think this is so impressive you know because somebody else has put a story around it but it was never quite like that so I think it's important for us and I think it's especially important for our children let me just say this one other thing about it it's important because we have to recognize the nature of organic development in our selves and in our children and that we don't create bad conditions for them and I think actually doing this at the moment in a very particularly let me ask you how many of you have had your tonsils removed okay now how many of your baby boomers now Ionis it again ask a roomful of teenagers this question people of our generation ima boomer people of our generation routinely had their tonsils taken out did we not the minute you showed any sign of a sore throat in the fifties and sixties somebody would pounce upon you and take your tonsils out when I was a kid you couldn't afford to clear your throat in public Oh somebody put their hands down your throat and remove whole sections of it your tonsils often your adenoids while they're in there and often people had their tonsils taken out not because they had a problem but because their siblings did and their parents shall look take his out as well it'll save us coming back or people that would take it for the for the ice cream which was free America millions and millions of tonsils were removed what happened to the tonsils what are chicken nuggets you know we do know but we don't but it's worth learning them our children this generation do not suffer from the plague of tonsillectomies very few kids these days have their tonsils taken out comparatively what it illustrates are firstly we have other ways of dealing with it and secondly it's no longer a medical habit doctors when we were kids routinely did it whether it's necessary or not as a kind of precaution it was a fashion a fashion which people have thought differently about and thought better off this generation of kids does not suffer from the false plague of tonsillectomies kids have their tonsils taken out if it's critical not as a matter of routine they suffer I think from another false plague which is the I believe the mythical plague of ADHD now I do not mean to say so you've got your discount originally I do not mean to say that there is no such thing as ADHD you know qualified doctors pediatricians psychologists agree there is there is a condition and I'm not qualified to question the existence of the condition but what I do want to raise a question about is the extent of this apparent epidemic I simply don't believe it you know in the mid 80s it was thought half a million kids in America had ADHD the current estimates are closer to eight million this is a bonanza you know for drug companies they were handing out these medications sometimes on the flimsiest flimsiest of evidence because kids are kind of disengaging from things they're doing at school I know students who take this stuff just strategically to get them through the program and see I have a big interest in aesthetic experiences I asked a math professor years ago how would you assess a PhD in pure math now remember my facility with mathematics which is not good so I wondered how you would assess a pitch now used to supervise phd's in the humanities so I said how would you supervise a PhD in pure math I've never seen one actually I asked him first how long are they and he said well he'd seen one a little bow before that was 26 pages of math no I mean we're talking hard math obviously you know like remainders and things like that you know that mean things you don't know what we're dealing with you know but page after page after page of math you know with equals at the end expect so I said well how do you judge one I mean presumably is right you know you'd be fairly annoyed with you spent five years doing a PhD in pure math it comes back wrong you know see me you know he said no they are normally right normally I said well how'd you judge them he said well there are several factors the first is originality in other words has to break new ground it's how creative it is within the domain of the discipline but the second he treat me he said it's aesthetic I said why is that important he said because there's a strong intuition among mathematicians that mathematics is the purest way we have of describing the truths of nature and since nature is inherently beautiful there's a powerful feeling the more elegant the proof the more likely it is to be true to chord with the truths of nature so he sets an informal test if it's an ugly proof it probably isn't right that's beautiful isn't it he could be describing a poem or a symphony or sonata or a dance and in a way it is you actually think we make far too much of the distinction between the Arts and Sciences there's so much art in science and Summit's science and the arts and yet we develop these separate categories of people aesthetic experience drives many of our deepest impulses in our sense of purpose in every field an aesthetic experience is one when you are fully alive and engaged in this experience when you are wide awake and vibrating with the resins the beauty of this moment the opposite of aesthetic is an aesthetic an anesthetic is where you shut your senses down so you can cope with the discomfort and I think that's what we're doing with a lot of our kids we're dulling their senses to keep them with the program and actually we should make the program more interesting our to wake them up not put them to sleep and they're living in the most data-driven most stimulating environment in the history of the earth