Crystal: [00:00:00] I am Crystal Delli, and welcome to the Forces for Nature Show. Do you find yourself overwhelmed with all the doom and gloom you hear of these days? Do you feel like you as just one person, can’t really make a difference? Forces for nature cuts through that negativity. In each episode, I interview someone who is working to make the world more sustainable and humane.

Join me in learning from them and get empowered to take action so that you too can become a force for nature.

We often think of education as a means to an end, a way to land a job, climb the [00:00:45] ladder, or secure financial stability. But what if education is something far greater? What if it’s the key to freedom, to critical thinking, and even to bridging the divides that seem impossible to cross? My guest today, James Keys, has spent a lifetime at the intersection of business leadership and education as the former CEO of seven 11 and Blockbuster.

He saw firsthand how an educated workforce isn’t just important for corporate success, it’s essential for the health of our society and democracy. In his book, education is freedom. The future is in your hands. He makes a compelling case that learning isn’t just about knowledge, it’s about [00:01:30] empowerment. In this conversation, we explore a fundamental challenge of our time fear.

Fear is at the root of so many of today’s most polarizing issues. Climate change, immigration, politics. It fuels the vision, spreads misinformation, and keeps us locked in echo chambers where we resist change instead of embracing its potential. James argues that the antidote to fear is learning, but not just any kind of learning.

The kind that fosters curiosity builds confidence and allows us to truly listen to one another. We discuss how deeply ingrained narratives can create what James calls militant ignorance, [00:02:15] a phenomenon where even the most intelligent people become so entrenched in their beliefs that they refuse to question them.

He shares insights on how shifting our perspective, much like viewing the earth from space, can reveal our shared humanity and common goals. And for those of us passionate about climate action, James offers a challenge. Are we framing the conversation in a way that invites collaboration or are we unintentionally pushing people away?

This episode is not just about education. It’s about how we learn, why we learn, and how leading can lead us to a future of greater understanding, connection, and progress.[00:03:00]

Hi Jim. Thank you so much for joining me on the Forces for Nature Podcast. It’s so great to have you.

Jim: Thank you. It’s great to be part of the show.

Crystal: We are at EARTHx. Tell me what brought you here in the first place.

Jim: I have been fortunate to know Trammell Crow for many years, and at it have admired from a distance the work that he’s done with EARTHx and his, his efforts to help humanity and.

When he saw that I had written the book, he asked me this year to speak. I’ve been here two EARTHx before, but this is the first time I’ve been invited back as a speaker and I was delighted to share the message.

Crystal: You just today spoke about the book? Yes. What were you talking about? What was the theme?

Jim: Well, the purpose of the book [00:03:45] as sort of.

Self-evident education is freedom, is to really make a wake up call for everyone. That many of the issues that we have in this world, climate being one of them, is possibly a. Best resolved through our collaboration, people coming together with knowledge, and that if you step back from it, climate is a metaphor for so many of the issues that society has today.

It could be crime, it could be immigration, it could be war, pick any issue, and someone on one side of the issue is afraid of something and then reacts or does something that causes fear on the other side of the issue, climate’s a great example. [00:04:30] So here we have an ironic situation with climate where some of the most conservative, um, or some of the most outspoken conservationists, if you will, are also those who are most upset about those who want to make climate change reforms.

And it, it, it, it doesn’t make any sense. You step back and you say, but wait, you’re, you’re a hunter, you’re a fisherman, you’re a conservationist. Yeah. But how can you fight against people who are trying to improve the, the planet? And then they say the other side of the argument, well, they’re, they’re ignoring the economics.

They’re gonna destroy the economy. And the irony is that. Many of those who are concerned about the planet are also concerned about [00:05:15] their fellow man. And, and they too are worried about the economy and the ability for, for all boats to be lifted by the tide, if you will. But, but their, their concerns are not being adequately communicated so often because each side is so hunkered down in their respective position.

That they’re not necessarily listening clearly, and the communication is not happening with the other side. So this was part of the message this morning. A lot of this, this problem that we have with climate issues, with immigration, with so many other issues in our world today is fear-based. And when you turn on the the news, that’s all you hear is a constant.

Fire hose, if [00:06:00] you will, of fear, fear, fear. They’re coming to get you. They’re gonna take something from you. They’re gonna do something to you, right? And so the antidote to fear is learning and knowledge.

Crystal: And communication and communic like re doing today.

Jim: Communication. Exactly. And so that’s my gift in the book, if you will.

I’ve talked about the what, the how, and the why of learning, but the what is recognizing that change really equals opportunity.

Crystal: So I wanna go deeper into those three elements of the book. Let’s take a step back first and tell me what got you into education, because you did start in business.

