How many times have you thought you reached the top of your game and believed that there was nothing left?
Well, it’s often that very successful people go from one project to another to continually challenge themselves, and that’s a really good thing because continual learning is always a plus. I want to give you a metaphor for life and your career and pretty much about everything.
Years ago, I founded a Montessori school in Tampa. Montessori is a very different kind of education, and one of the things that I loved about it was that there were mixed classrooms; so you had three six-year-olds, six to nine-year-olds, and nine to 12-year-olds. The advantage of this is that children learned to be in the role of that age they were. So, what I mean by that is that the three-year-olds learn from the older kids, and they watch those older kids be role models. The older kids got to be role models and got to participate in helping the younger children. The middle kids, well, they got to be a middle child, sometimes not quite knowing where they fit in the scheme of things.
And the interesting thing, when those six-year-olds went up to the next level, to the six to nine class, guess what? They become the youngest again. They become the least experienced again. And it’s kind of like life, in that lesson is that there’s always more to learn.
The other interesting thing about our Montessori is that some of the same materials that are in the three to six-year-old classroom are in the six to nine and the nine to twelve classroom, too. And you think, well, “Why would that be?”
For example, in the three to six-year-old classroom, they have a basket of shapes. There would be a cube, and a cylinder, and those kinds of things. Those young children are learning the names of those things. In the older classrooms, they’re using the same materials, and they are learning how to calculate mass and volume with those some things.
The interesting thing about this is the lesson to everyone is that you can have the same old thing and always get it to do something different or learn more about it or from it.
I was thinking about how Montessori is a system where it is education for life and life skills. And isn’t it true that we can look at every experience, every learning in our life like that?
So just because because you feel that you’ve reached the top of your game and you’re wondering what the next step is, I want you to remember this question: Do you ever really reach the top?
I’m Roberta Fernandez, Your Ability Activator.
