I love this mini-lecture from Ira Glass. He discusses how we artists are often vexed by the gap between the vision we have in our heads and the disappointment we sometimes feel in the final result of our efforts. And he has one simple solution to closing that gap.
"Tony DeRose wanders between rows at New York's Museum of Mathematics. In a brightly-colored button-up T-shirt that may be Pixar standard issue, he doesn't look like the stereotype of a scientist. He greets throngs of squirrely, nerdy children and their handlers - parents and grandparents, math and science teachers - as well as their grown-up math nerd counterparts, who came alone or with their friends. One twentysomething has a credit for crowd animation on Cars 2; he's brought his mom. She wants to meet the pioneer whose work lets her son do what he does."
It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school's principal, decided to try something extreme-by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher's best efforts. The school's team of special educators-including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist-convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it's practically obsolete.