Quote of the Week:

"He is no fool, who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." (Jim Elliot)



Drop me a line if you want to be notified of new posts to SiTG:


My site was nominated for Best Parenting Blog!
My site was nominated for Hottest Daddy Blogger!




www.flickr.com
This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from Woodlief. Make your own badge here.

The Best of Sand:

The Blog
About
Greatest Hits
Comedy
DVD Reviews
Faith and Life
Irritations
Judo Chops
The Literate Life
News by Osmosis
The Problem with Libertarians
Snapshots of Life
The Sermons


Creative Commons License
All work on this site and its subdirectories is licensed under a Creative Commons License.



Search the Site:




Me Out There:

Non-Fiction
Free Christmas
Don't Suffer the Little Children
Boys to Men
A Father's Dream
WORLD webzine posts

Not Non-Fiction
The Grace I Know
Coming Apart
My Christmas Story
Theopneustos



The Craft:

CCM Magazine
Charis Connection
Faith in Fiction
Grassroots Music



Favorite Journals:

Atlantic Monthly
Doorknobs & Bodypaint
Image Journal
Infuze Magazine
Orchid
Missouri Review
New Pantagruel
Relief
Ruminate
Southern Review



Blogs I Dig:




Education & Edification:

Arts & Letters Daily
Bill of Rights Institute
Junk Science
U.S. Constitution



It's good to be open-minded. It's better to be right:

Stand Athwart History
WSJ Opinion



Give:

Home School Legal Defense
Institute for Justice
Local Pregnancy Crisis
Mission Aviation
Prison Ministries
Russian Seminary
Unmet Needs



Chuckles:

Cox & Forkum
Day by Day
Dilbert







Donors Hall of Fame

Alice
Susanna Cornett
Joe Drbohlav
Anthony Farella
Amanda Frazier
Michael Heaney
Don Howard
Mama
Laurence Simon
The Timekeeper
Rob Long
Paul Seyferth



My Amazon.com Wish List

Add to Technorati Favorites






August 03, 2004
Learn

My wife copied down this quote from Eric Hoffer and left it on my bedside table:

"In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."

I suspect that most of us have areas of our lives where we are learners, and areas where we are learned. It's wisdom well-taken, isn't it, that in everything where we seem to be successful, we should have the humility and intellectual honesty to consider whether we haven't crossed over the boundary from learner to learned?

But it seems to be wisdom seldom taken. So consider for a moment the areas where you might rightly be regarded by your peers as learned. Are you open -- truly open -- to the new idea?

Of course we all say "yes." How can we not? But is the reality in fact something different? What I see at times, for example, is learned people proclaiming that the new idea "has been tried before." They pretend that the new idea is in fact an old, failed idea, and warn others away from it. Now, there's nothing new under the sun, so to speak, and so the reality of innovations is that most of them are combinations of ideas, tools, and strategies tried and discarded before. Thus it is easy for the learned to reject the new by telling himself that it is really old.

And so in field after field, the innovations of learners overtake the conventions of the learned, who are the last to discover that yes, the world has changed.

This is a vulnerability borne of pride. It was pride that led editorial writers at the New York Times, for example, to proclaim in 1921 that Robert Goddard, the eventual father of rocket science, "lacks the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." It takes humility, on the other hand, to follow the advice of Peter Drucker, who once wrote that, "It is much cheaper to make yourself obsolete than to be made obsolete by your competitors."

Drucker was 91 years old when he made that observation. Would that the rest of us had so much humility age 21. So ask yourself: am I a learner, or just learned? Look at what you do through the eyes of the learner. Maybe you'll discover the next big idea.


Did I ever mention that I used to do public speaking on management and leadership? Sometimes I still bust out with something like the foregoing, usually in my sleep. Thank you for your patience. I now return you to your regular programming.

Posted by Woodlief on August 03, 2004 at 01:54 PM


Comments

Great stuff!

Posted by: Terry at August 3, 2004 2:54 PM

One key to remaining a learner is a short memory. Seriously. A short memory helps one avoid the intellectual equivalent of "glory days," and keeps the focus looking forward. If you look forward, you can't help but be learning. Tautological, but true.

Posted by: PDS at August 5, 2004 1:36 PM