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No offense to Mr. Eno, obviously a talented guy with a storied career, but have you heard U2’s new “No Line on the Horizon” produced by the same Mr. Eno?

Enough said.

Unfortunately, the critical, important, often overlooked part of Mr. Eno’s statement is that students have to feel free to take their teachers’ and mentors’ positions and chuck them away. To often they don’t and what happens is the conforming sameness that Harry Chapin sings about in “Flowers are Red”.

http://www.harrychapin.com/music/flowers.shtml

The most important job of teachers, parents, and bosses is to ensure their students, kids, and employees understand that what their strong positions are not to be consumed for confirmation, but rather leveraged for forming one’s own. I wish more teachers and parents understood enormous importance of this distinction.

And there are some musicians who keep thinking that buying one more sound-making toy will cause them to make more music.

Totally guilty of that myself, even while saying it.

@Happy Good point. I think it’s important people realize early their teachers are only guides and not the final word on a subject.

The very first sentence summed this quote up:

“I’m very opinionated.”

Tunnel vision is nothing to be proud of – narrowing down options is good when a decision has to be made, but keeping your opinion open to other people’s ideas is always a good thing – in MY opinion :).

All the big innovations are the result of alternative view of the problem. I don’t think being opinionated is a good characteristic for successful business man.

It’s my opinion, Heath, that you’ve missed the point. ;)

Behrang: I think you’ve also missed the point. Acting like opinionless sheep doesn’t solve problems. Why do you seem to equate being opinionated with being arrogant and unwilling to accept alternate viewpoints?

That said, I think you’re right that being opinionated may not be a good characteristic for a successful businessman. A lack of ethics, some good knee pads, and a lubricated posterior are what most businessmen need thesedays to be successful, at least in the U.S.

No, I’m not cynical.

@Heath and @Behrang… Having an opinion isn’t the same as being myopic.

”...I want to articulate a position clearly enough so that other people can use it – or chuck it away if they don’t want it.”

Would you rather be surrounded by a range of opinions that are expressed clearly, directly and simply or a room full of people nodding their heads in agreement with you? I’ll take the former every time.

@Patrick:

Great point… I’m siding with Patrick on this one (after reading his opinion, I choose to side with it)

As a professor at a university in Indiana, I’ve had students who carry the “challenge everything” flag almost as a badge of honor, and I’ve seen how this stunts real growth… it stunts even the possibility of reaching the young; they often spend crucial imaginative energy looking for ways to contest everything. This is certainly not most students, but even when it is a small number, you feel a though something important is being lost. You should be in an educational setting because you seek those things not readily available in the “business” world. After all, you learn about 85% of the tasks you need fo any job directly on that job. (The goal should be skepticism, not cynicism. Be open to things and the ideas of others before you jettison everything. After all, students don’t know what they don’t know. My goal as faculty should be to help you realize and become your own self-teacher, but I can’t facilitate this passion or temperament if the desire to be open to ideas simply does not exist, or, worse, has been drowned.

The exiled German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote that

“Even the outmoded, inconsistent ideas of the older generation are more open to dialogue than the slick stupidity of Junior.”

Don’t be a Junior.

“I’m very opinionated.”

That is the focus that made the man decades ahead of his time, creating a whole genre of music. That is usually called brilliance.

In my experience,

Being opinionated means knowing who you are and being comfortable with you are and knowing what you are here for.

@Mark

Funny… I was a student at a university in Indiana. Hopefully I didn’t fall into the ‘challenge everything’ category for too much of my time there.