Howard Gardner’s Extraordinary Minds provides an
interesting discussion of what makes for excellence. Gardner is the man who brought us the concept of multiple
intelligences, a welcome concept to those of us who don’t thrive on
monoculture.
He posits four major kinds of
extraordinary people, Masters, Makers, Introspectors, and Influencers, each
with a particular focus. He
illustrates each kind with a case study, of Mozart, Freud, Woolf, and Gandhi,
respectively.
While he states that, obviously,
we can’t all be extraordinary by definition, he does suggest that a commitment
to excellence can bring us all closer to being extraordinary along with three
core practices: reflection,
leverage, and framing. We live in
challenging times; it behooves us to consider what we might need to rise to
meet them.
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