Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

A refusal to succeed

Fittingly, it was an education story that got me thinking about this.  The piece by Sam Dillon in yesterday’s New York Times was about Arne Duncan,  the Obama administration’s education secretary, wanting to push the reset button on failing schools by closing them down and starting them over – a tactic he used as CEO of the Chicago municipal school system.

The story ends with a quote from Bryan Hassel, an education consultant:

“A lot of these school turnarounds are going to fail because the work is so difficult,” Mr. Hassel said. “But as a nation, we’ll never have the capacity to do this work successfully until we make the commitment.”

Hassel’s words struck me, because I had never chanced to think of change in these terms before – that commitment is the heart of deliberate change.

And that’s the reason why so many people fail to be creative, because creativity is the result of deliberate change and deliberate change means hard, determined, don’t-give-up work.

It’s so easy to be inert. And fatalistic. And hopeless. It doesn’t demand anything of you except to stay slumped at your desk or on your couch and do as you’re told. Being inert also gives you permission to crab about what’s wrong as much as you want without actually trying to solve any of the problems that bug you. And if you ever go so far as to attempt a little creative change, inertia allows you to give up easily and say you knew all along it wouldn’t work.

I live in a city and state where inertia is the perpetual Zeitgeist. There are plenty of creative and committed individuals here, trying in their one- or few-person ways to transform the place into the vital, prosperous, exciting region they see in their dreams, but the prevailing mood is one of defeat.  We are resigned, here, to our loserhood. In fact – heresy alert! – I think we enjoy it.

Because it means we don’t actually have to collectively get up off our large butts and do something. What would be the point? We’re losers and nothing we do will ever change that. Loserhood is our brand and we’re perversely proud of it. We don’t demand the best of our leaders or schools or communities because we don’t want to ask the best of ourselves – which is to make hard decisions, stick with them and labor ceaselessly until we get the right results.

I guess we’re too scared and lazy to do that. So, apparently, Duncan and Obama are going to have to reinvent America without us. Well, so what? Every sturdy, beautiful, redone house needs a basement drain. We’ll be happy to take that role so we never ever have to climb the stairs.

You might say we’re so convinced we’ll fail that we’re … committed to it.

Photo by Kat