and we need to help them engage that fully and accept the challenge that presents to us as parents and as educators and also the implication has for ourselves given that we may have lost touch with some of our deepest capacities so the organic principle is vital and I just want to end by saying this that we live here not far from Death Valley in Nevada and it tells us something important if you look at the management chart of most organizations whether it's a company or a school or an art gallery or whatever it is if you look at the management chart it looks a bit like a technical drawing doesn't it you know that you have boxes and lines connecting it and dots it looks like an exploded component and it all conduces the idea that a human organization is like a mechanism in fact people talk about their functions but the truth of it is a human organization is not at all like a mechanism a human organization is like any other or like any living organism it's organic it's much more like an organism than a mechanism it depends on feelings and connections and relationships and motivations and sensibilities all those things I mean if all the people leave the building there's no organization left the organization is the people and their relationships the Gardeners know something that we I think should be applying to our own lives we should get away from this industrial metaphor and return to a more ancient metaphor of Agriculture farmers and gardeners depend upon making plants grow and having healthy plants flourish the irony is they can't make it happen plants grow themselves what gardeners know are there are certain conditions under which it's more likely to happen and their job is to provide those conditions and I think the same is exactly true of human beings in certain conditions we flourish and in some we wilt Death Valley is called Death Valley because nothing rose then nothing grows there because it doesn't rain in the winter of 2004 it rained seven inches of rain fell on Death Valley and in the spring of 2005 something remarked or hand the whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted with flowers as far as you could see people came from all over America to witness this phenomenon that they may never see again Death Valley was alive actually what it demonstrate is that Death Valley was never dead it's asleep dormant right beneath the surface the seeds of possibility waiting for the conditions to come when they will flourish and then it stopped raining and it all went back in and the life did what life does it protect itself in the husk against the harshness of the environment and I think it's exactly the same with people - same with kids as same with you with me and our communities if the conditions are asked people get protective and hostile if you change the conditions they start to flourish in a different way and that's really what we should be concerned about not treating schools as factories or organizations as mechanisms not standardizing - modernizing or personalizing and customizing around the core talents that make is truly human there was a great conversation I read recently with Michelangelo my high Renaissance Italian is not good by the way social paraphrasing but effectively he was he was talking about making the David you know that extraordinary statue and he said you know I can't really take responsibility for that or credit for it I didn't create the David I revealed it it was in the stone already I just found it he said nach it's easy the javascript is easy all you have to do all I had to it was to remove the part of the stone that were not David and it revealed itself and I feel in a way that's what we should be thinking about as we look at ourselves in the people around us getting things out the way that aren't really ours and letting the things inside us that are us start to come to life and give them some breath and some life you also said something very interesting Michael and Joe he said the problem with human beings is not that we aim too high and fail more often it's that we aim too low and succeed so part of I think this process of being our element is to start rethinking the richness of our own capacities and to think better of them and to create the conditions under which that will happen the things were good at and the things we might love to do because in the end I really believe it fundamentally for us for our children for our schools and our communities finally your passion changes everything thank you [Applause] thank you very much thank you thank you very much ah summer - my introductory remarks turning now to my major theme we've got some time for some questions if you're on for that we also have microphone I would like to we have some microphones so um you guys keep just for a few minutes before we just get to that I just want to offer a couple of things if I may firstly there are some people here one of the reasons I'm thrilled to be here in California is there are so many friends of mine I'm not gonna name you all you know who you are but I want to just point a couple people out this book would not have happened and would not be in the book shops and will not be in your hands later on I hope we're not for my wife and partner Terry where is she Simon please a couple of years ago I was at a conference I was telling the story of Julian Lin that some of you may remember from the TED conference and I came off at the end I said I'm going to write a book about these things at some point these are foolish comments to make in front of Terry she she said when are you going to do that book I said oh soon and