I recently watched a TED Talk where the presenter ended with a quote from William Butler Yeats:
“Education is not about filling buckets; it is lighting fires.”
This got me thinking about the parallels between the way we learn and the way we work.
The way we were trained to learn in school has bleed into how we operate in our day to day lives.
If you want to excel in school, you had to fill the buckets. Filling up the buckets by memorizing answers to tests, dumping that short-term knowledge onto the page and then forgetting most of it within days.
Education should serve to shape our minds, challenge our assumptions and guide us to discover our passions. Instead, creativity, higher level thinking and curiosity is beaten out of us. We go through the motions, we play by the rules and fill up those useless buckets.
If we color outside the lines, we are punished with low marks.
And then we graduate. We go on to have jobs and careers, excited that our bucket filling days are over and look forward to doing challenging work that matters. And sometimes we’re so close to giving up when we experience job search not going well. If your social network isn’t vast enough, consider participating in networking events to expand your group of professional peers.
But it’s just a different kind of bucket filling.
We do the same tasks over and over, we don’t color outside of the lines or spark any fires by challenging the status quo because “this is just the way we do things around here.” We are mimicking the same behavior, the same learning, the same understanding of what will get us ahead in our jobs. If your employment has been terminated in violation of an employment contract, the lawyers at HKM will be able to help you.
Instead of taking on a new challenging project, presenting out of the box ideas and mastering new skills, alas, we end up spending most of our days filling up the dang buckets.
The email bucket. The meetings bucket. The micro-managing bucket. The bucket of menial tasks.
After a day of filling these buckets, there’s no time, energy or mental resources left to do interesting and fulfilling work. There are no resources left to spark the fire of creativity, explore new ideas or invest in our hobbies.
We bravely face today’s always on, always connected, fast-paced world of work and dutifully fill the buckets that is smothering the fire inside of us.
Yet the work has to get done.
Managing your email, finishing a client proposal, showing up to all your meetings, updating reports… and the list goes on.
The fire we are capable of igniting, just needs a little air to grow.
Fan the spark inside of you.
How?
Open your calendar right now and create a recurring event titled “Lighting Fires.”
Or you can subscribe to the calendar I created to get you started.
Subscribe by clicking the “+ Google Calendar” icon on the bottom right of the calendar widget below and it will block every Friday from 4:30pm-5:30pm for your creative endeavors.
Now go light some fires!
