Ignore the Lizard Brain

Opening session of the conference was Seth Godin, described in the programme as an author, blogger and entrepreneur. He was excellent, with a very good presentation style. He apparently writes one of most popular blogs in world, so will be interesting to take a look.

Some of the main points from his talk:

His normal audience is marketers. Mass marketing is based on the concept of average stuff for average people. But, things are changing. There's more clutter, more stuff, but more importantly, there's been an explosion in the range of communication channels and ways to reach people. The mass marketing paradigm is broken, students will choose not to read emails, read brochures etc.
Revolutions change things. Look at the record indusrty. In 1996 it was perfect. Now there's more music than ever before, but the record industry is dead.

The revolution of our time is cheap connectivity. People to other people, and people to information.

The means of production has shifted. It used to be that the person who owned the means of production got to keep the money.
Now all of our students own a connected device. Now they own the means of production.

Competence is no longer a scarce commodity.
Access to information is now irrelevant. You can look anything up.

Also, the normal distribution of people is changing. The world is getting weirder because we can now find and connect to people who have the same wierdness as us.  The notion of average is no longer practical.

Becuase of the ubiquitous access to information, teachers will now longer get paid for telling students stuff. What is important is taching them how to solve complexx problems, and work things out for themselves.

Need to start to ignore our lizard brain, that voice that tells us that to be careful - Seth's written about it here.
It's the lizard brain that makes everyone check their smart phone every few minutes, we're only doing it to check that everything's OK, then we put it back in our pocket...


Ignore the voice!
Choose to be the one they'll miss when you're not there. Make a difference.
We have to do art, scary things that no human being has done before.
It's all about gifts, not favours. Don't have to pay the artist to see the painting, or hear the music. Make a change, make a connection and spread it.
Don't need authority or money, you just need to care and want to make a difference. For example, there's someone who when he learned how many healthy cats and dogs were killed in the US in shelters everyday decided to change it, and has already changed shelters to have a no kill policy in many major cities. With no money, and no authority, just passion.

Don't have a job, have a platform. A platform to fail, to change, to make a difference.

When you get home and someone asks "How was your day?", if your answer is "Fine", then you're a manager, listening to your lizard brain, checking boxes and having meetings.
OR you could tell a story about things that broke, changes you'd made, things you had leant which had surprised you. Then you'd be a leader.