Dr. Henry Lodge, coauthor of Younger Next Year, makes the point sharply. “It turns out,” he says, “that 70% of American aging is not real aging. It’s just decay. It’s rot from the stuff that we do.
Expert teachers fulfill four main roles: they engage, enable, expect, and empower. ENGAGE
Our schools have a doubly hard task, not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.
Whatever you woke up worrying about this morning, get over it. How important in the greater scheme of things can it possibly be? Make your peace and move on.
Kids aren’t particularly worried about being wrong. If they aren’t sure what to do in a particular situation, they’ll just have a go at it and see how things turn out. This is not to suggest being wrong is the same thing as being creative. Sometimes being wrong is just being wrong. What is true is that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.
Dan Baker agrees: “The myth that money brings you happiness is one of the happiness traps,” he says. In a study of 792 well-off adults, “more than half reported that wealth didn’t bring them more happiness and half of those with assets greater than $ 10 million said that money brought more problems than it solved.
The fun factor isn’t essential to creative work—there are many examples of creative pioneers who were hardly a laugh a minute. But sometimes when we’re playing around with ideas and laughing, we’re most open to new thoughts. In all creative work, there may be frustrations, problems, and dead ends along the way. I know some wonderfully creative people who find parts of the process difficult and deeply exasperating. But there’s always profound pleasure at some point, and a deep sense of satisfaction from “getting it right.”
