Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Derek Sivers on "Why You Need to Fail"

“While this quantity group was busy just churning out work and learning from their mistakes, the quality group, the one that was being judged just on one pot, had sat there theorizing about perfection, and in the end had nothing but grandiose theories and one mediocre pot.”
Really, really good stuff here. I don’t know about you, but I constantly need to be reminded of certain things. Much of what Sivers talks about in this video is familiar to me, especially all the examples he uses from music school. Not only that, but the section where he talks about “fixed mindset” vs. “growth mindset” sounds like pure Suzuki philosophy—the idea that any child can learn. He’s coming from a slightly different perspective, though, and these ideas are powerful and insightful. They gave me something fresh to work with this week, and I needed that. In fact, I think I'll add the entire video to my imaginary mental file titled, “All the Stuff You Learned from Violin That You Need to Apply to Parenting.” It’s a pretty thick file already, but this is a welcome addition.

I was going to lay out all the points for you, but honestly, doing that might tempt you to skip the video (it’s almost 15 minutes long) and go with my watered-down version, and that would be a shame. Take the time to watch it, and let me know what you think!