Whether or not you discover your talents and passions is partly a matter of opportunity. If you've never been sailing, or picked up an instrument, or tried to teach or to write fiction, how would you know if you had a talent for these things?
If you're running an engineering or finance company, all companies depend on ideas and ingenuity. I think the principles of creative leadership apply everywhere, whether it's an advertising company or whether you're running a hospital.
There's a wealth of talent that lies in all of us. All of us, including those who work in schools, must nurture creativity systematically and not kill it unwittingly.
Passion is the driver of achievement in all fields. Some people love doing things they don't feel they're good at. That may be because they underestimate their talents or haven't yet put the work in to develop them.
Creativity is as important as literacy and numeracy, and I actually think people understand that creativity is important - they just don't understand what it is.
You create your life, and you can recreate it, too. In times of economic downturn and uncertainty, it's more important than ever to look deep inside yourself to fathom the sort of life you really want to lead and the talents and passions that can make that possible.
Now the problem with standardized tests is that it's based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we can't, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not.
Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not - because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized.
The answer is not to standardize education, but to personalize and customize it to the needs of each child and community. There is no alternative. There never was.
