#831 Insight From Success or Failure

Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: How can insight be derived from past successes, or failures? That’s the question we explore in Room #831 of the Deep Talk Club, under our overarching theme of “Insight (and gaining it).” Listen in on the examples that came up and the perspectives that emerged in dialogue…

Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.

A very warm good morning to you all. Today we’re talking about insight from success, or failure. How can insight be derived from past successes, or failures, in brackets? We just want to look at this together today. I’m really curious, and especially curious about the examples and so on that will come together here. So, to what extent does something like success or failure actually determine whether we can generate insights from it? That’s what we want to look at together. So this morning, too, you’re warmly invited to join in and step into the exchange. As every morning, a quick reminder that these rooms are recorded and then published accordingly, the recordings, and that you agree to that if you join. And then we have three small room rules: a profile photo in which you’re clearly recognizable, your first and last name, and at least one sentence in your bio. Anyone who doesn’t want that for whatever reason, or can’t speak right now, or similar, of course has the option, as always, to use the shared chat, which you’ll find at the bottom left of your screen. There you have the option to add questions, comments, thoughts on the contributions too, and if it hasn’t been addressed yet, or fits in particularly well, I’ll pick that up accordingly. And in the interest of the recording, so we don’t have big empty stretches, so to speak, you’re warmly invited, as I said, to join without letting too much time pass. What are the first thoughts that come to you when you think about insight from success or failure? Do you have successes and failures from the past that immediately come to mind? Feel free to bring in a few examples, or what you associate with the topic. What are the first, so to speak, forests that come to mind for you, just to look at this. It’s not about anything being right or wrong, but about us simply looking together in exchange and using the room as a space for reflection, so to speak, to see what insights we can generate together from these 60 minutes this morning. And, well, I’ll mute myself briefly now and see who wants to join right away this morning. A very warm good morning, dear Marc. What do you have to say on the topic?

Good morning, dear Yasemin, and good morning to the whole round. I thought a lot about your topic last night, and arrived at the insight for myself that gaining insight doesn’t necessarily have to be a good thing either, because if gaining insight is a self-constructed reality, gaining insight can also mean standstill for me as an entrepreneur. By that I just mean your topic — I’ve engaged with your topic for so long, insight from success. We act according to certain principles, and we have success with that, but that doesn’t mean, as Andreas keeps pointing out too, that what we did in the past is also right for the future. And that’s why I arrived at the insight for myself that my actions, even if they’ve led to success up to now, that there has to be a pattern-break there. But the successes, what’s in a topic, the insight from the successes, that only gives you the security to even afford yourself the luxury of breaking patterns. That means trying out new actions too, to see what possibilities are still hidden and could happen for yourself, both in your private life and in your entrepreneurial life.

Yes, thank you, thank you so much. And this raises a question for me right away, even with what you just said — we’re pretty quickly into evaluations here, basically. So the first question that comes up for me is, what do we actually evaluate as success or failure in the first place? To look at that too, and then say, to what extent can an insight actually be derived from it. And how does the whole thing connect with — does it even have to go hand in hand with change? You used the word standstill, for example. So depending on what I define as success or failure, an insight there could also be something like “I don’t want to change that,” or something like that, and could still have gone hand in hand with a feeling of success, in quotation marks, in some context or another. So I’m really curious about the exchange and the discussion, the different perspectives that come up. And so I’d like to warmly welcome Andreas at our side this morning too. Good morning. What do you say to that, Andreas?

A very warm good morning. Yes, this is actually a highly individual topic, how we evaluate, how we evaluate successes or defeats. There are people who see success in certain situations, and for the person who was in the situation, it’s more of a defeat. So judging that categorically is quite difficult. But that’s also what makes it so fascinating, that especially with successes, but also with failures, you can establish that it’s so highly individual. And that’s actually been characteristic of my career so far too, and everything about it. Including this passion topic of gaining insight with young people, and then thinking about, well, what does this insight actually mean, and how individual it still is, at the end of the day, whether I derive a success from it, or a failure, in quotation marks. And I think both perspectives are simply enormously important, and we’re all allowed to — and I think this is actually the hardest part — that we all set aside our own perspective, our own opinion, the advice we often give people. Because from my perspective it probably looks completely different than from the perspective of the person who actually experienced the whole thing.

Yes, thank you, thank you so much. And I found your phrasing really fascinating too, because the room is called insight from success, or failure. That means the direction is, first record some success or failure, so to speak — something I evaluate as success or failure, so to speak, and then generate insights from that afterward. You just phrased it the other way round too, actually gaining an insight and then moving into the evaluation, so to speak, evaluating a situation as a success or failure — I find that really fascinating too. That shows it can actually work in both directions at this point. And with that I’d like to warmly welcome Layla too. A very warm good morning. Layla, what do you have to say on the topic?

