Now Be Thankful

The contemplation above is from Seth Godin’s The Thanksgiving Reader.

It contains many more pearls of wisdom that could come in handy tomorrow.

The full PDF is here. Feast your eyes upon it before the feast.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Read (and write) all about it

From Seth Godin’s daily blog:

Our dreaming opportunity

School and work push us to avoid real dreams. Dreamers are dangerous, impatient and unwilling to tolerate the status quo. Existing systems would prefer we simply fit in.

The dreams we need to teach are the dreams of self-reliance and generosity. The only way for us to move forward is to encourage and amplify the work of people who are willing to learn, to see and to commit to making things better.

It turns out that reading and writing are the cornerstones of this practice, now more than ever. These are the two skills most likely to produce exponential results.

The effective writer can see their ideas spread to a hundred people overnight, or perhaps a million. Writing is still the bedrock tool we use to codify and share ideas, and it forces us to organize our thoughts.

But we can’t say it until we see it, which requires the commitment to reading and understanding, combined with the guts to dream and to lead.

Find the others, see the problem, and then decide to do something about it.

Great stuff, as always, from Seth. Reading expands your worldview. And the pen is mightier than the sword. It’s never been harder to carve out time for reading… but if you do, it’s never been easier to publish your thoughts.

Ditch the rankings

Seth Godin is on point (as always) with one of his most recent blog posts:

This is so true… it’s also tough to put into practice in a world obsessed with “best of” lists and rankings, and a culture obsessed with #winning.

It doesn’t have to be the “best ever”… it just has to be what it is. And we should be focused on the “be here now” of it all. Because the “here” and the “now” are all we’ve got. And that’s enough.

Searching for a Better Future

Did you know you can save the planet, and that it only takes a couple of minutes? OK, perhaps I’m exaggerating a bit, but if you switch your search engine to Ecosia, they’ll plant a tree for every 45 searches you do.

So your searches for the latest Kardashian news could actually be beneficial to society. (Reading up on the Kardashians will still rot your brain, but at least the planet will be healthier.)

Oh, and if you switch to Ecosia, you’ll be stickin’ it to The Man, too! The Man, in this case, is actually the 800-pound gorilla of Google. If you use Google for your search engine, they’re harvesting your data and using it to stick ads in your face… and making money off of it. By using a different search engine, you’re improving the overall health of the web.

The excerpt above is from Seth Godin’s blog post about switching to Ecosia. If you need more reasons, you’ll find them on the Ecosia blog.

I made the switch – it was super-easy, took less than 2 minutes, and I haven’t noticed any difference in the quality of my search results.

To be clear, there’s still money changing hands. But the money for search ads will go to Ecosia – a not-for-profit – instead of going into Google’s fat wallet. And Ecosia uses that income to plant trees. Also, Ecosia doesn’t sell your data to advertisers and doesn’t use third party trackers.

You can switch in seconds right here.

Classroom of the future

Here’s a great New York magazine interview with Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU Stern School of Business… and the man who accurately predicted Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods and WeWork’s valuation bubble. It covers something that a lot of parents of college-age kids have been pondering during coronavirus lockdown: if my kid can’t be on campus, why am I paying the big bucks for School A vs. the much more economical School B?

There’s a recognition that education — the value, the price, the product — has fundamentally shifted. The value of education has been substantially degraded. There’s the education certification and then there’s the experience part of college. The experience part of it is down to zero, and the education part has been dramatically reduced. You get a degree that, over time, will be reduced in value as we realize it’s not the same to be a graduate of a liberal-arts college if you never went to campus. You can see already how students and their parents are responding.

It’s like, “Wait, my kid’s going to be home most of the year? Staring at a computer screen?” There’s this horrific awakening being delivered via Zoom of just how substandard and overpriced education is at every level.

excerpts from the article linked above.

Lots of interesting food for thought. Galloway predicts that the tech titans (Amazon, Apple, Google) will get into the higher ed game. Well worth a read.

And from the student side, Seth Godin has long advocated for changes in our factory model educational system. This coronavirus crisis also provides us with an opportunity to rethink… nay, reimagine, how schools are set up. His manifesto, Stop Stealing Dreams, is quite thought-provoking. You can download a PDF version here.

In the post-industrial model, though, the lectures are handled by best-in-class videos delivered online. Anything that can be digitized, will be digitized, and isolated on the long tail and delivered with focus. What’s needed from the teacher is no longer high-throughput lectures or test scoring or classroom management. No, what’s needed is individual craftsmanship, emotional labor, and the ability to motivate.

Seth Godin in Stop Stealing Dreams

The world has changed. Colleges, and all schools, need to change as well.