Friday Mindset #169

Happy Friday!

Quotation of the week. English clergyman William James Dawson makes an interesting point about money here:

This quote’s on our minds because we’ve found that some students’ dreaming-of-billions is becoming damaging to their wellbeing. They chase whatever shiny thing they’ve seen on social; fake people advertising fake lives that aren’t real and contribute nothing. Fantasies like that tend to discourage action in the present moment by making the outcomes seem impossible, and students default to pipe-dreams and bitterness.

We can’t have that. A better approach might be - “OK, forget about money for now. That’ll come eventually. Ask yourself instead - what is it that I can offer? What problems do I see in the world around me? What can I do to help? We need to switch around the question so it’s ‘what can I help make or produce that’s of value?’ rather than, ‘what can I dream of mindlessly consuming?’”

OK, moralising over. Lots to share this week - and a theme to connect everything - so let’s dive in.

Something we're reading...

Students with higher levels of engagement, happiness, curiosity or optimism, usually have a stronger sense of what their values are. In this piece, Psychologist Nick Wignall suggests we regularly assess our own values, and try and act in accordance with them. He has a downloadable resource with 130 values listed, and an activity in which he asks us to consider our top 10 or 20 values from the list.

We’ve sat down and tried the activity. It was good - interesting and helpful. We started out with a long-list of maybe 35 values, then whittled them down, discussing why we were combining similar values to make room for more, or cutting some from the list. It took us twenty or thirty minutes in total, so it’d make a decent tutorial activity.

You can find the blog post here:

And the values document here:

And Wignall’s other short articles have been useful too. This one caught our eye, and might yours too:

Something to try...

Sometimes it’s hard to get students to commit to studying something they can’t see the value of. How many times have you heard, “What’s the point in this subject? I’ll never use it in real life”?

A utility value intervention is an intervention that encourages students to explore the purpose of the subject they’re studying. A terrific study that we’ve shared before shows how students can become more engaged, determined and persistent once they realise the value of a subject.

Today’s powerpoint takes students through the study…

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