A very warm good morning. First of all I want to say, great topic. I’ve thought a lot about this topic, and I’ve mentioned this a few times in rooms before too. It actually has to do with this toxic positivity, that people so often say, yes but, and I recommend an “and” here, and it’s still something positive after all. So let me take my MS diagnosis again, because I’ve only known about it for four years. Here too it’s often, well, you’re wallowing in suffering, where I think, hey, listen, I have an honorary position at the respiratory centre, please leave that to me, because I go to bed every night thinking, well, let’s see if I wake up again tomorrow. And I always find it nice when people say, well, but others, you can cross the street, and, well, the probability is just a bit higher for me, so please leave that to me. And that’s actually the point why I often have such a problem with this toxic positivity, that people try to talk you into, look on the bright side. And still, they’re right, because things are neutral. It’s like money. Money is neutral. What matters is only what I make of it. And being poor is neutral, and being rich is neutral. But we automatically — and I learned this in your rooms, Yasemin, I already knew it before, but here it really fell like scales from my hair, or my eyes, take your pick — that this evaluation, we take it, and that’s already been said before too, that means we’re so often out there in this “is it good or bad now?” And, well, some things, let’s be honest, some things are truly terrible. And still I can gain an insight from it. My insight, for example, from my MS, is that I live my life differently now, that I set my boundaries differently, that I’ve informed myself a lot about it, that I’ve become an expert for myself, and that’s something really positive. And still, no one has walked a single step in my shoes. That’s why it’s always difficult to say, well, you have to evaluate it this way or that way. Even if someone says, I invite you to evaluate it this way or that way. Yes, you’re right, and still, let it mature within me. And my current insight is that I’ve achieved successes from failures too, that things are often neutral, but often in hindsight too, and that you have to leave it to each person how they arrive at that insight, even if I know that I’m right. So it doesn’t become this toxic positivity or negativity — you can take either one. And that can maybe become difficult, when I tell someone else, well, you know, high heels are totally, but you know, you should this or that. And I think, dude, you’re a man. Sure, maybe you wear high heels, but I think I wear them more often, so I prefer flats. Thanks for listening. I hope that wasn’t too long.

Thank you, thank you so much. And this shows again that it has a lot to do with our own evaluations too, and that we can really only ever speak quite subjectively for ourselves, generally. And just because I, in quotation marks, extend a hand to the other person, or offer something, or give advice, whatever we want to call it, since you also talked about invitation, it’s ultimately still always up to the person opposite me, so to speak, and how they, in the end, deal with it. That means we have so many situations that we can only ever primarily evaluate and judge for ourselves, however it fits for us. And even if we’re of the opinion, regarding the other person — and that’s a subjective opinion in itself — that we recognise something there, or something like that, and whether that’s phrased as an invitation, as advice, or whatever, that doesn’t mean the other person accepts it, or sees it the same way, but here too this construction of reality and these evaluations play a really essential role in this context. And especially against the backdrop that success, or failure too, is very, very subjective. What do I actually understand by that? That means if someone talks about success, that doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing for us either, and that’s already where the crux of the matter begins, talking about the topic, how do I even generate insights from failures or successes, or the other way round, if I’ve gained an insight for myself. And we’ve already established that this is quite subjective too, and a snapshot, and might look different in hindsight than in the here and now, well aware that it might change again in the future too, how I then look back on it afterward, once I’ve had new experiences again. And that makes the topic so fascinating, and individual in so many directions. And at the same time there are so many situations — I just got an idea from your stories, a memory that popped up, actually happened just a few days ago. We had a situation, often around this Muslim festival, so to speak, where children also get money, for instance. And Elias collected quite a bit, in quotation marks. And then my mother said, please wash your hands before eating, or after — I don’t remember anymore. He’d touched the money, because the money is dirty, in quotation marks. And I reacted intuitively right away, in quotation marks, and said, no, money isn’t dirty at all, bacteria and so on actually clean the stomach. You can kiss it, touch it, cuddle with it, whatever you want. And I got to explain to my mother at the same time what the background of my reaction was, so to speak, at that point. And Elias was a bit irritated by these conflicting statements. And that’s something I personally chalk up as a success at that point — showing him a different perspective. Now, how he’ll evaluate that later is a different matter — I probably don’t have much influence over that, but I can open up different perspectives, and toward my mother too, explain again what’s behind all these belief patterns and so on, and what effects that can naturally have in life later, if I just store it away without even being aware of it. And it was really, really fascinating. And here too, I don’t know what insight that might trigger in the other person, so to speak. But at least opening up a new perspective can create the space, and I find that important to bring in as another perspective too, creating the space, so to speak, for further aspects to come in and be processed accordingly, and that’s something I actually chalk up as something I find quite successful, a personal evaluation. I saw, Andreas, you wanted to add something, and then I’d like to welcome Sebastian to the round.

