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I have shared with you my experience as an architect… what ultimately failed me or made me fail… and want to quit.
But I’ll repeat it here, in the wake of a TED talk I just listened to: the tendency of life and formal education to march on leaving you with holes in your understanding, holes in your knowledge.
In the third year of my studies I spent nearly the whole first semester in and out of hospitals, 10 weeks out of the 14 weeks. I manage to get a passing grade, but, looking back now, I would have been better off, had I been forced to repeat that semester a year later.
I had a big hole in my education. I could have had more than one hole… but I had one…
I never had any confidence as an architect that point on. This was in 1969, and I quit the profession in 1988. 19 years of living with inadequacy, impostor syndrome, fear of getting found out.
Later in life I made sure I was never going to be left out, I was never going to leave out steps, I was never going to have holes in my knowledge.
In certain areas of learning I am slow. It may take me months to grasp a little piece without the whole thing doesn’t work…
What is special about me is that I give it months. When I have months to give. Which is: when the end result is important to me enough to get bogged down with this little piece.
I used to teach the way schools teach: force people to the next step, even if they weren’t done with the previous step.
If you are like me, slow to get some important points, this type of teaching doesn’t work for you, didn’t work for you.
This is one of the main reasons I switched to the 67 steps coaching, you take as long as you need, and you take the step as many times you need to get the juice from it..
But, of course, it is not always up to me.
It is also up to the mindset, the ambition, and the attitude of the student: if they ask for help I am always available.
Most students don’t ask for help.
There is a stigma that schools left on you that you want to get rid of.
If I accepted that stigma, I would have never amounted to anything. I was near sighted, dyslexic, and slow.
In the words of my mother: stupid. She judged. She probably judged the same way she judged herself.
Looking back at her life, she was fast, and yet: she didn’t really have a life that mattered, she was a very unhappy, unfulfilled person.
If you are an underachiever… here is your clue: you have holes in your education, you have holes in your knowledge base, and you are trying to build on insufficient foundation… and it’s not working.
Watch this excellent and short TED talk… I wept when I watched it. Observe that he gets a standing ovation at the end.
You are not alone, suffering.
If you are my student: get extra support from me. If you are afraid to become my student: don’t be afraid: I have mountains of compassion. It is hard. But it is not hopeless.
Let’s teach for mastery — not test scores… a TED talk for hope for you.
Hah, Amy, this is a brilliant contribution.
I have read the One Thing book, but I didn’t get that this is what it is saying. And maybe it doesn’t, but this is, if it is true, may be the key to unstuck people.
I just wrote an article about my hopeless results in helping people get unstuck. Now I may have a new method, coming to me through you from Wanda.
Change one thing… Brilliant. Thank you so much.
Thank you Sophie it makes me weep too. I could never understand percentages so I’ve decided to start there, to go back to 6th grade. I went to 6th grade on khans website and after watching his videos and doing the practice I finally can calculate it in my head. It took me a few hours to catch up. That makes me cry and laugh.
The other day I went and massaged my 90 year old friend, Wanda. I’ve told you about her awhile ago. She told me something that stuck with me and was in similar lines that you are teaching us. She said she read a book and in the book author said that everything starts with the way you write.
Wanda, my friend, writes several pages a day, so she said she has decided to change the way she writes just one letter. She said: “It took me days to change the way I write one letter, my hand kept wanting to write it the old way.” “But”, she said, “that one letter changed everything”. She said “For years I parked the wrong way at this particular place and all of a sudden I’ve started parking the right way without any difficulty and then all of a sudden I’ve started doing other things a different way.” Just like that book ‘One Thing’ teaches… that one thing we can change that can change another one thing…? Thank you!
Thank you Amy. I am weeping. I miss people with the growth mindset like yourself. thank you for starting my day out good.
Sophie, thank you so much for posting this. I haven’t read your articles in awhile because of my hectic life at the moment so I went through your emails and picked this one. I’ve never saw it that way. I used to be like ” C or B who cares.” Now I see that if we get 70% then we are missing 30%! His website is good too. I’ve started using it with my kids to fill our gaps.