Jim: Yeah, I’ve been privileged to have the leadership role at two Fortune 500 companies and both seven 11 and Blockbuster.

And [00:06:45] from the helm of, of a major worldwide corporation. You have a very different perspective of the world. You see things from a very different angle, and one of the challenges that I saw is that we have a supply crisis of one of the most valuable resources that any corporation has. We don’t think of it this way sometimes, but it’s the human resource and an educated workforce is critical to the success of any company.

This goes all the way back to the Rockefellers and the, you know, the industrialists who recognized the need to technically mass produce an educated workforce, which they did in building the public school systems that we know today. But that model doesn’t necessarily fit. Our needs today in the [00:07:30] information age especially.

And so sitting at the helm of a corporation, we, we, we saw the inadequate supply of an educated workforce trained in the way we needed, which is a breadth of knowledge and some depth potentially. But we decided to go into the school system and particularly the public school system and help build a bridge between those students and jobs.

And to say, here is the path and un and knowledge is your key. This education system is your key to unlocking unlimited opportunity. With me being a poster child for that, having grown up virtually with no one in my family that went to school.

Speaker 3: Wow.

Jim: So for me, it’s easy. It’s [00:08:15] a, it, it’s, it’s an example that I’ve been able to live and I wanted to help share that message with others that anyone can do this.

It’s just a matter of knowing the path. And being able to help them find it. So that was the purpose of creating the Educationist Freedom Foundation over 20 years ago, is to help particularly public school children who may not have that clarity of direction. To be able to find through knowledge, through knowing what to learn, how to learn, and why to learn their own path to success.

Crystal: It sounds like that you were bringing the value of knowledge to them because I, I mean, we were all kids in school and I can think back and remember like, why am I here? Like why am I learning this? Why do I [00:09:00] need this? This is useless, blah, blah, blah, and. You were helping to show them why it’s important, and in the book you go into three key points of what, how, and why to learn.

Jim: Yes. Right? Yes.

Crystal: So can you go deeper into what?

Jim: Sure. But before we do though, that you hit on a really important point. The value, again, I’m a business person, so I can’t help but relate to value, and I see these. Young people today, and it was no different when, when I was growing up. They see value in terms of salary, money.

Speaker 3: Yes.

Jim: The book is entitled, education is Money or Education is [00:09:45] Wealth. It’s education is freedom. One of the inspirations I had was my father, who was a really hardworking guy, worked in a factory. He didn’t want that life for me, and I thought it was because he wasn’t making much money. He wanted me to go make more money, and he said, no, son.

That’s not it. I want you to have the freedom that I don’t have. I’m trapped in my job. I have to work. I. These shifts and then I have to work on weekends to try to make enough money for you and your brothers and sisters to live. And he had spent some time in World War II and he was fascinated with the culture on the Burma Road, meeting people of all different cultures.

And he wanted to [00:10:30] share that with me. He wanted so badly to take me to Southeast Asia or to other places and to see and experience what he did as a result of being a soldier in World War ii. But he couldn’t afford it, and he kept saying. I want for you the freedom to explore this world and to have the ability to, not because you’re in a war, but the ability to see and learn, and, and, and exchange with people from all over the world.

That’s freedom. And it’s not about money. It’s about having the freedom to do what you want to do. Hmm. So that’s part of the message I was trying to impart in the book into these young people that, to your point, the value [00:11:15] proposition isn’t, I just want to go get a job. It’s a trap. Mm-hmm. My brothers and sisters fell into that trap.

They went to work for the factory ’cause they wanted a nice car and they wanted to get a job that would pay for that car. I took a different route and took the long, longer route. No immediate gratification. I’m gonna, in fact go into debt. Wow. I give myself the opportunity down the road for a life of more freedom, which is what I do enjoy today.

Hmm.

Crystal: To clarify for me, the what element? It’s the what you should learn or it’s what? What is the what element

Jim: in your Yeah. The what? The what, the how, and the why. I call them the meta skills, if you will. These are the things that there’s not a class on what to learn. [00:12:00] Well, yes, there’s, you should learn math, you should learn science, you should learn reading.

Those are the traditional what to learn, but stepping back from it, those softer skills or the meta skills are dealing with change because change is gonna happen. There’s no class that I remember on change management. How do I change, particularly in high school, but the reality is change is going to happen.

There’s no class on confidence. What do I do when that change does happen? How do I respond and do I respond out of anger or fear, or do I respond by using information to make the most informed response that I can? And then how do I communicate? That. First of all, [00:12:45] how do I understand that change through listening through learning, and how do I react to that change in terms of my communications to others around me?

That gives them the confidence that we’re in the right direction. So those three things change, confidence, clarity, or three elements that I’ve found are critical to the success of an individual. In any role, they are critical to your success in family life if you think about it. ’cause you’re gonna run into changes in your family life.