Andreas, I found that example really fascinating, and I had a parallel last week. We had a parent-teacher meeting with my sons, who are both Generation Alpha, so seven, eight years old, first, second grade. And what I do, based on my own past — and here too we could say success, failure, and evaluation — with my kids, is to teach them quite directly that these belief patterns from the past, Peter is better than you, this begging for achievement or whatever, that I find that complete bullshit, and that it’s important to me that my kids are happy and content. They don’t have to be the best in school, they should be inconspicuous, wonderful people in terms of their social behaviour, but whether they get an A, a B, or a C, that’s relatively unimportant to me, at the end of the day, in a school system that doesn’t prepare us for the future anyway. And I told them that, we were sitting at the parent-teacher meeting, and my wife was talking about how, with reading logs and this motivation, getting them a bit more into reading is currently difficult, because… and what she could do about it. And I just answered, nothing at all, because it’s completely irrelevant to me what other people do. I know that old saying too, from when I was a kid, if someone jumps into the Rhine, you don’t jump in after them. I find it extremely important that in a society that’s already trained by social media, by dopamine, by so many outside influences to constantly put itself into competition, that we stop that from the very beginning. And in this insight, seeing this as a success, I was shocked at how shocked the children’s teacher was that I’d come with exactly this, because now she has the problem with him that she can no longer create incentives from outside, pushing toward achievement. And I found that pretty fascinating, and a great example for me too, because in the future it won’t be about us trying to find an energy scanner against each other, so to speak, but about thinking how we can shape the school system of the future in a way that fits the future, not the past.

Yes, thank you, thank you so much. And I find that really fascinating too, because it brings so many aspects with it. I recently heard that there are new drafts again, or already passed, actually, and guidelines will be derived for the individual countries again later too. And it’s about the driver’s license, and I remember we had Dr. Mario Herger with us at the Authors’ Breakfast too, when it was about the fact that basically the first generation has already been born that will later no longer need a driver’s license. And actually the EU has quite recently decided, basically, that our driver’s licenses will apparently only — well, on the one hand they should become electronic, and on the other hand there should be additional tests at regular intervals for people from a certain age onward, and so on and so forth, all the way to, our driver’s license should in the future only be valid for 15 years and then have to be renewed. So I find that really, really fascinating. And against the backdrop of all the developments currently taking place, especially with AI, which you can really feel right now, because it’s not new as a technology per se, but it’s really penetrated the market now, so to speak, and made it tangible what’s actually coming and how it’s developing, that’s maybe made one thing or another clear too, especially with autonomous driving and so on. We’re already in a direction there that makes it relatively foreseeable what’s coming our way, in quotation marks. And, well, while some people wrote books years ago already saying that at some point there’ll be no driver’s license at all anymore, because we simply won’t need it anymore, I find it really fascinating and interesting that the EU has apparently just made decisions in that direction quite recently, where I think, whether I’ll actually need a driver’s license again in 15 years, or a renewal, when the time comes, remains to be seen. So I find it really, really fascinating how far apart that actually diverges at this point. And I’d like to bring that in too, because insight from failure or success isn’t just something related to the personal — it has a lot to do with personal evaluation, but it’s not detached from the outside world, or from what’s happening out there. And I’m really curious now. Sebastian, that might not be what you wanted to address, but maybe you can tie in here too. What do you have to say on the topic?

Yes, good morning. Yes, I haven’t been around for a bit, due to holidays of course. Many of you know, the Easter break was a bit longer this time in Hesse. Yes, the outside world — that’s exactly what’s led to more failures recently, or it’s belief patterns, or I’ll say methods, that I learned incorrectly, which have rather led to me stumbling more often lately. I’m trying to reflect on the last 12 months right now, to manage a new leap for this year. I’m currently reading a book, and we’ve actually had the author as a guest before too — Markus Zehner, I think that’s how you say it. He wrote a book called “Failgood.” It’s really impressed me over the past few weeks, just reflecting on what might have caused me to fail so often. In additional side businesses, in my main business too, for instance, partly in my private life too. Why did this chain form, of, I’ll say, goals I wanted to achieve that I didn’t manage? And ultimately I keep coming back to two points. There’s a certain training, or aptitude, where you sort of work your way up to these goals and successes, that means if I haven’t trained enough, or had the wrong approach to reaching the goals, then I’m just before the end — it’s like a sprint, running the 400 metres or 800 metres, just before the finish something happens, I trip and don’t reach the goal, and others overtake me. And that’s a bit how I feel right now, and, well, the training wasn’t quite perfect, or geared toward getting me to the finish, but I allocated my resources wrongly. Now I’m in the position, or the situation, where I say, now I’ve failed, spent quite a lot of energy, but starting again now, I have no desire to. So I really can’t right now. Pulling myself together again and starting fresh, I think that’s what others tend to see later, okay, then maybe they made it after all, but these fails, or I’ll say, this loss of energy, this new pulling-yourself-together. That’s of course difficult right now, at this time. And to overcome that, or to see new successes again in the professional environment, I rely extremely heavily on my network. And if I look back now at how strongly I trained building my network, which wasn’t a success at first, that’s all paying off now. Now I can reach out to contacts, ask about opportunities. So now I’m using the full power of the network to prepare the next successes. That’s what I see from the outside. Feelings from the outside, but of course also having the ability to keep training continuously, getting better, and moving forward, even when it’s hard. And I can really recommend the book “Failgood” to everyone, it fits this topic wonderfully.

