The historian Walter Isaacson had written quite a few books. I have read his books on the Wright Brothers and about Steve Jobs. Yesterday, I downloaded a collection of writing by Jeff Bezos. The collection has an introduction written by Walter Isaacson. Human flight, smartphones and many other Apple products and online buying through Amazon.com have all had a big effect on our world. In his introduction to the Bezos writings, Isaacson tries to note properties that are needed to make a big change in the world.
The topic touches on one that my friend and I re-considered for the umpteenth time this morning. She is a professor of special education and has long experience personally with educational difficulties herself. She is unhappy with standardized tests and she has good reason to be. I taught a course on school testing and grading for years. If you want to read some of my ideas about school testing and grading, download here:
https://sites.google.com/site/kirbyvariety/kirby-tests-and-meas-book
We can point to a modern, especially American, desire for certainty and verification and remember the influence of science and an aura of clarity when we consider testing that seems to produce the essence of an individual in a single number. So, you may feel that you have all there is to know about me once you know my IQ.
Isaacson, like many historians, seems to avoid too much fascination with capturing the essence of a person with numbers. Of course, outside of numbers, we run into murkier judgments and contradictory opinions. Since our conversation and my awareness of myself and of my friend, I am interested in the important qualities that lead to a good life. Isaacson writes:
The first is to be curious, passionately curious. Take Leonardo. In his delight-filled notebooks we see his mind dancing across all fields of nature with a curiosity that is exuberant and playful. He asks and tries to answer hundreds of charmingly random questions: Why is the sky blue? What does the tongue of a woodpecker look like? Do a bird's wings move faster when flapping up or when flapping down? How is the pattern of swirling water similar to that of curling hair? Is the muscle of the bottom lip connected to that of the top lip? Leonardo did not need to know these things to paint the Mona Lisa (though it helped); he needed to know them because he was Leonardo, always obsessively curious. "I have no special talent," Einstein once said. "I am only passionately curious." That's not fully true (he certainly did have special talent), but he was right when he said, "Curiosity is more important than knowledge." A second key trait is to love and to connect the arts and sciences. Whenever Steve Jobs launched a new product such as the iPod or iPhone, his presentation ended with street signs that showed an intersection of Liberal Arts Street and Technology Street. "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough," he said at one of these presentations."
Invent and Wander (pp. 1-2). Harvard Business Review Press. Kindle Edition.