And it’s not the change, it’s how you react to the change that everyone’s looking at that will determine how your family responds. It’s the confidence that you show that you’re not intimidated [00:13:30] by, you’re not afraid of it, you’ve, you’re prepared. To move forward, even if that change is awful. It could be a devastating, could be a gut wrenching problem that you encounter, but on the other side could be opportunity.

You just don’t know at that time why it is you’re having to experience it. And then finally, that, that communications, that clarity of communications piece being to truly understand, listen to each other, learn from each other, and understand the situation we talked about. Climate as a great example of this.

Is climate change an example of change? Yes. Is it bad change? Yes. Could there be a silver lining in this horrible, [00:14:15] catastrophic thing that’s happening to our planet? Maybe it, it was necessary to have us come out on the other side. I have a, a, a river that I grew up with called the Blackstone River in Massachusetts.

I never knew which day, which color that river would be. It could be green, it could be blue. We would, we’d joke about it and the smell was horrific. Today they fish in that river and they boat on that river, but it was, that change was resisted by so many. Yeah, and we thought the river was dead. But the river today is more vibrant and alive than it has been for a hundred years.

That’s the. That’s the positive change that ended up occurring, right? Mm-hmm. Someone had to have the [00:15:00] confidence to take on the challenges of that change. There were mills that were producing linens and, and clothing, and they were dumping waste into the river, and it was an economic challenge to those mills to have to change.

But look at the result today. And they made it. They made it through. And everyone’s better for it. So confidence was a factor. And then ultimately that clarity of communication. Was someone really truly able to listen to those factory operators and say, we can’t do this too quickly, or we will put thousands of families out of work.

So we have to be somewhat sympathetic to their challenges, but I. On the other hand, we can’t let them keep dumping these [00:15:45] dyes and this waste into the river. So let’s listen to their concerns and let’s together collaborate and have clarity of messaging and communications about what the timetable is and what the plan is so that we create a win-win for the community and for that factory and for the employees of that factory.

This is not rocket science at all. It’s fundamental human nature, but it is. It is overcoming the element of human nature that causes us to resist and to fight or to withdraw. Mm-hmm.

Crystal: I’m so glad that you said that and you brought up opportunity because in the environmental world and the climate change mitigation [00:16:30] world that I come from, we look at it so often as this fight and this.

I mean, it is horrendous and terrible and can be an existential crisis if, if we wanted to look at it that way. But that also just really brings you down. And so I started looking at it as an opportunity, because you’re right, fossil fuels for good or for bad, they got us to where we are today and they’ve given us so many incredible, wonderful things.

So you can’t poo pooh that. But maybe we’re not, maybe we are now at a point where. We have this opportunity to change and create a even better world, a more equitable world, a [00:17:15] more just and beautiful, healthy and humane world. And so that’s the way that we should look at it. And through education, I love the idea of instilling in people the confidence to change and not be afraid of fear and and whatnot.

The back of your book says, our freedom of self-determination has a prerequisite, an informed electorate. If that electorate is armed with false information or is influenced by outside forces, their actions and reactions can put democracy in jeopardy. And that that right there to me is so on point with where we are right now in the US and in the world in general.

And so let’s talk a little bit more about that. How [00:18:00] did we get to this point where, you know, people do feel like they’re informed. I’ve spoken to to many people who are preaching things that are misinformation, but they believe it’s to be true. So how do we move past misinformation? How can we separate what is a false truth and what is.

I guess you could say true. True truth. True truth. Probably without a better way of saying it.

Jim: I, I tried to understand that for the book. I did a lot of research for the book because I knew I had to tackle these difficult issues. There’s so many very intelligent people today doing so many really silly things and saying some pretty silly things on both sides of the argument.

Yeah. And I, you know, so I tried to look at it and I looked back at [00:18:45] history and I found evidence of. People who have tackled this problem and they, there’s one expression that I heard that was called militant ignorance. I was like, no. Wow. What’s militant ignorance? That means someone that is knowledgeable, someone that is intelligent, someone that’s armed with data, but they have surrounded themselves with others that are so steeped in a point of view.

That they defend what could ultimately be totally counter to their values to what they really truly know is right or wrong. But they’ve been reinforced in almost in a tribal way by others who can help them [00:19:30] believe that the other side is evil and wrong. And so even though their argument is not pure.

They believe they’re on the side of good versus evil, or right versus wrong. Mm-hmm. And this is creating polarization. You look through history and you see entire societies that have been crushed by this polarization and this militant ignorance that causes people to hunker down and even go to war. Over issues.