Yes, wonderful, thank you, thank you so much. I don’t know, did someone just raise their hand? Yes, Layla, go ahead, you probably wanted to add on directly.

Yes, I just wanted to add, because this was really fascinating for me. Andreas, thank you for your example. I didn’t just smile, I looked back a bit in my own career, at what I learned about primary-school education, about the Hamburg spelling test and all the rest. To keep this short, I thought about how I would have reacted if a father had reacted the way you did, in the sense of, well, the school has to change and move forward. And then I thought about my profession, thought about my studies and my career. And I thought, I would have given him a whole lecture that yes, we do have a Prussian system, but there are certain things we’ve agreed on. Then I looked back at yesterday, and I saw, I explained to fifth-graders yesterday, in a reading lesson, why reading can actually be important, because I totally understand this. I completely understand it. I once ran a library. I completely understand that people find reading uncool. And in my last eighth-grade class, which I was in two weeks ago, I also asked, tell me, who of you has been reading the Diary of a Wimpy Kid since fifth grade and gets the same book out every year just to say they’ve read one? Who of you actually enjoys reading at all? And then I thought, the lecture wouldn’t have achieved anything either, because you’d have argued from your own experience, and that would have been fine too. And that’s why it was so lovely when Yasemin told the story about the driver’s license, because Yasemin, I belong to that rare category of people who’s 44 and never got a driver’s license, because I did eight theory lessons and, I don’t know, someone was eating carrots and peeling the inside out. I come from a small village, and I never knew what I’d actually need it for. And I thought, well, you know what, I always get from A to B, I never had to drive. That was lovely, to get to the point. What you reported was something completely different for me. Because you’re always a bit caught up in your own socialisation, your own experiences, your own career, because I thought, well, that would actually be pretty cool, because the driver’s license costs almost 3,000 euros now, correct me if I’m wrong, but when I did it back then it would still have been in Deutschmarks, and I think it was around 1,800 euros, do the conversion yourselves, and I always thought, wow, that’s a lot of money. When you’re an adult, you notice why you might actually need it after all — that means jobs pass you by that you’d actually like to do. I could have — well, I don’t know, I could have become a subject-methodology specialist even at my second state exam. But for that you have to, well, you really have to visit the trainee teachers. And that’s where it would have failed. And then I noticed, for myself — back to the example, what did I notice while you were talking? I noticed it has to do with perspectives. Because Andreas isn’t wrong. But I had completely different experiences, because I’m a dyslexia trainer. I’ve seen my own school career. I’ve seen that I was told, you’re right in the morning and off in the afternoon. And I’ve seen what it brings me. Yasemin, when you were talking, I saw, well, my perspective on this is, it could be that I might avoid these 2,800 euros. And I’m not among those, in 15 years you’re supposed to do this test, maybe like my father. He’s 74 now, that he’d have to get a driver’s license again. And what I’d like to bring in is, insight also has to do with socialisation, with career paths, whether I record something as a failure or as a success. And Andreas, I wanted to say to you, you’re right. And still, I’m a friend of tips, not of advice, but of tips. And if I may, I’ll write to you sometime, because reading is really something wonderful, and you don’t have to force children into it. But maybe it would be possible. And I’ll take this on myself — maybe I could manage to get him to have a bit of fun with it. Audiobooks are cool too. Thanks for listening.

Thank you, Andreas. Feel free to add on directly.

Yes, it’s loud around me right now, sorry, but I’m exercising. What I meant was the example of the competition we artificially create, and this dopamine release young people experience daily through social media. And the goal was to make clear to the teacher that it’s completely irrelevant to me whether my child gets an A or a B, that we shouldn’t focus so much on this comparison and this competition so early in life, because if I’m in a competition, I pay a lot more attention to whether I’ve just won or lost. And the problem is, whenever someone wins, someone else loses too. And what about them? And especially in a school system that’s also supposed to prepare you for life, I find it extremely unfortunate to start so early with competitions, because it always means someone else isn’t winning anymore.

