To learn anything other than the stuff you find in books, you need to be able to experiment, to make mistakes, to accept feedback, and to try again. It doesn't matter whether you are learning to ride a bike or starting a new career, the cycle of experiment, feedback, and new experiment is always there.
Interpretation
Learning requires practical experience, including trial and error.
This quote emphasizes the importance of experiential learning, suggesting that true understanding comes not just from theoretical knowledge found in books, but from hands-on practice. It highlights the necessity of making mistakes, receiving feedback, and persevering through a continuous cycle of experimentation in any learning process, whether small like riding a bike or significant like starting a new career.
In practice
During a workshop on professional development, this quote can motivate participants to embrace their mistakes.
The companies that survive longest are the one's that work out what they uniquely can give to the world not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.
The first step is to measure whatever can easily be measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.
Why don't we teach our children in school what they are? We should say to them, 'You are unique... you have the capacity for anything. You are a marvel'.
We cannot wait for great visions from great people, for they are in short supply. It is up to us to light our own small fires in the darkness.
I believe that a lot of our striving after the symbols and levers of success is due to a basic insecurity, a need to prove ourselves. That done, grown up at last, we are free to stop pretending.
Creativity needs a bit of untidiness. Make everything too neat and there is no room for experiment.
I want to go back to my country to help other girls. We need to support girls to see other possibilities for themselves, to have a vision for their own future.
The younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which in school and press the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit as immoral, where to employ a hundred people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number as honorable.
The one experience that I hope every student has at some point in their lives is to have some belief you profoundly, deeply hold, proved to be wrong because that is the most eye-opening experience you can have, and as a scientist, to me, is the most exciting experience I can ever have.
The idea that computers can ever replace teachers and schools reveals a deep lack of understanding about the role leadership plays in student success.
The library is not only a diary of the human race, but marks an act of faith in the continuity of humanity.
The greatest investment a young person can make is in their own education, in their own mind. Because money comes and goes. Relationships come and go. But what you learn once stays with you forever.
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