Brad Bird was recently interviewed, and four quotes I thought were worth sharing.

Involved people make for better innovation… Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between—what they have in common is a restless, probing nature: “I want to get to the problem. There’s something I want to do.”

How many times do we encounter educators who have seemed to lose their involvement?

The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. … “You don’t play it safe—you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.

How often do we find this attitude in schools? How many times do parents share the same vision, the one that’s sometimes imposed on teachers? What happens when everyone doesn’t believe… in the impossible?

If you work in lighting but you want to learn how to animate, there’s a class to show you animation. There are classes in story structure, in Photoshop, even in Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defense system. Pixar basically encourages people to learn outside of their areas, which makes them more complete. [and more creative].

(Emphasis, mine). I think learning together–even if it isn’t, let’s say, a pedagogical skill, or a software application, can be fun and encouraging. I’d actually love teaching something off-the-wall with teachers. Encouraging creativity is good for education; I believe it 110%.

If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

The payoff in education is not sales, of course, but… the importance is just as great, if not more so. Too many folks, I’ve seen, ignore morale problems because honestly, they aren’t equipped to fix them.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Reflection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.