Time to bloom.

I was talking to Andrew the other day about his magnolia tree being much further on than mine, his is about to burst into bloom while the buds on my magnolia tree (20miles east) are quite small and still tightly shut.

Then last night my son started talking about his belief that he's not very "clever" and I reassured him that though learning at school is quite important, we don't all learn at the same rate and we do a lot more learning after school. What a shame we live in a society where so much emphasis is put on school tests and academia. When we discover what we love, following whatever makes our heart sing, we can become an expert in that field and achieve a great deal by simply doing what we feel passionately about.

We all bloom at different rates. If you know a young person who has lost belief in themselves as a result of not achieving what's expected of them by their schools system of scoring according to their age and stage, remind them of these great achievers as written about in, "The Denenberg Report," “Thomas Edison, thought by many to have the highest IQ in the last millennium, was dismissed from school because his teacher thought he did not have the intelligence to succeed academically. Albert Einstein could not read until he was seven and still was considered a slow learner in high school. Winston Churchill was last in his class in school but developed a remarkable vocabulary that led him to become one of the greatest orators of all time."