Benjamin Zander on music and passion

    I like classical music, but I don't think I always understand it.  I think I would be the person elbowing my sleeping companion and saying "Wake up! It's culture!" but I don't actually have a clue as to what that really means.  I think it's beautiful and inspired but I am also the kind of person who listens to it for a few minutes and then starts drifting off and thinking about summer vacation.  So I really appreciated Zander's passion and his cheerful, unwavering belief that "classical music is for everybody. Everybody."  It gives me hope that even though I could never get into Juilliard, I am still entitled to enjoy classical music and have it be a part of my life.   

     Now! On to discussing leadership and all that jazz (ha! like...music...).  I think the two most important quotes from Zander's speech were, "It's one of the characteristics of a leader that he not doubt for one moment the capacity of the people he's leading to realize whatever he's dreaming" and, "I realized my job was to awaken possibility in other people."  The first is an interesting idea that’s relatively new to me.  I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about measuring leaders by the extent of their faith in people they are leading, but it’s an excellent measuring tool.  If you, as the figurehead of a movement/company/idea don’t believe in your followers, how are they supposed to believe in themselves?  You have to “awaken possibility” in your people; you have to help show them their own potential. I loved when he talked about seeing the “sparkling eyes” of his students and his audiences, and how that was another measure of success for him.  Because, if you’re not making people love what they do, you need to stop and reconsider your course of action.

The 3 A's of Awesome

            This Ted Talk came right in the nick of time.  Just yesterday I found myself feeling really down and negative because I have a million and a half things to do over the course of the next week (write a paper, take a test, study for another test that’s worth 35% of my grade, plan this alumni networking event, and keep on top of all of my day-to-day reading and homework…).  I was slowly spiraling down into a pit of despair, one which I felt I could not dig myself out of.  But then I stopped to think: I am healthy, financially stable, fairly intelligent, a student at a fun and excellent university, and I can count a million other blessings.  Why am I so miserable, or rather, why am I allowing myself to think I’m so miserable?  Things are not that bad.  I liked all three of Neil Pasricha’s A’s, but my favorite, and the one I was most lacking yesterday, was awareness.  There are so many miracles and beautiful details in the world around us every day, and the majority of them go unnoticed and unappreciated.  But I find when I force myself to notice these things, I also find it absolutely inexcusable to be unhappy about things that, in the big picture, don’t matter that much.  I think this is something we could really tap into as a council.  At the end of last winter semester, finals started on a Saturday.  I decided to take a break from studying and a friend and I spent over three hours drawing pictures and writing poems in colorful chalk on the sidewalk/plaza outside the JFSB.  We invited everyone who walked past us to leave their mark and we got a huge response!  People loved it.  It was fun, simple, not at all time-consuming, and it appealed to the three-year old inside each of us.  People walked away smiling and they told us they felt less stressed and more prepared to face their finals.  It was a wonderful experience, and it made people stop and revel in one of life’s simple pleasures.  I'm thinking...we should do something like that. :) 

Kathryn Schulz: On Being Wrong

This topic, this human need to be right all of the time (to the extent that we tell ourselves we are right, we believe we are right, even when we are clearly wrong) is an interesting one that I haven’t thought about much before watching this TED talk.  But she’s definitely hit on something.  I felt guilty when she showed the “series of unfortunate assumptions” up on the screen, because I react that way most of the time when I encounter people who think and act much differently than I myself do.  I usually peg them as ignorant, dumb, or evil (maybe that’s too strong of a word, but somewhere along those lines…) because the only alternative is to accept their view of life as valid and well-informed, and doing that means accepting that my way is not the only way, that my version of reality is not directly equivalent with Absolute Truth.  It’s a huge fault of mine that I am continually working on (I’ve come a long way since high school) but I still fall into those fallacious assumptions from time to time.  To apply this to the Council, even though we are all Humanities College students, we still have different backgrounds, interests, and life-styles that contribute to the way we perceive the world.  And, most likely, we all think we’re right.  So how do we overcome this need to be right?  How do we reconcile our view of the world with those of others?  Because we need to be able to do these things in order to serve the students of the Humanities College, who also have different views from our own.  One of my favorite quotes was, “Because, unlike God, we don't really know what's going on out there. And unlike all of the other animals, we are obsessed with trying to figure it out. To me, this obsession is the source and root of all of our productivity and creativity.”  Maybe if we recognize that human productivity and creativity is only possible when we have a plethora of diverse opinions and experiences, we will be more open to the possibility of our own wrongness, or at least, the narrowness of our own experience.

Fringe Benefits of Failure

Can I just say that J.K. Rowling is the woman?!  What an incredible talk!  I found myself legitimately moved by this talk, and there were a few moments that especially stuck out to me.  I thought the most incredible quote was the following: 

“And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.”

Wow. Just, wow.  I feel like this theme has been coming up a lot in our discussions, especially in the “seminars” that Brady and Shaun gave at our retreat a few weeks ago.  It’s an interesting dichotomy that having empathy, having the ability to identify with others and to feel compassion, at once makes you extremely vulnerable but also a stronger, better human being.  It seems like the general consensus of the educated on this issue is that nothing of value comes without sacrifice; you have to be willing to go out on a limb, you have to be fully invested (and thus vulnerable, because you’re in a position to lose everything) in order to achieve big things and to make big gains.  One of Shaun’s mottos so far this year has been “go big or don’t go at all.”  If you’re going to fail, at least fail spectacularly and learn something from it.  If your failures are small, that means you didn’t invest very much in the project to begin with.  Fail or succeed, but don’t get stuck somewhere in the middle.  And this brings me to another one of my favorite quotes from the talk which was:  

“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential.”

I think this is where we can really learn something and apply it to our council.  We need to learn to objectively analyze our failures.  What went wrong?  What did we do that was unnecessary or “inessential”?  How can we remove these things from our process and try again?  These are the questions we need to ask every time something doesn’t work out so we are better prepared to succeed the next time.

Inspiring Leadership

I found both of these TED talks incredibly insightful and inspiring.  The main idea I took from Derek Sivers' talk, and the idea that struck me most forcefully, because I had never considered it before, was the idea that the leader may be the one who has the idea first, but it is the first followers who are truly responsible for starting the movement.  The half-naked guy was the first one dancing, and it took a lot of courage for him to be "the lone nut" but it took almost more courage for the second guy to start dancing, thus associating himself with the nut and putting his dignity and reputation on the line.  We as a council, when we want to get a project or an idea moving, have to find those people who see a good idea and are willing to go out on a limb to be one of the innovators that Simon Sinek talked about in his talk.  And the way we do this is by advertising the "why" (the center of Sinek's "golden circle").  Why should people care about Humanities+?  What good is it going to do them in their real lives, in their education, in their careers?  Are we, as a council, even sure about what we believe?  As Sinek says, people buy what you believe and if we do not have a strong belief foundation, we're not going to attract those innovators and those diehards who are willing to work for our cause.  We have to have a vision, a mission statement, and only then will people follow us.