Here are some very thought-provoking quotes from Seth Godin’s STOP STEALING DREAMS (click to download):
“By their nature, dreams are evanescent. They flicker long before they shine brightly. And when they’re flickering, it’s not particularly difficult for a parent or a teacher or a gang of peers to snuff them out.”
“The dreams we need are self-reliant dreams. We need dreams based not on what is but on what might be. We need students who can learn how to learn, who can discover how to push themselves and are generous enough and honest enough to engage with the outside world to make those dreams happen….I think we’re doing a great job of destroying dreams at the very same time the dreams we do hold onto aren’t nearly bold enough.”
“There really are only two tools available to the educator. The easy one is fear. Fear is easy to awake, easy to maintain, but ultimately toxic…The other tool is passion…Passion can overcome fear—the fear of losing, of failing, of being ridiculed.”
“Greatness is frightening. With it comes responsibility…If you can deny your talents, if you can conceal them from others or, even better, persuade yourself that they weren’t even given to you, you’re off the hook.”
“The future of our economy lies with the impatient. The linchpins and the artists and the scientists who will refuse to wait to be hired and will take things into their own hands, building their own value, producing outputs others will gladly pay for. Either they’ll do that on their own or someone will hire them and give them a platform to do it…The only way out is going to be mapped by those able to dream.”
“Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That’s who they are, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got. No wonder they’re not in a hurry to rock the boat…If I’m going to make the investment and hire someone for more than the market rate, I want to find an incompetent worker. One who will break the rules and find me something no one else can.”
“Dreams fade away because we can’t tolerate the short-term pain necessary to get to our longterm goal. We find something easier, juicier, sexier, and more now, so we take it, leaving our dreams abandoned on the side of the road.”
“The only source of innovation is the artist willing to be usefully wrong. A great use of the connection economy is to put together circles of people who challenge each other to be wronger and wronger still—until we find right.”
You can download the free e-book HERE (Stop Stealing Dreams).
Find hope in your darkest hour.
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5 replies on “Stop Stealing Dreams”
I like this orange colored wall 😉
Thanks for this great source you’ve shared ~ what a great tension between fear and passion…there’ still so much to learn along the road.
And while teaching, I also learn a whole lot more ~ I’d be careful not to steal anyone’s dreams away…
Wow..some really thought provoking quotes. I think it’s especially important that we don’t squash our children’s dreams…this can so easily be done and sometimes without intention. Sometimes even with an offhand comment we can diminish the resolve in which a child had to pursue a dream. This is something I try to be careful in preventing.
Great post!
I taught for many years and my goals were always to encourage children to pursue their dreams, to learn to love learning for its own sake, and to never, ever stop trying to excel. These quotes brought back so many wonderful memories for me. Thanks for sharing this inspiration with us, Joyce!
Blessings!
Wow, these are indeed thought-provoking, Jocelyn. They made me realize a lot of things, my own shortcomings. Thank you so much for sharing; there is so much to learn from these quotes. God bless <3 🙂
Excellent perspective.. Very encouraging.