That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [83]
“I look at the world and see something I don’t like and my immediate instinct is to say, How can I fix that? I don’t think I have better skill than other people to do that, but I have less fear than other people to go out and do it.” Gross argues that a big part of teaching the creative process at any level involves getting people to overcome their fear of failure and plunge ahead when they have an idea.
Who taught him that? “Failure,” says Gross. “We have had one hundred companies over the last twenty years and sixty have succeeded and forty failed, and the failures are where I learned everything. Everybody goes through life and sees things and says, ‘I wish that were this way.’” But most people stop there. The successful creators and entrepreneurs are the people who overcome that fear and act. The biggest barrier to creativity, argues Gross, is “lack of self-confidence.”
Gross says he gained confidence “from a few failures I had at the beginning—and maybe it came from realizing that a few failures at the beginning didn’t feel that bad. Failure that produces learning along the way is not looked on as a scarlet letter. As an employer, I find that when prospects come to me with failures on their résumés that they have taken accountability for and learned from, they are way more exciting to hire than someone who comes with a success that might have been due to luck. Every big company goes through hard times at some point, and having someone who has lived through that is very helpful.”
Successful creators, argues Gross, not only have a gift for seeing things before others do. They have another skill that is just as important, if less glamorous. They know how to get things done. “Getting stuff done is really underrated,” said Gross. “Bill Gates had a vision but then he just stuck with it and stuck with it and stuck with it. People laughed along the way; he just stuck with it. That you cannot teach … You can admire and learn from it.”
And as someone who is immersed in this world, Gross has no doubt that everyone needs to aspire to be what we call a creative creator or creative server, but he also believes strongly that there has never been a better time to do so. “This is a great time to be an entrepreneur,” he argues. “There is lots of money around. And if you make something happen that catches on, you can reach the whole planet with your idea. You have to make something that gets through the noise, but if you do, you have a global reach that is just unbelievable.”
Yes, And
Like Gross, the best educators understand that “extra” and “creativity” are not so much taught as they are unlocked and let out, after which they are usually self-propelled. One school that was designed to foster this is the forty-three-year-old Nueva School, a private school located in Hillsborough, California, between San Francisco and Palo Alto. Nueva is for gifted children. Few public schools can match the resources and teacher-student ratio of Nueva, with more than four hundred pupils and facilities such as a children’s workshop with every imaginable tool designed for students to build things. But the principles Nueva applies in teaching young people from a very early age to be creative are things that others can copy, because they don’t involve money or class size or even the individual genius of students. They involve intangibles, such as trusting teachers, helping students develop the confidence to take risks, and—most important—learning to say “Yes, and,” according to Nueva’s head of school, Diane Rosenberg.
Rosenberg