it.” Colbert adds, “Improvisation is a great educator when it comes to
failing. There’s no way you are going to get it right every time.”
Make a personal connection to your studies. In her sophomore year
in college, Eliza Noh, now a professor of Asian-American studies at
California State University at Fullerton, took a class on power in
society: who has it, how it’s used. “It really opened my eyes. For the
first time in my life, I realized that learning could be about me and
my interests, about who I was,” Noh tells Bain. “I didn’t just listen
to lectures, but began to use my own experiences as a jumping-off
point for asking questions and wanting to pursue certain concepts.”
Read and think actively. Dean Baker, one of the few economists to
predict the economic collapse of 2008, became fascinated in college
by the way economic forces shape people’s lives. His studies led him
to reflect on “what he believed and why, integrating and question-
ing,” Bain notes. Baker says: “I was always looking for arguments in
something I read, and then pinpointing the evidence to see how it
was used.”
Ask big questions. Jeff Hawkins, an engineer who created the first
mobile computing device, organized his college studies around four
profound questions he wanted to explore: Why does anything ex-
ist? Given that a universe does exist, why do we have the particular
laws of physics that we do? Why do we have life, and what is its na-
ture? And given that life exists, what’s the nature of intelligence? For
many of the subjects he pursued, Bain notes, “there was no place to
‘look it up,’ no simple answer.”
Cultivate empathy for others. Reyna Grande, author of the novels
Across a Hundred Mountains and Dancing with Butterflies, start-
ed writing seriously in her junior year in college. “Writing fiction
taught Reyna to empathize with the people who populated her
stories, an ability that she transferred to her life,” Bain notes: “As a
writer, I have to understand what motivates a character, and I see
other people as characters in the story of life,” Grande says. “When
someone makes mistakes, I always look at what made them act the
way they do.”
Set goals and make them real. Tia Fuller, who later became an ac-
complished saxophone player, began planning her future in college,
envisioning the successful completion of her projects. “I would keep
focused on the light at the end of the tunnel, and what that ac-
complishment would mean,” she tells Bain. “That would help me
develop a crystalized vision.”
Find a way to contribute. Joel Feinman, now a lawyer who provides
legal services to the poor, was set on his career path by a book he
read in college: The Massacre at El Mozote, an account of a 1981
slaughter of villagers in El Salvador. After writing and staging a cam-
pus play about the massacre, and traveling to El Salvador, Feinman
“decided that I wanted to do something to help people and bring a
little justice to the world.”
Paul is the author of Origins and the forthcoming book, Brilliant: The
New Science of Smart. The views expressed are solely her own.
Link Magazine | Educate7.com
5