So as I tried to research this, I was shocked at the knowledge of the ancient philosophers. They saw this coming in society. They saw it in their own society so often, and they spoke about this [00:20:15] power of fear as a motivator. You can motivate people through hope and inspiration, or you can motivate them through fear.

And fear is sometimes easier. It requires less creativity and less imagination and less communication. You just scare people, and if you get enough of them on board, then it reinforces itself. Then you don’t have to keep scaring them because they scare each other. They band up into a secure tribe and protect themselves from all those other people on the outside that are threatening them, and they forget sometimes what they’re even threatened by.

Yeah, so this has happened throughout society. This is not unique to us right now, but interestingly, our [00:21:00] founding fathers knew this and they said Jefferson, even to Tocqueville, coming from France and looking at our democracy, said this democracy works, but its sustainability depends on an educated populace.

’cause they have to have the ability to have critical thinking, the ability to have curiosity, the ability to have free speech, to be able to challenge each other and not to give in to this militant ignorance that can tear societies down.

Crystal: And it could be either side. Both sides.

Jim: Both sides. Yeah. They’re both guilty of it often and, and in the course of trying to write the book and.

I tried to find another example ’cause I knew people wouldn’t really relate to ancient [00:21:45] philosophers, so I turned to Yoda. True. Star Wars had some wonderful lessons in it and, and Yoda in Star Wars. When teaching Young Luke made this point. He said, you know, Luke, um, ignorance leads to fear and fear leads to anger, and anger leads to violence.

And that’s, you see

Speaker 3: that nowadays

Jim: and we see it. We see it all over. We see it in in the news. We see it in government. We see it among friends. Sadly. Yeah, that band up against other friends and Yotis message to Young Luke was quite relevant in today’s terms. He said [00:22:30] the antidote to that is understanding knowledge, because knowledge leads to hope.

Hope leads to understanding and understanding leads to peace. And so now in Yoda’s case, he was encouraging Luke to use the force. Now, the force could be a metaphor for one’s faith, and it doesn’t matter what faith, because faith does give you a belief in something bigger than yourself. And confidence.

But faith combined that faith in whatever your faith is, whatever your religion is, if you have no religion, if you still have faith in the universe delivering for you, whatever it is, that combined with knowledge, your ability to truly [00:23:15] think and be able to have critical thinking, be able to listen to each other.

That will allow you to reverse that cycle of negativity and fear and to replace it with one of positivity and hope. The climate challenge is a perfect, perfect opportunity for us to do this, to see the, the plus the good things we’re gonna save our planet. Our planet’s gonna be better, that Blackstone River is better today than it was for hundreds of years because someone took the action.

And we can do this now, but sometimes as with any crisis, you have to be shocked into the need for change, but then you come outside of that change a [00:24:00] better person.

Crystal: I think conservationists and environmentalists have been really good on the shock factor. I feel like we’ve come in and we’ve used the doom and gloom narrative for so long, but we’re starting to realize that.

That’s not getting us where we need to go. And so there needs to be more than just the shock factor because I think that also creates this feeling of, um,

Jim: anger.

Crystal: Yeah, exactly. It creates this anger in the people who are affected by it and this complete misunderstanding and lack of wanting to understand why somebody else isn’t feeling that same way.

Right. And so. For the listener of this [00:24:45] show who probably labels themselves more as a conservationist or an environmentalist or whatnot, how can we avoid our own militant ignorance? Yes. How can we move past that and work with the other side of the aisle?

Jim: Thank you for asking. I have, I have so many things I would love to be able to share and recommend, and let me just give you an analogy outside of climate because I think people can relate to this one.

I just spoke at a very, very conservative group who, if I said the word diversity or DE, I would be all over me. I have a chapter in the book called Cultural Literacy, and what I explained is that. In that chapter, I talk [00:25:30] about how much we need to learn from each other. I give examples about myself as an American studying in the UK and being a minority for the first time and having people make fun of me because I was a Yankee, I was from the United States and I didn’t speak the way they spoke and I, I had all kinds of American quirks and I was the minority and ironically, the minority.

There were Pakistani Indians, et cetera, and they embraced me faster and in a warmer way than my British friends, and I couldn’t understand that, and I got to know them, and I got to know their culture. So I tell this whole story about cultural literacy and how I came away with this beautiful.

[00:26:15] Understanding of different cultures, whether it was Pakistanis or Indians or even my British friends who I ultimately did adapt and warm up to their culture, but I required an adaptation. It required a conscious effort for me to change, have confidence, and have clarity. Those three things, right? I put them into place and it worked and.

I characterize cultural literacy as an opportunity for everyone to learn from people who are not like us. Because when we surround ourselves with people just like us, who think like us, look like us, talk like us, we’re just in a little bubble. But the world is a rich place, a beautiful rich place, and we become this patchwork quilt of everyone we encounter.