Yes, thank you, thank you so much. And the aspect I’d like to open up now is, we’ve established that it has a lot to do with your own experiences. Both what I define for myself as success or failure, and the concept of insight too. That can be very different for each person. We hear the same things in the same room, and different things connect with us than with others. And likewise this connection between success or failure and insight, in whatever direction, is ultimately a subjective evaluation, tied to prior experiences we’ve had. And on the one hand it’s really fascinating to look at it from this perspective. I’d like to open up another perspective on this topic now. I already hinted at this a bit before, that it’s not detached from outside developments taking place. And especially when I know that something like success or failure, or insight too, are very subjective against the backdrop of experience, then I need — and here we’re at this aspect of brain training that Sebastian already touched on to some degree — I need the understanding of connections out there too, so to speak, because as humans we’re neither individually cut off from other people on the one hand, nor from technological developments and so on and so forth. And if I now, in quotation marks, define successes and failures and insights, in whatever direction, whether insight first and then defining success or failure, so to speak, evaluating it for myself, or the other way round, if I’m just moving around in my bubble, in quotation marks, you hopefully understand what I mean by that, and I keep blocking out the rest, in quotation marks, or don’t actively engage with the outside world and with technological developments, politics, everything you could list here, keep consciously going into it, to observe what’s happening — then I also see a danger here, in quotation marks, that certain things — and we had this in yesterday’s room with the challenges too — that I don’t even see certain challenges coming toward me, because certain things simply aren’t conscious to me at all. And especially against the backdrop of all the developments that have already been taking place for many years, and are now already being felt very, very massively, and this will become much, much more in the future, there’s the danger that I don’t realise one thing or another at all. We’ve talked a lot about digitalisation before. Many people didn’t take it seriously, and especially when the pandemic came, when the lockdowns came, it hit many areas very, very hard, because they simply hadn’t engaged with it in the past at all, even though it was foreseeable and was communicated again and again. But it somehow didn’t connect, because people didn’t want to see it, or waved it off, along the lines of, that doesn’t affect me. And especially this area of technological development, and against this backdrop, all these chain reactions being triggered here. And if you look at what level discussions are actually taking place at sometimes, even though the discussions are completely missing the developments, in quotation marks, or people don’t even realise that a completely different kind of discussion is needed at this point, in quotation marks, then naturally the question arises, both individually and socially, and for Germany too, how this might continue if we always only evaluate things against the backdrop of our own experiences, namely by simply looking into the past, but possibly aren’t necessarily able to look in the other direction too, obviously, into looking ahead, and realise the corresponding connections here, develop scenarios, and actually look ahead a bit too. Sabine, you raised your hand directly. I assume you want to tie in somewhere. So I’ll bring you in first.

Yes, good morning. Fascinating topic. Especially regarding the discussion between Andreas and Layla. My child is actually abroad right now. And last week I talked to a mother from school — I think it’s a really good school, an evangelical school, and so on and so forth. And she told me what’s going on at our school would be tough already. It’s a constant battle between students and teachers. The bad thing is that parents are getting more and more involved. And I have to reflect and say, yes, that’s true. And I’d already seen that at our parent-teacher evenings too. So, don’t take this the wrong way, Andreas, I don’t know if I fully agree with you. I agree with you that my son didn’t read either. I kept trying, but then I let it go. He reads great today. So he read more online than books. I think I bought him a lot of books, but I also didn’t force it, because I find that stupid too. And everyone has to grow up the way they grow up. And their interests, but I think it’s essentially important that they have interests, and push their interests forward. And I see that now with my middle child too, who’s currently in Berlin working at a start-up, and so on. I think the important thing is that they develop work. What it’s for, they have to figure that out themselves. I fully agree with you on that, it can’t always be that I say, you’ll go work at a bank someday. I wouldn’t say that today anymore either, quite the opposite. They have to know it themselves, but I think they need at least a spark of ambition. And at our school we have quite a lot of kids from, how should I put it, family businesses, where I get the impression, well, they don’t even need it. And I find that really sad. Not that one doesn’t read a book, or another. I think what’s missing is the ambition. And the second thing I wanted to say, about the successes, failures. My failures actually always ended up leading to successes, because I probably would never have made the decision the failures were, on my own. And then I ended up somewhere else, some other drawer, and thought, oh, this is actually quite nice here too, and kept going. What Sebastian said earlier, I can fully relate to what you’re saying, but there too I think it’s important that you take something from childhood with you. Like, get up, as Jennifer always used to say — I can’t quite put the sentence together — get up, straighten your crown, keep going, or something like that. I think that’s really, really important.

Yes, absolutely, thank you, thank you so much, and Andreas also wrote in the chat, it’s not about learning, from his perspective, it’s about the comparison and the competition that gets built up too early. Yes, go ahead and tie in there. Andreas, was that you just now, or did someone else want to add on? Layla, that was Layla. Okay, go ahead, Layla.

