Actions, as they say, speak louder than words. Don’t trust people who trade in promises rather than deeds.
The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.
Image CC BY Vlastimil Koutecký
I’ve noticed an increase recently in people using the word ‘quality’ rather indiscriminately. It can be a filler word, something people use when they actually mean “the way things have always been done”.
Reading Eric Ries The Lean Startup has convinced me that you need to know who your ‘customer’ is when designing products, systems, workflows, and tools. There may be no monetary exchange, but the value proposition needs to be strong.
It’s only then that you can start talking about ‘quality’.
The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.
Image CC BY Laura Dinneen
One of the most pernicious things that young people learn when they’re younger is a ‘fixed’ mindset. Carol Dweck defines this in the following way:
In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb.
Instead, we should all realise that we’re a work in progress:
In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.
If I do one thing with my children (other than show them unconditional love) it will be to develop this growth mindset in them. In the other direction lies a dangerous form of conservatism.
The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.