So why not? [00:27:00] Chase the opportunity. Welcome the opportunity to learn from people who are very different from us. Well, this very conservative crowd was very warm to that idea. Now if I said I want to talk about DEI, yeah, that would’ve been all over me. Right? It would’ve been, the conversation would’ve been over very shortly.

This is a guy,

Crystal: why is he here? Is he, why in the

Jim: world is he talking to us? Right. But they embraced it and, and this is a good example because we deal with the same issues in climate, and I’ll give you an example of one. I was an early adopter of a Tesla, and I also sit on the board of an oil company. My oil company friends were horrified.

They’re like, why would you drive one of those things? It’s just, oh, it’s horrible. What are you doing? You [00:27:45] crazy. And I’m so excited

Crystal: to hear what you have today.

Jim: Yeah. Well I’m an early adopter, so I saw it as technology. I didn’t buy it ’cause it was a battery I didn’t buy. It was ’cause it was good for the planet.

Yes it is. And I am an environmentalist and I, I do wanna do the right thing for the planet, but that’s not why I bought the car. Mm-hmm. I’m an early adopter. I bought it ’cause it was new. What I discovered is that this has nothing to do with the battery. That the reason that people love the Tesla is it’s like driving an iPhone.

I could sit there, I could put on a roaring fire on the screen during the holidays. They had something, an app called the Yu Log or something that was like, [00:28:30] are you driving down the street and you get a fireplace on the screen? It was cool. There was a, your listeners may be offended by this, but my wife pointed this one out.

There’s a fart button. An app and I was like, what is that? And she pointed it out and, and it’s for the kids and there’s like, you can make a noise come from each seat in the car and the kids just love this. Right now General Motors would take, I don’t know if General Motors would ever put that into their car Point is.

The car is like an A, a an an A phone in that it upgrades itself. It creates new apps. The whole dashboard. You get on the phone one day, the whole dashboard is new and [00:29:15] it’s got all new stuff on it, new capabilities, new functions. So that going from that back into a traditional piston engine car that doesn’t have that capability was like stepping back in time.

Now we never hear about the attributes of electric cars from the perspective of the consumer and the technology and why it’s fun to drive and why it does so much more. Right? What we hear is, oh, you know, you wanna drive it because of the battery, or this and the battery Is that, and then all these negatives surrounding it.

So it, it’s a matter of almost as. In my analogy with the cultural [00:30:00] literacy versus using the word diversity, if we can find ways to address the opportunities within climate that are not going to trigger the other side to hunker down and resist immediately, I. Find the positives and talk about the hope where we’re heading with the technology and the capabilities.

Sounds horrible from someone who used to run seven 11, but it was such a pleasure not to have to go stop and fill up for gas. It’s just a convenience. These are the, the positives that we don’t, I don’t think we talk about enough. We get pulled into the fight. Yeah.

Crystal: Exactly. We get pulled into the fight. We do.

And if we could just learn what the other side values, we might [00:30:45] just realize that we have the same end goals. Just different ways of getting there. So let’s go back to the how and the why to learn that you talked about in your book, because I totally sidetracked us. How do you suggest people learn?

Jim: Well, interestingly, the, the how to learn is something that I think we all.

New as children. In fact, we did it almost naturally as children, and yet many of us have either forgotten or have been discouraged or just perhaps even some of us got a little lazy. So here, here are the three hows that I’ve outlined in the book. The first is critical [00:31:30] thinking. Critical thinking is something that we learned at a very, very early age.

I like to compare it to the scientific method. The scientific method taught us to have a hypothesis, put an action in place, and then step back and measure the results, and then take it full circle and reestablish a new hypothesis based on new scientific evidence. What we found out, what happened, and that process, a very, very simple process of critical thinking is something that.

Doesn’t just belong in the lab. It it, every business decision I ever made as a business person required, ironically, that same process. You have a hypothesis, you put an action in [00:32:15] place, and then here’s what so many of us forget, especially as business people, I can say we were all guilty of this. We just move on.

And then evaluate the results and based on new information, we change our plan. And that’s part of the learning process, right? The learning process is. Trial and error, but learn from your errors trial, put something in place, measure the results. If I don’t like what I got, I take a new action and I start over.

And that continued process of trial and error is a process of critical thinking that if you dial forward and you look [00:33:00] at today and you look at society and you think about how we take things at face value on the internet because it said so. We don’t then take that next action of gathering the information necessary to assess that.

And was it.

So that process of critical thinking is an, it’s integral to our learning process and our development process as humans, but it’s also integral to a democratic people, a society of people that want to establish their own self-determination. Because if they don’t have critical thinking, they will just take it face value.

