Don’t dream small dreams. Take on big challenges, and do not sit on the fence when the time comes to defend your values. Be aware of your limitations and be thankful for your opportunities. Be firm in your convictions. And even if you are required to stand alone, stand strong. Be prepared to be wrong so that you can enjoy the elation of being right.
How do you weaken a powerful force? It’s simple – you deny it access to its source of energy. It matters whom you have in your corner. It matters who influences you. It matters where you draw your inspiration. A spark will never truly ignite without the influence of oxygen. Even the most talented genius needs validation sometimes.
Our best response when we feel least hopeful is to take action. We might make the occasional social media post to express solidarity and to condemn injustice, but our true response is the action that we take, more than the words that we share. When the world loses its conscience, we must find ours.
During the worst periods of the war in former Yugoslavia, UWC Adriatic opened its doors to welcome their young men and women; and when refugees escaped from the Balkans to neighbouring Slovenia and here in Italy, this college was right there with them. We washed their feet, we enveloped them in a warm embrace, and we listened to their stories.
How can young people can join efforts to transform education for all and how education systems can better incorporate real-world participatory learning? From the example of Hurt Hahn, if you are a young person, three things are clear.
Envision the world not as it is but as it should be. Be sceptical about challenges, especially the ones that look unsolvable. Resist the urge to be overly cynical about the possibility of change. We do not always know for sure how life will turn out, but we can always trust in our own efforts.
It is incredulous to imagine that the evident reality of our warming planet has been met with extreme politicization and deep-seated scepticism to science across the world. Scientists have been branded as alarmists; public advocates have been met with life-threatening opposition (227 were killed in 2020), and Greta Thunberg has been called everything from mentally-ill to communist propagandist.
The premise of democratic governance is that people who are entrusted with leadership should govern with the best interests of the people at all times. This is where most leaders fail. John Magufuli’s presidency is a contemporary case study in leadership that gets it right on one level, and absolutely falls apart on another.
As humans, we tend to project our highest aspirations on to our leaders, expecting them on their worst days to be the embodiment of who we struggle to be on our best days. Donald Trump simply bucked the trend. He had no time (or capability) for make-believe – he lived out his real and true self on the pages of Twitter every single day, and that scared some of us and emboldened the rest of us. Our society indeed is polarized, far beyond what we are prepared to admit.
Mr President, the buck stops at your table, and history right now records that you presided over the killing of your citizens, and you proceeded to threaten them in your distasteful speech afterwards. You acted neither like an elder, a Nigerian statesman or a President.
Hard things are hard, and that’s the hard thing about hard things. But not all things are hard, and at times, that’s a hard thing to accept. Like writing this article – conventionally, all that it takes is a five-paragraph outline and a general sense of the key idea that I want to communicate, plus at least 30 minutes of… Read More »Hard Things Are Hard. But What about Willpower?
I have come to realize that our lives become the totality of the individual actions that we take — that we are better off previewing our futures through the actions of today. If our works are not credit-worthy today, they will not be tomorrow; but if we commit to creating value, even if we do not see the results immediately, everything will make sense down the line.