Author: philipdodson

Hi I’m Philip Dodson entrepreneur co-founder of @Work Hubs and founder of Dodson Commercial I am passionate about revolutionising how & where we work, enabling individuals and business to connect, network and grow. Self-employment within the next 7-10 years will become the norm in the developed world, alongside this will be a co-working revolution. The future is all about sharing, collaborating and helping others to succeed. Find out more – @WorkHubs

You don’t fatten a pig by keep weighing it

Posted on by philipdodson

I was talking to my friend Tom today and he used this brilliant quote to talk about the constant testing that is used in education. The same as you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it, you don’t educate children by keep on testing them.

Education in the last 100 years or less has all been about the industrialised machine preparing inter-changeable cogs for their ‘machine’. The standardised test in the US invented for that very thing to bring everyone to a satisfactory average level of competency in certain repetitive tasks so that the machine could continue to efficiently function. Take a look at Seth Godin’s ‘what is school for?’. A question that rarely, if ever, gets asked about the purpose of education.

Education across the globe is systematically on auto-pilot, with little thought about the suitability or usefulness of education, preparing people for a world that doesn’t exist.

You don’t fatten a pig by keep weighing it and you do not ever make things better by doing the same things.

Curiousness got the human race to now, our compliance and standardised education will halt any further progress because there will be no more rebels, no more heretics, no more people causing a stir or challenging the status quo.

Just a lot of regularly weighed unintelligent and compliant ‘pigs’.

One pair of jeans

Posted on by philipdodson

None of us knows a woman or a man who owns just one pair of jeans or one pair of shoes or one coat or one of almost any item.

Many of us have accumulated spares of almost everything, just in case the item breaks or becomes lost or whatever other reason.

So we work all day to accumulate trinkets to exchange them online or at shopping malls for goods we will probably not really need or use. Even with food, we do the same, buying more than we need or can consume. As much as 1/3 of the average weekly food shop ends up in the bin.

Perhaps if we only had what we really needed, repaired things, shared, used 2nd hand stuff and were more careful with what we consumed, we’d be able to work less or spend more time doing things that matter.

A joyful life will not be found at a shopping mall or a supermarket or in our fridge.

Consume less, live more and own one pair of jeans.