Whatever a leader should say [00:33:45] and blindly follow. So that’s one. How to learn, reengage our critical thinking skills. The second is how,

Crystal: how do we do that? Sorry to interrupt, but how, how can we do that as adults? Not in a classroom. Do you have any suggestions?

Jim: The first, the first is awareness is to be able to just be aware that there is a process here and it’s, it’s a discipline that we have to reengage with.

To remind ourselves not just to take at face value. And I’ll give you a a an example I use on the cover of my book. I have a picture of the globe, and I call this perspective. When you step back and you look at the planet, [00:34:30] you have a very different perspective and you don’t feed borders, you don’t see wars, you don’t see races.

See this beautiful planet earth, when you then return to. You turn on television or the internet, you get this barrage of perceptions, and it’s that difference between perception and perspective that I’m encouraging everybody to embrace as part of the learning process. Perception is what you immediately think when you see something.

It’s a reaction. Perspective is when you step back from whatever it is that caused that perception to exist and engage your critical thinking to [00:35:15] ask why. The basic question why. And, uh, so yeah, I, I, it, it’s very simple to do, but we have to have, as humans and adults, we have to have the discipline that we were taught in grade school to ask why.

Crystal: Everything we read nowadays and see and hear.

Jim: Exactly. And that asking why leads me to the second how of the learning process. It is literally curiosity that we were all born with. And if you have any children under the age of five, you know that you have probably been guilty too, of saying, don’t keep asking me.

Why? Because that’s all kids ask, right? Why? [00:36:00] And, and it’s a healthy process. They, they wanna know, they’re naturally curious about their environment, about everything. And so they ask, they drive you crazy asking why, why, why about everything they see. They touch, they do, they’re told. And yet, as adults we forget and we, we stop asking why.

But if we can engage that natural curiosity, our childlike curiosity about everything around us. Be curious about how does it work? Why is that position that person’s taking, why is it being driven? And what is the reason for their, their position? Is it something, is it me? Is it [00:36:45] them? Is it something about the way they are responding or reacting to a circumstance, et cetera, et cetera.

So that question, why is a fundamental part that curiosity is a fundamental part of learning.

Crystal: Nice.

Jim: You ready for the third?

Crystal: Of course. I’m ready for the third. Definitely.

Jim: Okay. So if you’ve got a recognition that critical thinking, the process of, of trying something and learning from your mistakes and then collecting data, et cetera, is an important part of learning.

And you can reengage with the question why with that natural curiosity. So critical thinking, curiosity. And then the third C that I’ve, that I’ve tried to capture in this simple [00:37:30] three step process for how to learn is creativity. Einstein once said, it’s my favorite quote that I used in that to lead off this chapter on creativity, is that creativity is intelligence.

Having fun.

Crystal: Ah, I love that.

Jim: Right. And it’s so true. And think about something as fundamental, it makes a lot of

Crystal: sense.

Jim: It does when you think

Crystal: about it. Mm-hmm.

Jim: Exactly. And it, and it, and it truly is. So, so many of us use our left brain and we’re very good at technical things. And yet someone says, why don’t you, here’s a microphone.

Go sing some karaoke. And we go,

Crystal: well, I don’t think you’d want that of me at least. [00:38:15]

Jim: Ah, but I would. But I would. And, and here’s why there is no such thing as bad. Creativity is about expression. And even if you stood up and recited the words, instead of saying them, it would be your form of expressing yourself.

And if you can get over that, and here’s a, an important part of learning, if you can get over that fear, resist that fear of creativity, then you’re completely open to learn. Because creativity is integral to the learning process. You have to be able to not be afraid to express [00:39:00] yourself and let yourself use your right brain in a creative way to solve problems.

Crystal: And I, I heard recently too, or I saw a headline or something along the lines of, when you’re using, when you’re being creative, when you’re in that state, you are. Not anxious, like you’re replacing the feeling of anxiety, so it actually helps to like calm you down and, and give you flow. It does even if you’re not quote unquote the creative type.

Jim: Right? Exactly. No. It releases a new kind of energy. And, and to this, to this point though, this idea that you’re not the creative type. It’s a narrative that we have been told since we [00:39:45] were children, and it, if you go back, you trace through your own personal history. Why do you think you’re not a creative type?

You have. Painted outside the lines or colored outside the lines in your coloring book. And what were you told? Bad, bad, not good. Now I, I like to joke that my mom, when I did my first paint by numbers painting, and it was horrible ’cause I didn’t stay in the lines on paint by numbers. I joke that my mom probably looked at that and said, my son’s an impressionist.

Because it didn’t matter at the end of the day, I was five years old and trying to paint. What’s important is I was expressing myself, and yet we’re [00:40:30] told what’s good and bad and the reality of art. I remind if I’m talking to students, I say, if want you to go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, if you ever think you’re not creative, I want you to go the Museum of Modern, and what you’re gonna see is a box of rocks.

