Whatever your aptitudes, the greatest source of achievement is passion. Aptitude matters, but passion often matters more… If you love doing something, you’ll be constantly drawn to get better at it.
Revolutions are defined not only by the ideas that drive them but by the scale of their impact.
Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it’s the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.
Human resources are like natural resources; they’re often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they’re not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.
The gardener does not make a plant grow. The job of a gardener is to create optimal conditions.
We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it’s impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.
The point is not to be the best, but to be the best you can be.
Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler did not solve an old problem, they asked a new question, and in doing so they changed the whole basis on which the old questions had been framed.
The Element is about discovering your self, and you can’t do this if you’re trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can’t be yourself in a swarm.
If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.
Creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.
You cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do is like a farmer create the conditions under which it will begin to flourish.
We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. (p.9)
Very often, organizations are inflexible because there is too little communication between functions; they are too segregated.
Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it’s produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.
Passion is the driver of achievement in all fields. Some people love doing things they don’t feel they’re good at. That may be because they underestimate their talents or haven’t yet put the work in to develop them.
You can be creative in anything – in math, science, engineering, philosophy – as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.
Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests.
If you’re running an engineering or finance company, all companies depend on ideas and ingenuity. I think the principles of creative leadership apply everywhere, whether it’s an advertising company or whether you’re running a hospital.
The answer is not to standardize education, but to personalize and customize it to the needs of each child and community. There is no alternative. There never was.
The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student’s education.
What you’re doing now, or have done in the past, need not determine what you can do next and in the future.