There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.
From my first year on the faculty, there was always so much more I wanted to impart to the students. I decided that, rather than waste the last day of class summarizing the semester, I'd spend my time talking about what I'd learned in life that was useful.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of sharing life lessons rather than merely summarizing academic content.
In this quote, Clayton M. Christensen reflects on the value of imparting practical life lessons to students instead of adhering strictly to the syllabus on the last day of class. He suggests that the experiences and insights gained from life can be more beneficial for students' personal growth and future endeavors than a mere recap of the academic material covered. This approach fosters a deeper connection and a more meaningful educational experience.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a graduation speech, a professor might use this quote to inspire students to seek wisdom beyond textbooks.
More from Clayton M. Christensen
All quotes →Understanding motivation is one of the most important things we can do in our lives, because it has such a bearing on why we do the things we do and whether we enjoy them or not.
Companies, in fact, are specifically organized to under-invest in disruptive innovations! This is one reason why we often suggest that companies set up separate teams or groups to commercialize disruptive innovations. When disruptive innovations have to fight with other innovations for resources, they tend to lose out.
There is no evidence that success in business will make us happy people or allow us to have happy families.
By definition, big data cannot yield complicated descriptions of causality. Especially in healthcare. Almost all of our diseases occur in the intersections of systems in the body.
The breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited. That's when people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.
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I entreat masters to live a good life and faithfully to instruct their scholars, especially that they may love God and learn to give themselves to knowledge, in order to promote His honour, the welfare of the state, and their own salvation, but not for the sake of avarice or the praise of man.
Give your child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information.
We want the world our children inherit to be defined by the values enshrined in the U.N. Charter: peace, justice, respect, human rights, tolerance, and solidarity.
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The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.