The most important competition is the one between you and your own imagination

"Somebody much smarter than me once said that pessimists are usually right, optimists are usually wrong, but all the great breakthroughs in history were done by optimists." - Thomas Friedman.

Storyline:

Thomas Friedman, the author of the famous book "The World Is Flat", is a real "out of the box thinking" (OBT) practitioner.  He provides excellent views about the world that should be read and pondered by any parent, teacher or manager. 

Here are some excerpts with links to the complete articles:

Friedman: I’ve added something I got from my friend Ramalinga Raju from Satyam, the Indian company. We decided that the greatest economic competition in the world going forward is not going to be between countries and countries. And it’s not going to be between companies and companies. The greatest economic competition going forward is going to be between you and your own imagination. Your ability to act on your imagination is going to be so decisive in driving your future and the standard of living in your country. So the school, the state, the country that empowers, nurtures, enables imagination among its students and citizens, that’s who’s going to be the winner.

Friedman: In the latest edition, I added a whole section on why liberal arts are more important than ever. It’s not that I don’t think math and science are important. They still are. But more than ever our secret sauce comes from our ability to integrate art, science, music and literature with the hard sciences. That’s what produces an iPod revolution or a Google.

Pink: It’s the combination of the left brain and the right brain. Left-brain thinking — rule-based, linear, SAT-style thinking — used to be enough. Now right-brain thinking — artistry, empathy, narrative, synthesis — is the big differentiator.

http://www.aasa.org/publications/saarticledetail.cfm?ItemNumber=9736&snItemNumber=950&tnItemNumber=

But where does imagination come from?  Ah, now we come back to the liberal arts.  My friend, Marc Tucker, who heads the National Center on Education and the Economy, answers the question this way: “One thing we know about creativity,” he says, “is that it typically occurs when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework in one to think afresh about the other.”  Intuitively you know this to be true.  Leonardo DaVinci, Tucker notes, was a great artist, scientist, and inventor and each of his specialties nourished the other.  He was a great lateral thinker but if you spend your whole life in one silo, you will never have either the knowledge or mental agility to do the synthesis, connect the dots, which is usually where the next great breakthrough can be found.

So I don’t know how many art, music, or literature courses you have been able to take while you have been here (in school) but I hope it was more than zero and I hope even more that after you leave here today you will expose yourself to the richness of liberal arts because the imagination that gives birth to great ideas, products, designs, and intellectual breakthroughs often happens when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework of one to think about the other.

http://www.rpi.edu/academics/commencement/address07.html

Reflection: For people who have taken "Out Of The Box Thinking" (OBT) classes or are involved in such practices will find Tom's message very familiar.  And as we all know, the best part of learning is doing, so ...........

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