The 2 Different Attitudes Towards Life

A story of the bucket versus the searchlight.

I.

Has your education killed your creativity?

In 2007, education professor Sir Ken Robinson took to the stage at the Monterey Conference Centre, California.

Equipped with a dull suit, a sharp sense of humour, and thankfully no slides, he delivered one of the most popular TED Talks of all time: Do schools kill creativity? (Spoiler: yes they do).

17 years later, I realised that Sir Ken was describing 2 different ways to approach not just education, but life in general.

We can imagine these 2 approaches by using the analogy of buckets vs. searchlights.

II.

The bucket way of life

Imagine you’re hunting for treasure in a dark, thick forest. And all you have is a bucket. You’ve been assured that there’s treasure to be found, so you start stuffing things in your bucket, filling it up in the hope that you’ll score.

This is the bucket theory of life.

It’s indiscriminate. It’s perception without expectation. It comes from a place of hoarding and scarcity - collect all you can get.

Once your bucket is ful…