Latest / Amazing Life Breakthrough / Ep 67 | When the Egg Breaks, Keep the Lesson

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Ep 67 | When the Egg Breaks, Keep the Lesson · Amazing Life Breakthrough

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever worked really hard on something, watched it almost succeed, and then had it fall apart right at the end?
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean literally fall, about 50 feet with a raw egg inside.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Earlier this week we talked about what I called the September reset.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: As summer begins winding down and schedules start filling up again, we have an opportunity to decide what rhythms we want to bring back, what we want to carry forward from summer, and maybe what we're ready to leave behind.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: And with school getting ready to start for many students here in the Pacific Northwest, I've been thinking about something else.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: We spent an awful lot of time in school trying to get things right, get the correct answer, pass the test, earn the grade, finish the assignment, win the competition, and those things certainly matter.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: But some of the most valuable things I learned in school came from moments when things didn't go exactly right.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Amazing Life Breakthrough.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Steve Klein, and this is where we explore the experiences, discoveries, and life lessons that help us find meaning in ordinary moments, grow through what life teaches us, and hopefully learn how to live life to the fullest.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: And today I want to take you back to my freshman year of high school and beginning algebra.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now I actually enjoyed this class, and a big reason for that was my teacher, Mr.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Wilkins.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Wilkins was one of those teachers you remember.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: He had a big personality and a way of making algebra feel like something more than numbers written on a chalkboard.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: When you walked into his classroom and looked up, there were geometric shapes hanging from the ceiling.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't just decorations, they were trophies of a sort.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: They were the survivors of something that students in his class knew was coming eventually.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: The egg drop challenge.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: The assignment was to engineer a structure that would protect a raw egg when dropped from the top of our high school stadium grandstands, somewhere around 50 feet up.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the egg didn't just have to survive once, it had to survive three times.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: The structure had to use organic materials.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea was to apply what we were learning about geometry, structure, shock absorption, and problem solving.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: If your creation survived all three drops, there was a pretty good incentive.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Your structure might end up hanging from Mr.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Wilkins's ceiling along with the winners from previous classes.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now some of my classmates built these elaborate geometric creations, triangles, polyhedrons, interesting designs meant to distribute the force of impact.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: As for me, I took a slightly different approach.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: I had a box.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: One box.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing special about this box, it was just plain with a simple lid.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: And inside that box I had a loaf of French sourdough bread.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, bread.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: My brilliant mathematical innovation was bread.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: I hollowed out the center of the loaf, put the raw egg inside, and used the bread as a shock absorber.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: It was organic, it was soft, and in my mind it made perfect sense.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Why build some incredibly complicated structure if a loaf of bread could cushion the fall?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I tested it at home, and it worked.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: At least mostly.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: The first drop usually went well, the second drop usually went well.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: The problem was that by the third drop, the bread had already absorbed a couple of impacts, and things became a little less predictable.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I came prepared, I brought another loaf.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: My plan was simple.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: If I could replace the bread before the third drop, I figured I had a pretty good chance of making it all the way through.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: The day of the test arrived, and there we were at the high school football stadium looking up at those grandstands.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Fifty feet doesn't sound quite as dramatic when you're not there to see it.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Stand at the bottom and look straight up while somebody is holding your school project over the edge, and suddenly fifty feet looks pretty high.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: One by one the projects went over it.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Some survived, some didn't.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then came mine.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: First drop, and the box hit the ground.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: We checked the egg.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Still good.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, yes, I made it.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Then came the second drop.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Down it came again.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: The bread had taken another beating, but the egg survived.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm getting excited.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because suddenly this ridiculous idea with a loaf of French bread is working.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: One more drop, and maybe my creation is going to join those other projects hanging from the ceiling.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, wouldn't it be so cool if my geometric shape of a simple square got immortalized on the other elaborate designs on the ceiling?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Future classes would scratch their heads wondering how in the world did this geometry disperse the impact?
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: All along they would never know a loaf of bread as the secret ingredient inside the box.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And now I was about to see my fun comical dream become a reality.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: It had nothing to do with geometry and everything to do with innovation and thinking on your feet.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: I had brought the fresh loaf for exactly this moment.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: So before the third drop, I asked if I could swap out the bread.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: The answer was no.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: The structure had to make all three drops, as it was.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And there I was.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: I already knew from my testing that the third drop was the risky one.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: I had a fresh loaf sitting there and I knew what I wanted to do.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: But the rules were the rules.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we went ahead, the box went over the edge, it dropped, it hit, it rolled, and I ran over to see what happened.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: I opened the box, cracked.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: There was bright yellow yolk spreading into my now very unsuccessful loaf of French bread, and that was it.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: No spot on the ceiling for me.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: At that age, those things feel important, and I wanted my project up there, I wanted to be one of the ones who succeeded.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: I had come so close.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Two out of three.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: But two out of three wasn't the challenge.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: The challenge was three.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: All three.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: So by the rules of the experiment, my egg drop project failed.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: But here's what's interesting.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: All these years later, I don't look back on that experience as a failure.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I remember that algebra class as one of the classes that helped me discover something about myself.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: I liked math.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: I was good at it.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: I like that you could approach a problem in different ways and still arrive at the same answer.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: I liked the logic of it, and I liked factoring.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: Apparently, I liked factoring enough that Mr.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Wilkins later congratulated me in my yearbook for being the factoring champ.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: I ended up getting an A in algebra, and that interest in solving problems, looking at things from different angles, finding patterns, and figuring out how pieces fit together would stay with me far beyond that classroom.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Those skills would eventually become useful in programming technology, business, and many other areas of my life.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: And isn't that interesting?
