The goal, I think, of American education, for decades, and across many, many scholars, was basically to teach people broad lessons in how to live life, how to engage life, how to essentially be effective citizens and effective people.
I can't tell you how many life lessons I've learned through bowling. Time management, finding balance in life, how to lose, how to win, how to bowl as a team and deal with people. How to do something I love to do and inspire other people.
The value of life is not in its duration, but in its donation. You are not important because of how long you live, you are important because of how effective you live. And most people are concerned about growing old rather than being effective.
More than seven out of 10 people have found The Landmark Forum to be one of life’s most rewarding experiences. To me, this suggests that The Landmark Forum addresses many of people’s most profound concerns how to improve their personal and professional relationships, how to be a more effective person, how to think productively about their life and goals.
I never was a person that wanted that life...I'm a leader not a follower. I don't care what they say, or what they're doing or what they're wearing. Go ahead, cos come Judgement Day, all of that won't matter. How many people did you help. How many people did you talk to. How many people did you try to encourage. How many people did you bring to God. That's what's gon' matter.
The imagination wants to construct the new worlds, no? Creativity is a solution. If I ask you, "What is your goal in life? How many years do you have to live before to die? How many years do you have? And what you will do with these years you have?" You have pressure there. "How you will realize a good life? How? Tell me!" Then, you start to open your mind.
Of all the things people have taught me regarding life lessons or anything that would benefit me, I don't think anything helped me learn more about life than football. You go through so many different things: adversity, how to handle adversity, how to handle success, how to lead, how to be a teammate, how to communicate.
We run after values that, at death, become zero. At the end of your life, nobody asks you how many degrees you have, or how many mansions you built, or how many Rolls Royces you could afford. That's what dying patients teach you.
The thing about education - and why I'm so passionate about the position and status of the university - is that it's supposed to teach citizens how to think better, how to think critically, how to tell truth from falsehood, how to make a judgment about when they're being lied to and duped and when they're not, how to evaluate scientific teaching. Losing that training of citizens is an extremely dangerous road to go down.
The only way to know everything is to learn how to think, how to ask questions, how to navigate the world. Students must learn how to teach themselves to use new tools, how to talk to unfamiliar people, and basically how to be brave.
See the minutes, how they run,
How many make the hour full complete;
How many hours bring about the day;
How many days will finish up the year;
How many years a mortal man may live.
Let us candidly confess our indebtedness to the needle. How many hours of sorrow has it softened, how many bitter irritations calmed, how many confused thoughts reduced to order, how many life-plans sketched in purple!
My greatest influences are actually probably a set of different teachers. And these teachers, most prominently at my high school, but also a few others, helped kind of instill in me, thinking thoughts about how life is meaningful in terms of how we all kind of live in a network of people and how you interact with those people is part of what makes life essentially meaningful and then kind of concepts to think about, how do you add value to other people's lives? How do they add value to yours? And how do you kind of form a community together in the network?
I train like I'm training for the Olympics or for a Mr. America contest, the way I've always trained my whole life. You see, life is a battlefield. Life is survival of the fittest... How many healthy people do you know? How many happy people do you know? Think about it. People work at dying, they don't work at living. My workout is my obligation to life. It's my tranquilizer. It's part of the way I tell the truth--and telling the truth is what's kept me going all these years.
How much more money do we have to waste, how many more families have to be destroyed, how many more people have to be killed before you summon the courage to tell the truth to the American people?
You cannot imagine how many people called, how many letters, how many emails. Every place I go, people ask me, 'Please, don't quit.'
I feel very strongly, we've got to give animals a good life. I've worked really hard improving slaughter plants and animal handling and transport. And people have said to me, why don't you work on improving conditions on pig farms? And basically, to be effective on making real change out there on the ground, you can only work on so many things. You know, you get too distributed, you're not effective.