I kept procrastinating eventually she started it herself random people up started doing interviews found an age until I was totally embarrassed and had to get on and do it so she really did frost the whole creative process now I just want to acknowledge her publicly for the great work she did and I've also dedicated the book to a number of people including where's Kate whereas my daughter Kate and my son James I want them to stand up because they're not normally here if you would thank you very much and down here is Andrea Hanna who is our assistant to make the whole thing work please enjoy Andrews having a baby read this book Andrea so some comments please yes right at the frontier it will started what our treasure is keep getting people at the far end these stairs for you if not V okay so you okay yes I could understand people spending their lives doing things they would rather not do for social or financial reasons but have you encountered people adults say over 35 years old who discovered at that time in their life that they had a significant Elif or something and they had no idea about it before yes and if so how did that come about we have all kinds of examples in the book of people who either went to something fresh or went back to something they left behind I mean there a famous example of one of our great friends is wonderful one call Susan Jeffers and Susan was a hospital administrator for years and did all kinds of very interesting work but then in the middle of her life decided that she wanted to talk about the things that stopped people doing the thing things they love to do and it's a very interesting story that we tell in the book there's a chapter called is it too late but gendered running a course in New York on fear the process of fear and she called the course feel the fear and do it anyway she wrote a book about that based on the course that was turned down by numerous publishers but eventually she persevered and several years later had it published it's become one of the best-selling books in this field ever she sold over 4 million copies she's travelled the world as written 11 other books since has changed many many people's lives but that didn't start until she was in the middle of her own life there are lots of examples of that of people who've turned to either the arts or to move even to science or to teaching midlife and that's really important to me now this life is not a one-way street this important to recognize it's not you know if you it's not as if you miss it the first time that it's all over there's always an opportunity to go back and try again or and often I found particularly our generation we talk a lot now about encore careers you know people who kind of put their own ambitions on hold for a while what better time is than now to start to think you know what what's that and can I try it thank you for the question charge something at the back yeah yeah Thanks I think the next one will be over here some add anything if you want I can walk over there not hey no a few years ago at the Getty we had the pleasure of having lunch with you and it did I hate no actually I bought so you okay that's a real pleasure it was mine too and still is and we talked about what you were going to do next and at the time because I'd bought lunch you felt the need to say something and so you said well I'm thinking about writing a book about the epiphanies yes and we talked about it and I said well what about the process of getting there and you said well yeah that's valid - but epiphanies you know it's more exciting it's kind of pop to it so I was curious how you went from writing a book about epiphanies to writing a book about element without the other story about the lady who started to write it herself okay um that's no lady that's my wife but I this this is the book that began life is epiphany I liked epiphany as a kind of holding title actually that's what the creative process is like you know you start somewhere you need to anchor a process somewhere but then often you'll evolve into some of the direction the reason we moved off epiphany was partly because it's true that for some people there is a moment of Revelation that was true certainly for Bart Conner going to the gymnasium was a moment of Revelation the number of those in the book but it's not necessarily like that it's not necessarily road to Damascus inversion often I find people's towns unfold in the process of doing something it kind of creeps up on them that this is the right thing they should be doing and so describing what the center of it was and being in your element centers to be a better thing altogether and the other way in which is shifted was originally the book was going to be a collection of stories topped and tailed but we came to realize that what's much more important is what these mean for everybody else you know that it's not just the stories it's what the implications are in a way the book isn't about the people in it is about the rest of us and that's what we try to do so do I owe you lunch is somebody getting up unfortunately done yes I'm tired of most of this year Utley let's talk yes hi good evening and thank you I have to tell you with all due respect to your wife I love you this book is so dry said not to mention that when she was here this book is so needed for the masses and I completely agree with your premise probably because I have lived it and only have found my passion in the past three months due to the rest of the world not wanting me with what I thought I was there to give in a proven time and time again I have been a realtor I went