Thank you, thank you so much. I just wanted to be a bit of a connector now, because I think it’s exactly what you said, Sabine, it’s often, why do I need this? I’m currently doing Schulz von Thun’s four-ears model with my eighth-grade class. Not everyone’s interested in that. And not everyone’s interested even though I bought special cards for it, with sentences like “you have to start small,” “you’ll never learn it this way,” sentences that keep getting said by various people, often parents and teachers too, and everyone who has any kind of authority in some form. And I thought, this’ll definitely fascinate them. Nope, not everyone’s interested. And that’s fine. And not everyone likes reading. And that’s fine too. And it’s important to ask, what do I need this for? Now I have a student in eighth grade who wants to work at a bank someday. I was quite glad I could fall back on my general knowledge there a bit. I told him at the end of the lesson, look, you want to go into banking, right? He said, yes. Then I said, look, and here’s the four-ears model, Schulz von Thun, if it doesn’t interest you why your parents say that, isn’t it important, why is this important for you later? Because, look, NLP, sender, receiver, you’ll keep hearing sentences where you have to think about, what’s the factual level here, what’s the relationship level, what’s the appeal behind it? What do people want to say by doing that? And that’s true with customers, that’s true with people above you, that’s true with people below you. And it’s just really important that you understand that. And I hope I gave him a reason. I’ll see in the coming lessons whether that works or not. And I see that as a bit of the task of school, and of parents, and of every person who wants to teach something to another person, wants to teach them, this insight. And Andreas, you’re completely right about the competition, that we divide it into good and bad. And still, you won’t believe it, but kids love games, you know that, you’re a dad. And kids love competition to some degree, if the other person isn’t immediately bashed for it, if we don’t say, okay, one has to go down, the other goes up. But I can tell you from experience that competitions are something wonderful, that we live in an error culture, which is difficult, that we often make evaluations, which is also difficult, but that competition itself, measuring yourself against someone else, is something wonderful, even if comparison is the death of happiness. And that’s why, maybe, to get back to the topic, insight from failure. And you said this, Yasemin. What’s a failure? A failure is maybe when I look outward and think, I did worse than the other person. But if you take your own experience — and you can all take your own experiences here — take the experience from your life where you thought, gosh, I really shouldn’t have done that. I went to a vocational school, and I can say I’m really glad about it, because that wasn’t the biggest success, because I’m a great secondary-school teacher, and I’m a good vocational-school teacher, but it didn’t make me happy, and still I gained an insight from it, namely that I’m a great secondary-school teacher, and, yes, I’ll take credit for that now. Thanks for listening.

Yes, thank you, thank you so much, and I’ll hand the word back. Andreas, maybe another addition regarding competition and comparison. The question is, am I in competition looking outward, or could I also say competition is something good, in quotation marks, again an evaluation, if I compare myself with myself, and with my own previous performance, so to speak, again with myself. Andreas, did you want to say something about that too?

Yes, absolutely. So an insight means something happened. Then I generate an insight. So I’ve had some kind of experience. Now the problem is, if we go into competitions much too early, the insight becomes, I’m losing. Let’s take the example of reading aloud, which is a popular tool to help kids learn to read and also understand what they’ve just read. Now, if I read aloud and everyone around me laughs, what insight do I have then? What competition is being driven forward then? And now the second point, which we’re all currently overlooking, because none of us had a digital childhood. We don’t know what it’s like as a child to be reachable 24/7. What it’s like as a child to experience cyberbullying — everyone’s welcome to read the current studies, it’s brutal. And it doesn’t stop at school. We all, as adults, or maybe as teachers too, have the perspective, same school, and I did my best. But we don’t think about what happens afterward, because we’re no longer in an analogue world. We’re now in a fully digital world, where this laughter won’t stop in the future.

Yes, thank you, thank you so much. And we actually had a long internal debate, an exchange, on this topic yesterday too — which professions will remain, which will disappear, and how individual job profiles will change, even the ones that do remain. And, of course, school, teachers, educators and so on were a topic there too, in quotation marks. And a lot of it goes in the direction — because this topic came up again too — that humans are, after all, social beings, meaning we’ll continue to need these institutions in the future too, which make this space for encounter possible, so to speak. But, and here I agree with Andreas, we’re allowed to rethink a lot of things in many places. What’s currently very, very strongly practised in schools, unfortunately, is primarily about knowledge transfer. And here you see exactly the example Andreas brought up too — if I read something aloud and the other kids laugh or something. The focus should be, for example, on aspects like this — and this does depend on the teacher, and is partly already done, it’s not like it never happens — but the focus, so to speak, shouldn’t just be, in quotation marks, learning to read, learning to read is of course important, I don’t want to deny that at all, but rather something like empathy and how we treat each other, so that we move much more in the direction of compassion. How do we treat each other? How do we listen to each other? What reactions are okay, in quotation marks, and what aren’t? How would that feel for me if others did that to me, and so on, that we’re allowed to put much, much bigger focus on this side, instead of just grading social behaviour, in quotation marks, which I personally already find outdated, instead of talking about it and actually teaching certain things, and at the same time moving a bit away from this pure knowledge transfer toward enabling learning, quite generally. Dealing with information, dealing with social media, dealing with tools like ChatGPT for instance, AI and so on and so forth. And here we need, I personally think, a whole, whole lot of changes, in quotation marks, but that also requires, to some degree, and it currently depends on who the teacher is. There are certainly teachers who actually already pick this up in their curriculum, in quotation marks, to some degree, in one place or another. Others don’t. They still do pure knowledge transfer, and there are really, really big differences between teachers at this point too. And that’s certainly a challenge too. Would anyone else like to add something? It’s getting loud in the background for me right now.

Yes, if I may, I’d like to. Yes, go ahead. Okay, I happened to meet a friend last weekend whose daughter just got back from Canada, and had only been there for a quarter of a year. And she was furious about what’s going on at school now, because she’d lived in a different school system for a quarter of a year, which I can actually understand a bit too, and now she’s back and could barely handle it, because the teachers picked up exactly where she’d left off. She’s only an average student, they pigeonholed her. It wasn’t easy for the student either, because she’d suddenly become a different person. So we talked and said, what we’re actually missing at school is good, forward-moving subjects, either in extracurricular clubs or — every school has some social worker. The social worker only ever gets brought in when there’s actually already a problem, when two kids are fighting or whatever. These hours should actually be completely integrated into regular lessons, and a lot would probably happen there. So I’m completely with you on how school should develop, but I still stick with my point about ambition.

