Given that I want to continue to blog every day, I need some structure to keep going. I’ve already instituted the Things I learned this week series which will appear every Sunday on this blog. I enjoyed Balthasar Gracián’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom so much in 2009 that I’m going to couple some highlights with CC-licensed images from Flickr every Wednesday.
You can purchase an inexpensive copy of the book from Amazon or read it online for free via Google Books. 🙂
Image CC BY-NC-SA Stuck in Customs
I stumbled across this quotation from the Chinese sage Chuang-Tzu, writing 2,500 years ago, in Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (p.29-30):
As Tzu-Gung was travelling through the regions north of the river Han, he saw an old man working in his vegetable garden. He had dug an irrigation ditch. The man would descend into the well, fetch up a vessel of water in his arms and pour it out into the ditch. While his efforts were tremendous the results appeared to be very meagre.
Tzu-Gung said, “There is a way whereby you can irrigate a hundred ditches in one day, and whereby you can do much with little effort. Would you not like to hear of it?” Then the gardener stood up, looked at him and said, “And what would that be?”
Tzu-Gung replied, “You take a wooden lever, weighted at the back and light in front. In this way you can bring up water so quickly that it just gushes out. This is called a draw-well.”
Then anger rose up in the old man’s face, and he said, “I have hear my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them.”
Technology integration in education may seem to make sense in terms of society and the future, but is that everything? What about individual identity and the ‘spiritual’ dimension?
An open question.
Image CC-BY-NC-ND bobsd46 @ Flickr
These last few weeks have been difficult for me. Being promoted quickly is great but comes at the expense of very steep learning curves! 😮
That’s when quotations mashed with images like the ones above are useful to spur me on. I’ve just used an online poster-printing service to get a bunch printed for my office. There more images like the one above available at the Flickr group entitled Great quotes about Learning and Change. 🙂
What are YOUR favourite images or quotations relating to motivation/productivity?