to law school on scholarship I've been a diplomat I've been a marketer you name it I've done it in pursuit of finding my passion and I have finally found it and I have never been happier and now that I found it and started my company I have more clients than I know what to do with so finding your passion doesn't necessarily mean you'll be poor and I actually believe that when you do what you love and you're good at what you love to do the whole thing will come together thank you very much thank you very much thank you can I just say by the way we've launched a website for the book called the element book calm we have a blog there and we're really interesting at people's stories as well up there so thank you for that let's have somebody come over here if that's all right we've got never got more than one microphone yes you're presupposing that the environment if not conducive at least allows is not toxic to finding your passion what do you do and that's not true particularly as we're discovering on a very large societal basis you talk about the natural environment now no I'm talking about the social environment you know our world is collapsing and if you followed business for a long time it's been very clear and you know the larger organizations the people are being grounded the end of the dust for someone's profit yeah that's right um let me I want to show you some pictures which will I think speak to that can you put these slides up for a minute but you might be interesting that this quickly this a map of the alleged instance in America of ADHD the light areas of weather isn't much and the dark areas are where there's a lot you can see immediately that this is nonsense because according to this there isn't much in California yeah come on but according this people start losing interest round about Oklahoma and get more and more distracted as they head east until they get to Washington and can't think straight at all which may be true well that's Death Valley and that fantastic in the spring of 2005 just have a quick read of that and I promise you this is to your point I love this quote this is Bertrand Russell the British philosopher um by the way would you forgive the mail language here he wrote this in the 1950s when he didn't know he couldn't so I don't want a corrected now he's dead it seems impertinent really but but this seems to me to capture the essential question of Western philosophy you know is life meaningless and random and pointless and accidental or is it as full of purpose and possibility as Shakespeare's great tragic hero Hamlet believed it to be I got very interested in the first part of this question you know the small and unimportant planet bit now we know the planet is small it may be unimportant but how small is it really relatively you see the problem in trying to get any feel for it is images like this from the Hubble telescope we know for example that light at the distances in space are measured in lightyears which is the distance that light travels in the year this is far you know this is further than Paris now this area on this photograph covers a distance across of seven hundred thousand light-years so what are going to do with that information you know you go oh wow you know a huge unquestionably huge but you can't get your head around that so how big is the earth in the middle of all it so I came across this fantastic set of images which I really like and something had the brilliant idea of taking the earth out of the sky and putting it on the ground with some other planets for comparison with no distance involved so it's like a team photo okay of parts of the cosmos so this that's what this is I've had them rear-ended for your pleasure that's the first one isn't that fantastic now a couple of things just say very quickly about this I think we're looking groove you don't you cover things the first is I think we are less worried now than we were about being invaded by Martian hordes don't you I mean bring it on I feel yeah you and whose army exactly yeah and the other thing is that Pluto is no longer planet and frankly we can see why now coming it's it's a boulder but keep you and the earth as we pull back a little bit and bring some other planet in and it's all a bit less encouraging really isn't it you know I mean Jupiter is a big deal in Pluto as a kind of cosmic embarrassment isn't it right who led Pluto in but still you know what were but okay I mean obviously Dhruv is a big deal but we know the Sun is very large compared towards but you know how large compared to read you know it means you have a sense of the scale of that is it like twice the size of Jupiter three times you know here it is with the with the Sun in did you know that just one quick question by the way while we're here how come we can't get all the energy we need from that thank you it's if Edison said this years ago he said all our energy should come from the Sun and instead I mean to your point we're burning the ground beneath our feet you know it's like being at sea and burning the ship and choking ourselves to death in the process so okay so the Sun is a big deal and grateful for that that Jupiter is now Pluto on this scale of course but keep running the Sun as you pull back a bit more and there's the Sun without tourists in the picture the earth is gone now totally invisible Jupiter's about one pixel on that scale and the Sun is a poor version of Pluto but keep your eye on Arcturus and the Sun as we come back once more the Sun is now one pixel Jupiter's gone and by the way these are just a few of the bodies in the near neighborhood of the cosmos