TED Talk: Adam Grant - The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers

A long time ago I downloaded the TED Talks app on my tablet but in all the years it's been on there, I've not actually used it. The other day I opened it up, which caused it to start giving me some suggestions. I've watched a few of them in the past few days and here's one I feel is worth sharing.

It's all about what Adam Grant terms Originals - that is creative thinkers. He tells a story of how he missed an investment opportunity that would have paid off immensely for him because he didn't recognize that the ones who offered it to him were going to be successful.

A big part of the talk is how (moderate) procrastination can lead on to more creative responses. he says (and it's backed by his research) that if you put of completing a task it gives you more time to think and more time to come up with more ingenious solutions or responses. I found this to be very empowering as I do tend to be a person who procrastinates (and in fact, this blog post is a semi-procrastination from working on one of my Coding Across the Curriculum videos), but I also tend to come up with creative solutions. It's nice to see the connection between the two. It's also nice to be able to support those children who (again, moderately) procrastinate with their work - to give them time to think and mull over ideas. 

A second idea that he discusses is the idea that original people are full of doubt and fears. What is different however, is that the doubt is not self-doubt, but idea-doubt. That is, that original and creative people doubt that ideas will work, but don't give up on solving any problems. Many people doubt themselves so much that they don't even put ideas forward. This is not what originals do. He discussed the fact that you can (almost) predict the creativity of a person based on the internet browser they use (I'll let you watch the video to find out more on that though). The argument with that is not that your browser makes you creative, but the way you choose which browser you'll use reveals a lot about your mindset (so just changing browsers does nothing, I'm sorry to say to you Internet Explorer and Safari users - whoops, I just ruined the surprise).

The final point that he makes is that creative and original people produce a lot - and that a lot of it isn't their greatest. Most people who have done great and amazing things have got their because they tried many, many things. It is through those attempts that eventually they have discovered new and original ways of doing things. This ties into the whole idea that failure and mistakes help you grow (also doing an online course where this is being stressed - more on that when it's done).

Here's the talk below. It's definitely worth 15 minutes of your time. If you are one of the people he is describing then this can be very empowering. If you are not, then it can give you some insight into how you can be like that AND how you can recognize those people who are. 

Goal Setting and the Hamster Wheel of Life

Last week, as an add-on to a staff meeting we were shown this video about goals. Even though I made a few wisecracks about it while watching it, there are some important concepts within it that are beneficial to think about when it comes to any job, but especially education.

The video explains that goals are not necessarily the best thing to have. For example if your goal is to walk 10000 steps a day, once you reach it, it is pretty anticlimactic and you end up having to set a higher goal - say 11000 steps or more per day. 

The video then explains that it is more productive to have a system in place, rather than a goal. A system, according to him, is setting aside a specific amount of time to work on something. For example, our principal suggested setting aside one afternoon each week to do a certain task that many of the educators don't really enjoy doing - but can be overwhelming if not done. Instead of making the goal of finished x amount of tasks per week, the idea is to work on it x amount of time.

In my mind this is all semantics and is the difference between a result-oriented goal and a process-oriented goal (and that's how I'm going to refer to it in the future). At the end of the day, it's still a goal, but it's a more manageable goal that doesn't come with as much stress to finish something. 

I run a a lot (or at least I used to) and I've always adhered to this idea. When I planned what I would do each week, I focused on how much time I would run each day, NOT on how far. Thus, I made sure I put in the time to get better, but I put no pressure on myself if I wasn't feeling great that day. Eventually, putting in the time works a lot better as you don't feel like you've gotten behind on things.

So this past weekend, I tried doing just that. I said to myself that I would spend an hour on my weekly planning and I kept to it.  I felt afterwards that I had been more efficient than I usually was, as I was on a bit of a deadline. I also felt like I was more focused on the task at hand because I wasn't thinking about how much longer I had to work to get it all done, but how much longer I would work until I could move on to something else.

This is also about wellbeing. It's so easy in education to keep on working. The job is never really done. I can't count how many balls I'm trying to juggle at the moment (and that I've not done a good job of for the last few months - exhibit A would be the time between this post and the previous one). 

My next step is to make a weekly schedule to make sure that I'm doing the things I need to do regularly. So it will be an hour for activity x and 30 minutes for activity y.  This should help me be more consistent with things such as my Google Innovator Project (it's been a long while), this blog, more breakouts and more math videos - not to mention enjoying other aspects of my life!