Is today a good day to die? /// Louka Parry at Aspire Talks

Imagine you meet somebody on the street and they say: “You are a Venn diagram, not a spreadsheet”. Weird, right?

This is exactly how 40 Aspire Alumni felt like on a normal rainy Wednesday, but in a cozy Zoom. 

Louka Parry, a traveler at heart (with over 50 countries visited) and a hyperlearner that speaks 5 languages, is the CEO of The Learning Future, a centre that focuses on (re)inventing the education. He was our special guest for a one hour call, entitled ‘Shaping our Future’, integrating exciting concepts for every learning human being.

He successfully motivated and brought new ideas to the table for our Aspire Community and we feel like sharing a few of them today with you as well.

Here are some insights:

The importance of being aware of our emotions.

There is so much impact even in the tiniest things that we experience. Louka guided us through a one minute breathing exercise to prove this point. In an ever faster, moving world, remember the grounding power of your breath.

The ‘middle of nowhere’ for someone is the ‘middle of everything’ for another.

Only you can decide if that `nowhere` can become the centre of the Universe for you.

Playing with words is still cool.

Louka loves mashing key frameworks like the Maslow Pyramid and Bloom`s Taxonomy into `Maslow before Bloom`, so it becomes clear that first and foremost you need a sense of belonging, love and safety before thinking on those assignments. 

But this is not the only information that Louka passed on during our time together.

We will let some of our Alumni speak of what they have taken away after this Aspire Talk:

• the gateway to education is emotion; 
• don’t be a nice person, be kind; 
• remember to review and review to remember;
• learning more languages means inspiring interaction with other people;
• understanding the paradox of life: we are both the main character and insignificant;

Moreover, to further understand the extent of Louka`s amazingness, he gave us his personal Trello account where he listed all the books that he read from 2016 until today. Here are some of his favourites:

And, as a final call, we want to transmit Louka’s values, and hopefully, these will become yours too:

be curious

be honest

be kind

Now imagine you pass by that stranger again. And they say to you that Venn and spreadsheet thing. But now you understand what they meant. You understand that your boundaries don’t have to be delimited by a row or a column. And what better place to exercise it other than Aspire? 

Until next time, keep Aspiring!