so when you go back there there we are in cosmic terms pitifully small inconceivably tiny now it's not to make a couple of quick comments about this the first is that whatever you woke up worrying about this morning get over it honestly I mean make the call apologize and move on because it was almost certainly your fault everything about it but the but the second thing is this that we may be pitifully tiny in cosmic terms maybe scrappy and unimportant but nonetheless we are still the species that did produce Hamlet and the Sistine Chapel and the David and the great religions of the world and quantum mechanics and digital culture and 6000 languages currently spoken on earth and the great edifices of human culture from the beginning of human history these are not insignificant achievements and I believe we are all this to a single capacity that distinguishes from every other species on earth I mean the power of imagination the power to bring to mind things that aren't present to our senses however many senses it turns out we actually have now I don't mean to say that other animals don't have imagination I don't know I do know there's some striking differences if you take a small child into the garden and point at the moon the child will look at the moon take your dog into the garden a point of the Moon and the dog will look at your finger you know quizzically other animals sing but they don't compose operas you know they communicate but they don't write plays they look puzzled but they don't write tomes of philosophy they get depressed but they don't listen to Miles Davis and drink Jack Daniels you know and hang out saying yeah I've got this coyote thing really bad you just don't understand it and they don't sit round in forest clearings look at these images going I had no idea this capacity we have is the most extraordinary power that survives McTell is unique to humankind and we owe everything that we take for granted to it and it's applications through the creative process and my point is to you is that yes the world is in a parlous state because of our actions for the most part and we have it within our power and our capacity to begin to remake some of this it won't be quick and it won't be sudden but we do have the power to do that we have the capacity beginning where we are in our own circumstances in our own way I believe under this new presidency the chance of improved dramatically although the situation's are pretty parlous but I never give up on this you know with we've faced bad times and I think we have extraordinary problems to face in the environment and in our cultural relationships but changes happen quite profound changes happen and we have at the moment the most sophisticated communication systems in the history of the earth binding people together in a different way and if we know anything we're human history is surprising things can happen where the will starts to generate itself and I I don't think I'm deluding myself myself I feel I travel a lot around the world and I find people shifting their position wanting to figure these things out seeing that this old system is collapsing for good reasons and you know if you'd accept the organic metaphor always beneath the ruins there's new growth coming up and it's the new growth I think may have to encourage and go with let's just have a couple more quick comments then we'll finish thank you let's person over here I think I just have a quick quick couple of quick comment symbol we'll wrap this up yes thank you um I have a question about I don't know if you talked in your book about dreams and how people tell you to not give up on your dreams and that's a really um it pertains to me right now and how I've been good at something and I go to college he's la think I'll be good at it and I encounter some classes some some new stuff that's just not way over my head and so if you now I talked to people at South two counselors they say just hang in there and you know and there's this um this common idea that you know you will be challenged if you want to do something that you want so where is the boundary where's this thin line when you think or you can say that it's time to give up time to move on and find my other passion and for a person like me who likes a lot of stuff it's even harder so I don't know if you talked about in your book about how when to give up if that's the right term to say thank you it's obviously a very personal call you know something I would want to hang on the question though is that I'm not suggesting that people are limited to one thing I don't think everyone is this like this just is one thing many people have many things that they loved and feel equally passionate about occasionally some things move ahead of the rest and they spend more time on that than something else you know if you look back to the polymath of the past soon as the Renaissance people didn't feel they had to have a specialized at that point and I think for as long as you can keep things in balance there's no reason why you shouldn't try to do that I think in time some it will show itself you know it'll become clear where your energies are really being drawn most powerfully if you just have one more we who were gone you pick I know this all all thoughts are confusing you mentioned teachers earlier yes and in your opinion how can we produce better teachers well I think that well firstly I have great respect for teachers as I've worked in education most of my life and they do an extraordinary job in very difficult circumstances and I don't hold teachers individually responsible for some of the issues