If you want passion and engagement, don’t lecture or test

passion and engagement: photograph of the backs of a happy couple, arm-in-arm, sitting on the shoreline looking out to sea. Photo attribution: Flickr user 98810885@N07
Magical events change people’s lives. Great events foster passion by providing well-designed opportunities for significant engagement with peers. For passion and engagement, you need a tribe—be it two or a hundred other people—with whom you relate and connect while you’re together at the event, and, hopefully, afterward too.

For passion and engagement to be possible, what should we avoid?

“If you want people to become passionate, engaged in a field, transformed by an experience — you don’t test them, you don’t lecture them and you don’t force them. Instead, you create an environment where willing, caring individuals can find an experience that changes them.”
—Seth Godin, “Will this be on the test?”

Hmm…don’t test, lecture, or force people to do what they don’t want to do.

As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, seventy years ago:

“Building a boat isn’t about weaving canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It’s about giving a shared taste for the sea, by the light of which you will see nothing contradictory but rather a community of love.”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “Citadel”, 1948, translated from the French

Giving people the opportunity and support for meaningful emotional experiences gives them the gift of potentially changing in positive ways.

Photo attribution: Flickr user 98810885@N07

One thought on “If you want passion and engagement, don’t lecture or test

  1. Here’s Seth Godin again, five years later:

    “It will be a long time before I spell “handkerchief” incorrectly. That’s because in third grade, I lost the entry round of the spelling bee to my friend Elisa because I got it wrong. Who knew that there was a “d”?

    And now I know where I keep the thermos in my house. I spent twenty minutes looking for it the other day, and failed. A few days later, I came across it. Because of the previous challenge of missing it, my brain was on high alert when it finally appeared.

    That’s how we learn most of the foundational things that we know, remember and care about–not through exposure, but through effort and failure.

    That’s why tests aren’t nearly as useful as projects. Just about anything worth learning is worth learning the hard way.”

    from https://seths.blog/2021/06/lessons-learned/

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *