After I wrote my piece on disruptive innovation, I began reading more on the man that is Clayton Christensen. He is one of the leading figures when it comes to business strategy, whose motivation in life comes from his spiritual alignment.
"Several years ago I read a story in a news magazine about flooding in several western states that resulted from the rapid spring melting of a heavy accumulation of snow. One photo showed thousands of Mormon citizens in Salt Lake City who had been mobilized with only a few hours' notice through a call from their local church leaders. They were shown filling sandbags that would channel the flow of run-off water. The article marveled at the command-and-control precision - almost military in character - through which the LDS church was able to put its people onto the front lines of this civil crisis. Another photo in an article the next week showed a thirty-something resident of a town along a flooding stream in another state, sitting in a lawn chair reading while national guardsmen filled sandbags nearby. The author of the article attributed what he saw to the "organizational efficiency" of the LDS church, but he completely missed the point. Thousands of people instinctively showed up and went to work because they do this sort of thing all the time, week after week, in over a hundred countries around the world, as part of being Mormon. This was not an unusual event - just another week in the life of a typical Mormon."
This excerpt comes right out of Clayton Christensen's essay titled "Why I Belong and Why I Believe". In the essay he goes on to explain why he belongs within the Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and secondly why he believes in the teachings in the book of Mormon.
Clayton explains how his church doesn't hire clergy or any type of religious staff. Instead, each individual is forced to go on a spiritual journey to reach God all on their own. Which is why that paragraph stuck with me. I realized how true his statement was with regard to any aspect of life.
When you suffer and learn all on your own, you gain a special appreciation for your end result for all the "blood, sweat, and tears" that you've poured into your work. When things are handed to us, human nature kicks in and prevents us from gaining full appreciation for what it is we are being given, we don't realize the inner workings of whats being presented.
And such is the case with education, and perhaps why Emerson Spartz and so many others have become so successful. The current school environment is still in tune with the way it was a hundred years ago in the industrialization era. The goal was to create docile individuals who would then join factory jobs. But this day and age requires creative thinking and innovation to rise to the top, which are two traits often lacking in school systems.
Self teaching allows us to go beyond any planned outline because there is no set curriculum from which someone can limit their potential.
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