For myself, I went into an industry I wasn’t educated on, and I thought, ‘Hey, yeah, let’s do this. Awesome.’ And I’ve really had to educate myself in the fashion world: undergarments, fabrics, and learning their language, but it’s been really great.
It’d be nice to learn enough from each mistake that we’d be guaranteed to never repeat that same mistake twice. But, how many times have you said, ‘I’ll never do that again,’ only to find yourself right back at it a few days later. Learning from our mistakes requires humility and a willingness to look for new strategies to become better.
When you’re an actor who just got his first big chunk of change, and you’re like, ‘What do I do with it?’ you try to look at Silicon Valley, and the learning curve is so huge. Especially on the investor side. I don’t want to say it’s like Vegas, in a sense, but you do kinda roll the dice on some companies. It’s like educated dice rolling.
In my early shows, I wanted to put myself through a new childhood, disintegrating my whole identity to let the real one emerge. I became a human jukebox, learning all these songs I’d always known, discovering the basics of what I do. The cathartic part was in the essential act of singing.
Before and after emancipation, the Negro, in self-defense, was propelled toward the white employer. The endowments of wealthy white men have developed great institutions of learning for the Negro, but the freedom of action on the part of these same universities has been curtailed in proportion as they are indebted to white philanthropies.
That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.
While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.
As a Millennial and Gen Z expert at Accenture I had the opportunity to host and lead several workshops and panels with key clients at industry events. The topics ranged from virtual reality to blockchain; artificial intelligence to machine learning.
I remember going to see my dad pitch against other coal-mining teams, and he was successful with the knuckleball. I saw how bad guys would look like swinging, and how guys talked about how he could throw every day and didn’t hurt his arm. That’s how I grew up learning.
I never could read science fiction. I was just uninterested in it. And you know, I don’t like to read novels where the hero just goes beyond what I think could exist. And it doesn’t interest me because I’m not learning anything about something I’ll actually have to deal with.
When I moved to Minnesota, I found there was a thriving and determined movement, a grassroots movement, to revitalize the Ojibwe language. And I’ve never come to be a competent speaker. I have to say that right now. But even learning the amount of Ojibwe that one can at my age is a life-altering experience.
Authors can get an attitude of us-against-them when it comes to publishers, but learning how authors and editors can work together taught me to look at my work in a different way and to make that work as solid as possible before it ever goes to the publisher.
When you come from a big family, you see that, growing up, you’re learning how to share. Your sisters have got your back; you’re not alone in this – ‘We all support you!’ Your family provides that; it gives you a sense of safety, and it’s a very grounding feeling.
I became a human jukebox, learning all these songs I’d always known, discovering the basics of what I do. The cathartic part was in the essential act of singing. When is it that the voice becomes an elixir? It’s during flirting, courtship, sex. Music’s all that.
As I’ve traveled the country, we visit tech incubators all the time where women are going into their second or third act in their career and learning how to be software programmers, or how to work at startup companies, and learning a completely different skill set. I think it’s never too late.
I think one of the critiques of me is that I thought I knew it all. But I was learning from the enormous resources available within the U.S. government who have a very different view of the world than many of the people commenting on foreign policy from outside of the government.
I found this deer toy that poops out candy. And so if I say, ‘Cree, you have to go to bed right now. You will get a candy.’ We’ve named the pooping deer ‘Gus.’… He gets a jelly bean. And it works. Positive reinforcement is the way to go. I’m learning things like that which help me be a better parent.
The worst mistake you can make with children is to talk to them in a condescending, patronising way and think that you can teach them something. You have to understand that it is you who will be learning from them. You have to get into their world and see things from their perspective.
I believe human beings mark a threshold in the development of the planet, of course, but it is only part of the picture. What Big History can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power, with collective learning.
The text, ‘Is God a White Racist’, By Rev. Dr. William Jones, is still studied by theologians and academics and taught in institutes of higher learning. The book called into question the chief construction of black liberation theology: that God is on the side of the oppressed.
In ‘Chappie,’ you see this sort of young robot that’s learning through maybe ‘deep learning’ how to see the world really, look out into the world, and learn step by step. What’s so interesting is that with ‘Chappie,’ you’re getting to see how human behavior reacts to artificial intelligence, and I don’t think it’s always going to be positive.
Artificial intelligence is one of 50 things that Watson does. There is also machine learning, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and different analytical engines – they’re like little Lego bricks. You can put intelligence in any product or any process you have.
My hair story has been unique because my mom’s a German Jew, so her hair is way different than my hair. She was always learning on my hair growing up, but I would sit there for hours, and she did learn how to braid hair. Early on, it was a lot of tears while my mom was braiding my hair.
My own personal aesthetic is all to do with real actors and real locations and a kind of almost hyper reality and actuality to things. But the digital world, I explore that through other mediums, with music videos and commercials. Even ‘The Road’ was a real learning curve for me with digital effects.
On ‘Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,’ I spent two or three months learning how to ride a motorcycle. I wasn’t really riding the motorcycle in 98 percent of the movie, but the shots of me getting on and off had to look like I had been doing it for years and years.
