every mom wants to be an all-powerful wizard
Max CEO and Co-Founder of Castle working at Rebirth House
Generation Startup is a documentary I just started watching on Netflix. It follows young entrepreneurs and employees of other startups as they try to make new companies successful. In the first ten minutes, several things have already caught my attention. Are low numbers of young entrepreneurs caused by our broken education system?
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Our school system is failing. We all know this. I started hearing it in high school, which was over twenty years ago. In the United States, our test scores are woefully behind other countries.
So how does the United States continue to turn out, to educate, entrepreneurs and teach innovation? In this post, I explore the idea of the English language giving rise to entrepreneurs….
Finland’s education system ranks at the top of the world by almost every measure, in all sorts of rankings. How do they do it? How is the US education system compared to Finland? To get more information, I watched The Finland Phenomenon:Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System, from the Robert Compton Documentary series on Global Education, directed by Sean T. Faust. In my first post, I looked at the differences between Finland’s school system and our school system and then at how the Finnish educational system structured.
How else do Finnish schools differ?
In Finland, they actively try not to punish students for mistakes and there’s very little testing….
I’ve read quite a bit of information about becoming an entrepreneur. Not that I’ve been able to put much of it into practice, but I’ve done a lot of research. Enough that while I was reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, and Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, I was surprised to notice when Jobs’ success occurred not because he followed what is often given as common advice, but when he deviated from it….
Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli points out that Job’s success in his second career at Apple depended not only on what he learned from the failures of NeXT and the successes of Pixar, but on him evolving personally, learning how to manage his weaknesses and fine tune his strengths. I went over some of his strengths in a previous post. So what were his characteristics that hampered him, especially earlier in his career? What were Steve Jobs’ weaknesses as a leader?…
According to Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, these were some characteristics of Steve Jobs that made him successful. I also read, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, the official biography, but because Becoming Steve focused more on his career and less on his personal life, it was easier to keep track of his characteristics in Becoming Steve. Some of these were characteristics that he was lacking – or weren’t well developed – the first time he was at Apple and led, all or in part, to his dismissal from the company. Some of these characteristics intersect with the ones that I went over before, the characteristics of Steve Jobs that are the opposite of what traditional education teaches.…
How did Steve Jobs, a college dropout, go on to found a computer company, get kicked out, help steer the success of Pixar, and make his way back to Apple and phenomenal success? Since he was a college dropout, it wasn’t from something he learned in college. In fact, he wasn’t much of a student in high school either. His opinion was that schools just made students memorize stuff, rather than teaching them interesting information. What were the entrepreneur skills Steve Jobs didn’t learn in school?…
My dissatisfaction with the current overbearing schedule for students in high school, has led me to do quite a bit of reading. (To see my reading list for books about success and education, click here.) One of the first books I read was Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcom Gladwell.
In the first half, Gladwell showed how the success of Outliers can be tied to luck, to timing, to “Opportunity.”
In the second half, Gladwell showed how the success of Outliers is also affected by where you come from and your culture, “Legacy.”
In my third post, I looked at my own conclusions from Outliers about what you needed to do to be successful. Hint: It has nothing to do with being a straight-A student.)
But the book is about what makes people an outlying success, like Steve Jobs. What factors does Gladwell think it takes to be an outlying success? Obsession….
A couple months ago I slipped on some water. I could tell you that I managed to catch all my weight with my right hand, so that I didn’t even get a bruise on any other part of my body.
Or I could tell you — that the over-achievement of my right arm and hand led to breaking my wrist.
Which has turned out to be more of a pain, in every possible definition of the word, than I thought it would be. Of course, I’m right handed. So this post, typed with one hand, will be short.
Related to the subject of this blog, I’ve been gathering information about education, job prospects, and entrepreneurship. This episode of the podcast Start Up, by Gimlet Media, shows an interesting connection between them. In this episode, the ADULT employees talk about the effects of their late hours and stress are having on their health and personal lives.
Their schedule sounds remarkably like high-achieving high school TEENS I know….