I'm describing I think what I'm describing but I know what it is is a systemic problem the whole culture of public education is rooted in the 18th and 19th centuries and we are living in the 21st century this present system is put together my visionary people you know Thomas Mann in America the founding fathers of America you know Jefferson and Franklin had much to say about education they were visionaries in the way they foresaw the challenges they were facing but they didn't foresee this you know Franklin was a straw Denari polymath you know a statesman an entrepreneur an inventor a writer extraordinary and a great visionary in at the founding of the democratic system in America and his thought of influence as the Enlightenment did generally our current education soon we didn't see this you know they were good but they weren't that good it wasn't like Thomas Jefferson said by the way there's a footnote here on the possible emergence of digital culture in the 21st century just bear that in mind in case it comes along you know it's a systemic problem and it takes two sorts of actions it needs leadership at the top and I hope we'll find that in this administration we certainly didn't find it in the last one but it also means activity at the grassroots level now in the end education happens in the minds of individuals in individual settings individual groups of people the relationship between teachers and taught and we have to remember that the great problems for education reform or when people lose sight of that and forget that education is personal that it's not mechanical you know kids will achieve enormous things if you tune into how they think in their particular talents if you D personalize them and treat them as a commodity they will become in alienated I can't imagine that kid in California who gets up in the morning think what can I do to raise the state's reading scores you know how can I help call me you know I'm at your disposal but get them to think differently and that's the skill of great teachers I remember talking to one of Kate's teachers she was having a hard time with she was it was the teacher I think and well I know it was and and I said Kate is a brilliant student beautiful and gifted its genetic as you can see and Hunter well you see and Terry so remember saying this teacher you know how's Kate getting on and she said well she's very abled but I think she has an attitude problem I said what's the problem she said well she seems bored all the time I said do you have any theories about that she said how'd you beam I said well could it be boring she this is a French class and she said well we tried to make it as interesting as possible but you have to accept the sub master works of learning language or just boring I said well I don't you see I really don't I mean I'm not aware of houses of French teenagers giving up on French every year on the grounds it's too tedious you know I'm moving to Denmark where it's much more interesting you know to speak Danish this is nonsense I said no no no that's a problem the wrongs you are boring you know I've been here for five minutes I'm already still to find great teachers make anything interesting that's what teaching is about and we will not improve education anywhere until we invest in the power creativity and vocational integrity of great teachers no education is better than the teachers ever anywhere okay we ought to stop because we're trying to wring money out of you here there's also no no but let me again thank you for coming I've also just realized that the lady I was talking about Susan Jeffers is here and I want to acknowledge Susan Susan if you wouldn't mind standing up you can invoke film up here a great friend of ours as well as a pediatrician Harvey Karp here's here please Harvey wrote the hackus child on the block Alec Harvey has the most advanced understanding of what really makes children succeed in their elyes of anybody in America at the moment and I do recommend his work too and can I also thank you sincerely for coming I was asked how long it took me to write this book you know and there were several answers one of them is six months and the other is 50 odd years and it really isn't it wasn't the case I just decided I was going to knock a book out you know these are issues that have preoccupied me for most of my professional life and I feel they're fundamentally important and that we need to address them in our own lives and systematically and it's something I hope that will start a conversation that even if it doesn't totally end it and that you'll become part of it because in the end I think if we all start to think different in act differently extrordinary things will come you find this all the time you know with people you know you look at death value think that's a bit miraculous it is but it's always the way with people and students and ourselves that if you make a small change sumit miraculous might happen the think about saying it's about a miracle makes it sound exceptional but really everybody in a way has a miracle waiting to happen if they find the right conditions and I suppose what I'm trying to say in the book is we're all in the miracle business here and there's no better business truthfully thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: UCLA

Views: 241,454

Rating: 4.9167089 out of 5

Keywords: uclachannel, ucla, hammer, museum, ken, robinson

Id: yJAL21IE9fY

Length: 83min 16sec (4996 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 06 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/380nm]

Thank you. I loved Ken Robinsons TED talk.