Blair's Blog

Oma’s birthday was the 13th of March, but we are celebrating today with a big waffle brunch.

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Posted from our iPad!

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…not the basketball – that isn’t interesting.  But the month of March has been.

We’ve had quite a bit going on over the past few weeks.  Mark and I did a Father/Son outing with his boy’s club to launch model rockets, we had a road trip to Lethbridge to celebrate my uncle’s 90th birthday, we saw some interesting aircraft, we were at a traditional RCAF mess dinner.  On top of all this there was lots of business at work and around the house.    Here are a few pictures of all the excitement:

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Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink, 2009, Riverhead (ISBN: 978-1594488849)

This is a very thought provoking book that complements other books that I’ve read over the past while. In particular, it complements the ideas found in The Element by Ken Robinson which I reviewed a couple of years ago. Like The Element, this was an audiobook, however this time I got distracted part way through and it took about 8 months to finish it off. Brenda and I listened to the last three chapters on a road trip to Lethbridge last weekend.

Dan Pink’s thesis is similar to Ken Robinson’s view that personal fulfillment is tied to having interest, passion and opportunity combine in a way that allows individual potential to be realized. In Drive, however, the idea is broader and looks to the source of personal motivation, the idea that each of us is best motivated to achieve a desired outcome when we are driven by autonomy, purpose and mastery. That is, when we choose (autonomously) to do something meaningful (that has purpose) through the exercise of our skills and strengths (mastery) we will persevere to accomplish our aims. This internal or “intrinsic” motivation is far more powerful than external (“extrinsic”) motivation – the carrot and stick approach. The majority of the book circles around this idea and supports it with fascinating research and examples

What struck a particular cord with me was how Pink argues that the industrial model of work and education that has been the norm over the past 3 or 4 generations is ill-suited for the creative, collaborative demands of the 21st century knowledge based economy. Mediocrity beckons to any of us that bow to the demands of the social systems that require compliance and “fitting in” as the prerequisites to getting into the “right” school, getting a good job in a cube farm and retiring with a fat pension. It isn’t the 1950’s anymore. I look at my kid’s school and it is all too clear that the purpose of public education is to bash the spark of creativity and individuality out of my children and shame them into conforming, fitting in and memorizing facts that they could look up on Google in a heartbeat. I don’t want my kids to learn compliance – I want them to be engaged in life, to think on their feet, to challenge the status quo and to seek purpose in something greater than themselves.

This clip, from The RSA, is where I first heard of Daniel Pink and Drive – it is well worth spending 10 minutes watching.

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Once again its time for the annual update on the license plate game! The anticipation you all must feel as you wait for this day must be a lot like Christmas – except you don’t get any presents. Or turkey. Or shortbread. Or a statutory holiday.

Well, enough rejoicing – here are the sad facts. The recession seems to have affected my progress quite a bit this year as I have only counted a mere 42 plates in the 9th year of playing the game. I saw plate 721 earlier this week. This has dropped the average rate from 85 plates/year (after 8 years) to 80 plates/year or 6.7 plates/month. The rate over the last year was only 3.6 plates/month. Scott will be catching up with me.

I think that the increasing numbers of the 4 digit plates, which are harder to read at a distance, and the fact that I don’t drive in rush hour nearly as much as I previously did are big factors in the slow down.

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