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.