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People in power, the industrialists, want us to fly lower because it's easier to ignore us, it's easier to keep us in line, it's easier to get a factory job that way.
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The story of Icarus is fascinating to look at from a cultural perspective.
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It's been around for thousands of years, we all know it.
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Daedalus and Icarus go to a desert island.
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Daedalus, the dad, makes wings out of feathers, gives them to his son, puts them on with wax, says to his son, obey your father, we're flying out of here.
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Don't fly too high, because if you fly too high, the wax will melt and you'll die.
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We all know what happened.
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Icarus got uppity, he had hubris, he disobeyed his father, and he died.
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Except that's not what the myth said in 1700, or 1500, or 1200.
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They changed it.
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It used to say, but more important, don't fly too low, because if you fly too low, the water and the mist will weigh down your wings and you will surely perish.
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They took that part out.
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They took it out because the people in power, the industrialists, want us to fly lower, because it's easier to ignore us, it's easier to keep us in line, it's easier to get a factory job that way.
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People who have the hubris to dream of something bigger change the status quo, and the people who are in charge aren't in favor of that.
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I'm not a conspiracy theorist at all, but I do know where public school came from.
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Public school was invented by factory owners who didn't have enough compliant factory workers.
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It worked great.
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For 100 years, we had this wonderful system.
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Do what you're told, go to the placement office, you'll get a job for 50 years.
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You won't like the job, but you'll be able to go home and watch TV, buy enough stuff you'll need a storage unit, and then you'll die.
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The deal was straightforward and kept on both sides.
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And during our lifetime, in the last 20 years, it deals off.
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And the mistake, the problem, is that people are still seduced into thinking that what they're supposed to do is fit in more.
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And social media has made it worse, because there's this whole pack mentality of, how do I fit in more, with small bursts of, here's one quick tip for a flat stomach, and three different ways to get rich, and you can learn to flip houses today and be a millionaire tomorrow.
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None of which work, right?
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But the combination of those two mean that people are starting to feel broken and bitter, because the promise isn't being kept.
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Mandatory education makes no sense.
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Nobody ever learned anything against their will.
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Sooner or later, it becomes voluntary.
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You need enrollment.
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Not enrollment from the legal sense of you're not truant, but enrollment in the sense that you are leaning into it and want to learn.
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So if we want to teach someone to be a baseball fan, here's what we don't do.
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We don't say, here's the baseball textbook, there'll be a test tomorrow.
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And if you do well, you can take another test.
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And if you do 10 tests in a row really well, we'll take you to a game.
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That's not what happens.
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But yet, kids memorize all these statistics, and they know all this stuff, because they wanted to know it.
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So we must begin by gaining enrollment.
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And there are a couple ways to do it.
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One way is to promise a quick win.
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Just read these six paragraphs, and you will lose 30 pounds.
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And it's easy to get the masses to pay a dollar for that.
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But it doesn't work.
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It's a dead end.
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The other way to do it is to say to people, being a Navy SEAL, or being physically fit, or being smart at business, these are endeavors.
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They take effort.
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If you're ready to pay the price to get the benefit, there are people who will teach you.
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So it's the opposite of the question, will this be on the test?
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If you're asking, will this be on the test from an online course, or from a school, what you're basically saying to the teacher is, without a certificate, I don't need to be here.
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I'm only here to prove that I was here.
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And in this post-educational institution world that we're entering, certificates are worth less and less.
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What's actually worth is, did you sign up to learn something where you opened yourself up to possible failure, opened yourself up to the stress of becoming someone else in a way that made you better?
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So the system wants you to feel mostly powerless, because they have power, you don't.
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And it also wants you to feel inadequate until you buy more stuff, because that's what marketers sell us, is the idea that until you buy this, you're incomplete.
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It turns out those two things don't make people happy.
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What makes us happy is agency, knowing that we have some sort of control over what's going to happen in our life.
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And unfortunately, the economic structure that we live in isn't going to be easy for most people to fix, not in the short run.
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But what we can fix right now is how we respond or react to what's happening in front of us.
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And my friend, Cat Hoke, says you can't be curious and angry at the same time.
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So you get a choice, right?
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You get a choice in the traffic jam, you get a choice when you're dealing with an angry clerk, you get a choice with a bureaucrat.
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Am I going to be curious about how this person got to this moment?
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Am I going to be angry at this situation?
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We could dig deep and say, in this moment, I'm going to choose to be the best version of myself and seek possibility.
