@VikramJncasr@makash @_kashi_ks Hi, this still needs some polish, but would love to get your opinion and ideas for improving it.
https://t.co/HO2e81ZVsJ
@KamathGurudutt@makash @_kashi_ks Hi, this still needs some polish, but would love to get your opinion and ideas for improving it.
https://t.co/78WFs0Mixa
In 1954, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Hersey investigated the question everyone was asking, "Why can't children read?"
Hersey found the answer and then wrote about it in a piece published in Life Magazine.
Which led to one of the bestselling children's books of all time.
For 2 years, John Hersey read children's books, met with experts, and attended schools to observe how reading was taught.
"It became obvious," Hersey writes, what the problem was:
Children's books were terribly boring.
"Some children read very well indeed," Hersey writes. But…
"Reading troubles come from a failure to help children to *want* to read."
Remember, Hersey says, "reading has to compete for the interest of children with television, radio, movies, comic books, magazines, and sports."
So to be able to compete and to help children to *want* to read, Hersey says, children's books need to be more interesting and entertaining.
The article was read by an editor at Houghton Mifflin.
The editor called the illustrator Dr. Seuss and challenged him to "write me a story that first graders can't put down."
"There was a catch," Dr. Seuss' biographer writes.
In this book for first graders, Dr. Seuss had to use a vocabulary list of 300 "accepted" words.
Dr. Seuss played around with the list of 300 words, he'd recall, "and said, 'If I find two words that rhyme and make sense to me, that's the title.'"
As Dr. Seuss scanned the list, two words caught his attention:
Cat and Hat.
A little over a year later, on April 19, 1957, Dr. Seuss released...
"The Cat in the Hat."
Using just 236 unique words, Dr. Seuss wrote a blockbuster. The book was called "the biggest event in children's reading for centuries."
John Hersey said the book was a "masterpiece" ... a "gift to the art of reading."
"It's the book I'm proudest of," Dr. Seuss said, "because [it] proved to a number of million kids that reading is not a disagreeable task."
Takeaway 1:
Dr. Angela Duckworth talks about how intelligence follows interest.
"This is why,” Duckworth said, “I can be very dumb about things I don’t care about and I can be extremely smart about the things I do care about.”
And this is why the simple solution to the nation's reading problem was to make children's books more interesting.
Takeaway 2:
Constraints boost creativity.
Dr. Seuss used just 236 unique words to write "The Cat in the Hat." Following the book's success, Dr. Seuss' publisher bet him $50 that he couldn't write a book using only 50 unique words.
Dr. Seuss won the bet delivering "Green Eggs and Ham" to his publisher in 1960, which would go on to sell more than 8 million copies—his bestselling book of all time.
- - -
As Jack White, the lead singer and guitarist of The White Stripes, said,
"[Constraints] make you creative...Telling yourself you have all the time in the world, all the money in the world, all the colors in the palette, anything you want—that just kills creativity."
Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!