Yes, Layla, go ahead. I just wanted to briefly add, if I may say so quickly, I always find it funny that we talk about insight from failure and success, and somehow we always end up back at the topic of school. And I say, sometimes the place has changed, but the people sometimes stay the same. And what you said, about laughing at others — funnily enough I did that yesterday. Especially in a reading lesson, that’s difficult too. And that’s why I think teachers are really important, in the sense that I think teaching this social behaviour is important, evaluating it, yes, we’re in the Prussian system there, unfortunately, I have to say it like it is. And I’m not an education researcher, I can only fall back on my own experience and my studies and my qualifications and my life experience. What I can say is, I told them yesterday, you don’t want to be the boy from the Simpsons, you don’t want to be Nelson, who says ha ha, and I always say, look, if you laugh at someone else, you’re revelling in someone else’s suffering. That means you’re glad they’re now in trouble. And do you actually want that? And I think that’s the task of the teacher, whether you should grade that or not. Well, we’ve agreed that you get a grade for it. And what you said, Sabine, look, that’s really lovely, where there are people, there’s humanity, so to speak, I’ve heard that before. These are the prior experiences we fall back on. And you can’t change the system, only yourself. And it takes a while until the other person notices something has changed. And then it goes from there, then I have this problem, that’s how I’ll be assessed again. Something has developed. So to support you all a bit, school isn’t the way it was 30 years ago, 20 years ago. I’m doing a training course on May 1st, and I’m inviting every colleague in Baden-Württemberg to it too. There are always new training courses. Using AI in the classroom. Yesterday colleagues of mine said, we write our parent letters with ChatGPT. Without any data, of course. But it’s much faster. Yasemin, that ties right into your book. It’s something we can use, and find positive. You once said, we learned in school not to copy. I actually quoted you in the staff room. And I realised for myself, well, we have to look at this. And I’m an ethics teacher. I learned the Plus-1 Convention. That means I tell my students, look, I always try to pull you up to the next higher moral level. You don’t have to do that. And for all the adults in the room who think, wow, I’m already so far along — according to Kohlberg it’s actually the case that you can be at stage 1 in one area, and stage 5 in another. There used to be six stages, he reduced it to five. And for everyone who’s anonymous and likes to bash people online, you’re at stage 1, my dears. So as long as you don’t get punished, you don’t behave morally. And if you get a reward, you behave morally. And if you were an Amazon review, you’d actually have gotten very few stars. So, I know we’re stuck in this grading system. I haven’t found another system that works differently. There are other possibilities. There are other systems too. I like looking at other countries, and seeing what I can pick up from them. What do I see that’s positive there? And so, I think we can’t close ourselves off from this development. I want to use it in the classroom. I didn’t invent it, and it’s already being used. And that’s what I want to say. The wheels turn slowly, but progress is being made. And we can support it, but criticising is always easier than doing it yourself. Which doesn’t mean the others shouldn’t make an effort too. Thanks for listening.

Yes, thank you, thank you so much. And I’ll pick up on something that was said in a moment too, to build the bridge back to where we started this morning. But before I do that, I’d like to give a reminder, because I of course also watch what happens in the chat quite critically, sometimes. On the one hand we have really, really lovely contributions and so on that can be picked up. On the other hand, it keeps happening — I’ve been thinking about this recently — we’ll definitely do a room at some point soon where we discuss the room rules again too, I think that’s really, really important to say at this point, because both on stage and in the chat, please make sure that if you voice an opinion, on the one hand you include explanations, and on the other hand you stay on a factual level, and don’t attack anyone personally, or with any kind of expression, or similar. Because otherwise that simply leads, no ifs and buts, to you being removed from the room, and not being let back in either. We’ve created a space here in the Deep Talk where it’s possible to hear other opinions respectfully, with tolerance and so on. That’s fine too. But the moment it gets personal, a line has been crossed, and I don’t tolerate that. I want to communicate that really, really clearly at this point. And whoever doesn’t stick to the room rules is simply out, and won’t get access back in. Period. That’s really, really important to me. And it’s completely irrelevant whether that’s directed against me personally, or against anyone else who brings great contributions here and participates regularly, every day, for a long time already. I have no patience for that. And here too we’re quickly back at empathy, mindfulness, respect, appreciation and so on. These are all topics we keep picking up, and please, please handle it accordingly here too. And if you bring in any contributions, think for a second longer about how you’d feel if someone did that to you, and maybe take that as an orientation, or a guideline, so to speak, to stick to a bit. And with that, before we move into the closing round, I’d like to pick up on something we had at the very start too. Layla, I think, said that insight doesn’t necessarily always have to be something positive. And I think we can now take this, with what was discussed, wonderfully as a bridge again, to make clear which direction insight, or something like that, can go in. And we’ve basically also had aspects like belief patterns and so on. What do they actually generate from? They generate from the experiences we have. And especially this example with reading, or reading aloud, the others laugh, in quotation marks, is a lovely example to show — if I, as a child, for instance, experience others laughing while I’m reading aloud, because I obviously can’t do it well enough yet, and that’s a painful experience, then I’ve stored an experience. And the insight for me might quickly go hand in hand with that, that I say, apparently I can’t do this, and that’s why the others are laughing. And that’s a painful experience, so I don’t want to read anymore. And that shows, for example, that from these experiences — in this case it would be a failure, so to speak, an evaluation of a situation as a failure — that I read. The others laughed. Doesn’t feel good to me. So it gets stored like a kind of failure. I apparently can’t do this. And the insight from that is, then I’ll just stop doing it. And here you see to what extent that ultimately has an influence on belief patterns too, which also develop relatively early on. And the more often this experience repeats itself in contexts — because I keep getting called on by the teacher to read aloud, and so on and so forth — then this belief pattern gets reinforced over time, and patterns emerge from that, and from these patterns, in turn, corresponding derived behaviour. And behaviour can also mean, for example, avoidance. And so I find that really, really fascinating to show at this concrete example that was discussed too. Would anyone else like to add something, before we move into the closing round now, and then we’ll go straight into the closing round. Okay, if that’s not the case, then let’s move into today’s closing round. Marc, Andreas, Layla, Sabine, in that order, please. What are your insights from the room, or what would you like to underline as a highlight today? Marc.