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the egg broke, but the learning didn't.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, maybe that's the part we sometimes misunderstand about education.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: We think learning is proven when something works.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: You get the answer right, therefore you learned.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: You pass the test, therefore you learned, you win the competition, therefore you learned.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: But that's only part of it.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes learning happens because something doesn't work.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: You try an idea, you test it, it gets through the first drop, it survives the second, then the third one exposes the weakness.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's not necessarily wasted effort.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's information.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: And whether you're a student going back to school, a parent trying to encourage a student or someone who hasn't sat in a classroom for decades, that still applies.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: There are things you're trying right now.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's in your work, maybe it's something you're building, and maybe it's a relationship, maybe it's a new habit, maybe you're learning a skill and you're frustrated because you're not very good at it yet.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And when something doesn't work, the temptation is to reduce the whole experience to one word.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Failure.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: But maybe that's too simple.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: A better question might be what did this teach me that I couldn't have learned if everything had worked perfectly?
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's different.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because now the cracked egg has value, the mistake has information, the disappointing outcome becomes part of the education.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: And there's another part of that story that matters to me more now than it probably did when I was a freshman.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that was my teacher, Mr.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Wilkins.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: A good teacher can change the way you see an entire subject.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody else could have taught beginning algebra as a series of formulas, assignments, and tests.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: He made it memorable.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: He brought energy to it.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: He had those strange geometric creations hanging from the ceiling.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: He created contests.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: He challenged us.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: He made us laugh.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: And years later, I can still remember his name and the way that classroom felt.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's influence.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And for the teachers who may be listening as another school year begins, I hope you know that.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: You may not see the long-term results of what you are doing.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: A student may forget half the formulas you teach, they may forget the worksheet, they may forget the test, but they may remember that you made something interesting.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: They may remember that you believed they could learn it.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: They may discover an ability in your classroom that becomes useful 10, 20, or 30 years later.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And parents, we have a role in this too.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: When a child brings home a disappointing grade, loses the competition, misses the shot, or tells us something didn't work, it's natural to focus on the result.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: What happened?
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Why didn't you get this right?
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: What are you going to do about the grade?
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes those questions need to be asked, but maybe there's another question worth adding.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: What did you learn?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because that changes the conversation.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: It tells a young person that the purpose of learning is not merely to produce a perfect result.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's to become more capable, more curious, more creative, more willing to try again.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I think adults need that reminder just as much as kids do.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: We don't graduate from learning, we just stop getting report cards.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Life continues handing us experiments.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Some succeed, some crack on the third drop.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the question becomes whether we're willing to learn from both.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: So here's something I'd encourage you to try this week.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Think about one thing that hasn't worked the way you hoped recently.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Don't immediately label it a failure.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, ask three simple questions what worked, what didn't, and what do I know now that I didn't know before?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you discover your idea was better than you thought, but one part of the design needs to change.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you realize you need more practice.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe somebody gives you feedback that helps you see an ability in yourself you hadn't noticed.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe you simply learn, as I did, that French sourdough bread can protect an egg from a surprisingly long fall.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Twice.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Just don't count too heavily on that third one.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back, I never got my creation hanging from Mr.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Wilkins' ceiling.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm okay with that.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because the things that lasted weren't hanging from a ceiling anyway.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: The creativity lasted, the curiosity lasted, the enjoyment of solving problems lasted, and the memory of a teacher who knew how to make algebra come alive lasted.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the award disappears, sometimes the egg breaks, sometimes you don't get the results you hoped for.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: But the big thing is to keep the lesson.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because years from now that may turn out to be the part that mattered most.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you know a student, parent, teacher, or somebody who's discouraged because something they're trying hasn't worked yet, consider sharing this episode with them.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're enjoying Amazing Life Breakthrough, follow or subscribe so you can join me for the next conversation.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Steve Klein.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Keep learning, keep experimenting, and don't let one cracked egg convince you the whole experience was wasted.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: And remember to live life to the fullest.