Leave high school forever

Leave high school forever

Most of us feel like we've been left stranded in high school forever.
Like something happened there that we've never shaken off.
Before high school, in our earlier and more carefree childhoods, we
were creative dreamers filled with a boundless sense of energy and
wonder.
But in high school something got turned around. For the first time in our
lives, we began fearing what other people were thinking of us. All of a
sudden our mission in life became not to be embarrassed. We were
afraid to look bad, and so we made it a point not to take risks.
I'll never forget something that happened to my friend, Richard
Schwarze, in high school. (He is now a respected photographer, and I
won't need to ask his permission to tell this story about him.) Richard
and I were walking home from school one day and all of a sudden he
stopped in his tracks, his face frozen with horror. I looked at him and
asked what was wrong. I thought he was about to suffer some kind of
seizure. He then pointed down at his pants and wordlessly showed me
where his belt had missed a loop!
"I spent the whole day like this!" he finally said. It was impossible for
him to measure what everybody thought of him as they passed him in
the halls, perhaps seeing the belt had missed a loop. The damage to his
reputation was probably beyond repair.
That was high school.
Today when I give my seminars on motivation, I love the periods when
I take questions from the audience. But many times I can see the
painfully adolescent looks of self-consciousness on people's faces when
they ponder the risk of asking a question in front of the group.

This habit of worrying more about what others think of our thoughts
than we do about our own thinking usually begins in high school, but it
can last a lifetime.
It is time to be aware of what we're doing and, once again, leave high
school. It's time to reach back to those pre-high-school days of innocent
creativity and social fearlessness, and draw on that former self.
By the way, I finally came up with a way to deal with the moments of
silence that fill a seminar room when I ask for questions. I go to the
board and make five circles. Then I tell the audience that I used to say
in my classes, "If there are no questions at this point, we'll take a
break." People always want to take a break, so there wasn't much
incentive for asking questions. But questions are the most fun part of a
seminar for me, so I came up with this game: After five questions—we
take a break. Now I find people in the audience urging people around
them to join in asking questions so we can take our break sooner.
Although it's an amusing artificial way to jump-start the dialogue I'm
looking for, what it really does is take the pressure off. It takes the
participants out of high school.

Most people don't realize how easily they can create the social
fearlessness they want to have. Instead, they live like they are still
teenagers, reacting to the imagined judgments of other people. They end
up designing their lives based on what other people might be thinking
about them. A life designed by a teenager! Would you want one?
But you can leave that mind-set behind. You can motivate yourself by
yourself, without depending on the opinions of others. All it takes is a
simple question. As Emerson asked, "Why should the way I feel depend
on the thoughts in someone else's head?"

I'm reading: Leave high school forever