I really want to tell you, if you’re not in the room and listening to it, then the insight for me is much smaller than with you all. Thank you for being here, everyone. It was a wonderful morning with you, and a good start to the day.

Thank you, thank you so much. Andreas.

Yes, a really, really wonderful room. What’s important to me is that we’re aware of what influences come from outside, and that no one made themselves, but we’re all actually shaped by our environment. And there are so many terms you can look at in this context too. Self-confidence, self-assurance, and many topics that come from within yourself, but yes, are shaped by outside influences at the start.

Thank you. Layla.

I learned something again today, for myself. I love learning, actually. And what I learned is that we always measure ourselves. We like going into competition. I learned, comparison is the death of happiness. And even when I compare myself with myself, I decided for myself at some point — because there are people who say, well, I just want to become better than myself. But do I blame myself for having become better? And do I blame my other self, my previous self? And at some point I decided for myself, I don’t want to be my opponent, but my friend. That’s why my head should — I know, negations are negative, but my head isn’t a boot camp. And your head isn’t a boot camp either. So try to be your own friend. That’s not egocentric yet. And measure yourself against yourself, but also be gentle with your previous self, and say, hey, I couldn’t have done it better, and I did it the way I did it, based on my experience, based on my socialisation, and that’s okay. I’m my own friend. Thanks for listening.

Thank you, thank you so much. Sabine.

Yes, I found your saying, “it always comes back to school,” really interesting, and I can actually only support that, because so much has been talked about school and the education system lately. It’s insane. The second thing, what did I want to say now — oh right, and what was an insight for me again just now is that very different children often end up in the same drawer. The one who can’t read yet, because they simply have a certain weakness, and the one who’s too cool for it and just doesn’t want to. And still they end up in the same drawer in the end. And that was an insight again just now. I mean, you know it, but you always hear it. So the room was great again.

Yes, wonderful, thank you, thank you so much. I think a lot of really, really different perspectives came together again. It’s fascinating. Yes, we always end up talking about education, about school too, and it’s important, because in personal development — and we’ve heard this from brain research too — so, so much gets laid down relatively early. At the latest by the 16th week of pregnancy, it’s demonstrably already starting that a lot of things get stored unconsciously and experienced, even if they can’t be remembered afterward. That means many, many patterns, many belief patterns and so on already get laid down really early. So I personally always think, it’s of course wonderful that we might gain insight even in adulthood, and then work on our personality. But we’re allowed to keep looking toward children too, whether we’re parents ourselves, or have children in our environment, or maybe aunts, uncles, or whatever, that we become sensitised to how important that actually is, regardless of whether that’s the institution of daycare, or a nursery, or school, or just our own personal way of dealing with, encountering, children and similar, that we contribute here too, not just individually, but socially too, and that it’s really important not to break a lot of things first, in quotation marks, and then hope that these people, as adults, will someday gain the insight and engage with personal development, get a coach, therapist, advisor, or whatever, to their side, to work on it, but that we’re allowed to work preventively here too, so that one thing or another doesn’t even arise in the first place, at least not to that extent. And so I’m looking forward to continuing tomorrow with the topic of insight from mistakes. We really want to look at that quite specifically. How can insights actually be gained from mistakes? And what role does learning play in this context here too? And so I’m really looking forward to tomorrow’s room too. You’re warmly invited to join again tomorrow morning at 8 in the Deep Talk, and I wish you a wonderful day first, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow. Until then. Ciao.