Somebody has expressed themselves with a box of rocks and that box of rocks may be worth millions and millions of dollars. And it’s there in the Museum of Modern Art. Right?

Crystal: Isn’t that crazy?

Jim: Yeah. So tell me that someone can say that that’s good or bad art. It’s art, it’s an expression. And so my point is there’s no such thing as bad when expressing yourself creatively.

[00:41:15] If once you get over that hurdle of not being afraid, then you’re also over the hurdle of being afraid to learn.

Crystal: Excellent. So we talked about the what and we talked about the how. And I now I wanna hear your perspective on the why to learn. It seems like a pretty obvious question, but not necessarily.

Jim: Well, it wasn’t obvious even to me what that I needed to address. The, the why to learn it seems, as you said, of course it’s you should learn because you should learn. But a friend of mine in reading my first draft said, Jim, why are you writing this book? What, what is the why? What, why should people learn?

And he was right. And so I. Thought about the [00:42:00] pieces of this puzzle I was trying to put together to paint the picture of the importance of learning and not just learning as a child, but lifelong learning and why is it critically important. So I stepped back and I found, again, trying to keep things simple.

Three Cs. I’ve tried to make this something that you could remember the three Cs of why we learn. And so here the, here they are. Collaboration, cultural literacy and character. And let’s start with the collaboration. The reality is that at least I never had a class in high school, grade school on collaboration.

The reality is you get out of school and you get into the [00:42:45] work world and you realize, oh. There’s no like test that I give an A or B on. It’s me working with these other people and I first discovered it when I was in graduate school and I was, I was had to do case studies and I thought, this is a dreadful experience.

I have to rely on somebody else for my case study grade in graduate school and business school. It’s a horrible thing. I don’t wanna rely on them.

Crystal: Yeah, my, my stepson is in college right now and going through the, the same motions.

Jim: Well, you, you, you should share this story with them then, because it’s a classic.

So I, my first case study was in accounting and in accounting class, and I had never taken an accounting course in my life. My first one was in, in [00:43:30] business school. And so all of a sudden my apprehension that I was gonna rely on somebody else for my grade came down to relief because in. In my case study group, I had a, an accountant from pwc, one from Deloitte.

I mean, they were CPAs. We were all in core accounting at Columbia Business School. So here’s what happened. We got into the case study and I thought I didn’t have anything to contribute at all, but it turned out that my lack of accounting, discipline and knowledge, let me take. Two companies and balance of two very different.

I came up with the idea [00:44:15] that let’s factor them. Let’s put them both on an even percentage, on a percentage basis, and let’s come up with a factor for them and, and the accountants, the trained accountants of course said, can’t do that. It’s not, you know, blah, blah, blah. There’s a whole host of reasons that wasn’t technically correct, but my creative solution ended up working.

We got an A on the exercise and I actually contributed as a result to. An accounting case study, even though I had zero background in accounting and it was the creative contribution that I made to the team that with their technical skills and my creative recommendation, we ended up with an A on the project, um, that I could not have done alone.

So it was a [00:45:00] great case study in itself on the power of collaboration.

Crystal: Yep. That is certainly good. And you have two more C’s. Oh wait, you already told us about cultural literacy with your DEI story, is that right?

Jim: It is, it is. Oh, okay. So we covered

Crystal: it.

Jim: Yeah, we may have covered it, but let me give you another one for cultural literacy ’cause I’ve been talking a lot about one and it’s been a popular I, I may have done it with you already, but maybe not.

Let’s try it. Okay, great. Shoot. Once you’ve mastered the art of collaboration, you’re gonna realize that looking around collaboration’s going to require collaboration with people that are not like you. And that’s really hard for many of us if we don’t have the experience. I [00:45:45] actually have an example of the challenge here in the opportunity.

I Chairman Symphony. In that role, I had the privilege of attending rehearsals and I remember sitting in a rehearsal one day, and this is during the early push for DEI and diversity and all this stuff. And like many people, I was scratching my head and saying, you know, is this really a critically important thing or is it, is it, you know, something that we should double down on?

And I was looking at the instruments and I was thinking, what if the instruments were people? You know, that if those instruments were human, that they’d be making fun of each [00:46:30] other. That they’d have a hard time thinking that the violin’s looking at the bass going, man, you are way overweight, and the bass is looking at the oboe saying, you’re just weird.

You know, you’re not even one of us. You’re just, you’re funny looking and man, you sound funny, right? Don’t you know, they would, they, they don’t make fun of each other. And yet the, the conductor then steps up with his baton at the podium, taps the podium, and brings them all together. And what comes out an amazing harmony that it would not be possible by any one of those instruments or any like group of instruments, like even the bass and the violin together would not be what [00:47:15] they are.

