The Campbell Academy Blog (84)

The greatest gifts

If you had a baby that was born today, and someone offered you a basket of talent and skills and gifts to give to your child, and you only had the chance to pick two out any number of those things, the two I would pick would be emotional intelligence and creativity.

Emotional intelligence is one of the most important skills for anyone to have in modern society (IMHO).

As the world becomes more digital and AI becomes more prevalent, we can less and less believe anything we see on the screen; the most important thing we will have is human contact and interaction.

The ability to read that, to see it, and to take the temperature of the emotion in a room is perhaps what separates the people I have met, who are the greatest of all, from everyone else.

Emotional intelligence was first described by Daniel Goleman way back in the nineties when he was looking for something else.

But the most fascinating part of emotional intelligence is that it's a trainable, acquirable skill. Even if you are not born with the ability to exercise emotional intelligence, you can improve your level enormously by paying attention (as opposed to IQ, where you can't).

The second most crucial gift, though, is creativity.

In a world that is changing so fast and so much all of the time (and that will only get worse, it will not get better), the ability to see a different solution to a new problem is perhaps the thing that will set people apart from mediocrity into magic.

I will try to remember this as I continue to talk to my kids and my nieces and nephews, and anybody else who will listen.

We're way past making sure someone can remember a physics equation about force or motion (we can find that online in about half a second).

We must go back again to creativity and emotional intelligence.