Meaning – Thought – Action

Jerry Porras, the co-author of Built to Last, and, Good to Great, while talking to the builders of great companies and ideas, found that these men and women represented a variety of very different personalities. However, what appeared to be common in these individuals was the clear alignment of three essential elements – Meaning, Thought and Action. I offer a very brief summary of these elements as described in Porras’s third and most recent research endeavor, Success Built to Last: Creating a Life that Matters.

Meaning is linked to what you love and are passionate about. You may not have just one passion but a portfolio of passions. This is a similar concept to what is described in Gladwell’s Outliers and Robinson’s The Element.  How do we as educators, draw deep meaning and purpose from our work with students? 

Thinking can either kill or allow our passions to take flight. Builders are somehow able to overcome self-doubt as well as the doubts of family and peers when it comes to persisting at what they find meaningful. While fortune or glory have come to many builders, it did not figure at all in their thinking. Rather, they trusted their passion enough to strive to become experts at it for its own sake. How can the way we think influence our own craft and improve our abilities to reach  our students?

Builders take action to achieve BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) for themselves. Just the act of setting these goals requires unreasonable confidence, because although they have a clear objective, they often don’t have a clear roadmap. Builders draw meaning from the journey. They learn from failures, persevere and improve, and get to the end of the journey through “thousands of tiny steps.” What personal BHAG can help drive our passion as educators?

The above just scratches the surface of Success Built to Last by Porras, Emery and Thompson. It pulls together a lot of what Gladwell and Robinson have to say on the subject and offers the practical aspects of aligning meaning, thought and action.