The orchestra without the brass, without the percussion, without that oboe. And so to me, that’s a wonderful metaphor for the power of cultural literacy. Once you understand each other and the contribution that each of you can have to the, to the whole, then you have much more respect. You still may think, well, you’re different, but together we can be better.

And that’s, that’s the why. Of cultural literacy.

Crystal: Now, do you think that we need a conductor, though, in order to get all of us to play this beautiful music together?

Jim: We shouldn’t, but that’s the reality is that’s the role of leadership for whether it’s a corporate CEO, whether [00:48:00] it’s a chief of state. The idea is that a leader should be the one that recognizes the power of our differences to come together.

To make us perform in harmony together. It’s always a challenge though.

Crystal: Yes. It’s always a challenge.

Jim: Always a challenge. Some leaders don’t see that opportunity have a harder time in bringing people together, but it is, it’s, it’s all part of learning and it’s, it’s really the why of learning, because if you don’t recognize this opportunity and you can’t learn those differences, then you don’t have a chance of bringing people together.

Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s true. And the final C? [00:48:45]

Jim: Well, the final C is in many ways the most important of all of the why to learn because we often forget, like with collaboration or with cultural literacy, that we’re just not on this planet alone. We’re not in a company alone. We’re not in a country alone. And so the character that each of us have that final C is character really represents.

In many ways I, I characterize it as our brand. So just like when we go to the store, we’re looking at that shelf and we see a whole host of brands. But your preference may be Coca-Cola, my preference may be Pepsi, and that’s fine. [00:49:30] They can be different preferences. But when you look at that product, you develop an impression.

On the external appearance of that product. So yes, appearance matters. How we carry ourselves matters. But what’s even more important, you’ll even overlook a bad package design if you know the integrity of that product inside. And so far more important than the external appearance of that product is what’s inside.

And when it comes to humans. Integrity, gratitude, humility, compassion, all of those things that we may learn in church, we may learn in our family, we may learn from social groups, but it’s an important [00:50:15] element of why to learn because we have to learn the importance of our character. I used the example of the Boy Scouts when I was a child.

They baked into my head that a scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, thrifty, cleve, brave, reverent. All of those things that are still in my head so many years later are character elements that I had to learn. The importance of, but they have helped to create a brand for me that when I do interact with others in the business world or just in in a social setting, hopefully that that brand [00:51:00] character will come through.

Crystal: Yeah, we have to get back to these values and learning these character traits because they’re what makes us better people and better communities. Jim, this was, this was a great conversation. I learned so much from you, and I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today. Thank you for all that you’re doing.

You’re making a difference.

Jim: Well, thank you for the opportunity and, and, and I hope I’m in these times when there’s so much division in the world and so much fear in the world. Um, that’s really my mission to try to remind everybody that we really have so little to fear, because if we have knowledge in any, any form of faith or belief in ourselves.

There’s really nothing to [00:51:45] fear and so much of the challenge out there in society is, is rooted in people’s fear and insecurity. So to me, knowledge what to learn, how to learn, why to learn. That’s the antidote, the best antidote we have to being afraid.

Crystal: What if the biggest barrier to progress isn’t a lack of solutions, but how we think about change itself. Chatting with Jim left me reflecting on how fear and misinformation keep us divided, especially in the environmental space. We often assume that if people just had more information, they’d get on board with climate action.

But as James pointed out, facts [00:52:30] alone aren’t enough. They have to be paired with curiosity, confidence, and open communication. His point about militant ignorance really gave me pause. Regardless of how good our intentions are, have we in the environmental space become so entrenched in our own perspectives that we’ve stopped listening?

Are we so focused on the fight that we forget to invite others into the conversation and actually listen to their side? After all, Jim reminded us that real learning isn’t just about absorbing facts, it’s about perspective. If we truly want a healthier, more just world, we have to engage with those who think differently, challenge our [00:53:15] own assumptions and frame climate solutions as opportunities, not threats.

Of course, easier said than done, but at the end of the day, education isn’t just about what we know. It’s about how we use that knowledge to build a better future. What do you think? Shoot me a note through the link in Apple Podcasts and Spotify or an email. Let’s keep the conversation going and learn from one another.

I’ll chat with you soon.

Don’t forget to go to forces for nature.com and sign up to receive emailed show notes, action tips, and a free checklist to help you start taking practical actions today. Do you know someone else who would [00:54:00] enjoy this episode? I would be so grateful if you would share it with them. Hit me up on Instagram and Facebook at Becoming Forces for Nature, and let me know what actions you have been taking.

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