 My wife had a corner cabinet where she kept some delicate mementos. In order to protect these, she moved a box of books in front of the cabinet so that nobody could get near to it without first moving the books. My first notice of this was when I backed into the unexpected box, tripping on it. I had to reach out my hand to keep from falling in. There was the cabinet. Though nothing got damaged, it was still a disturbing situation. We are often our own worst enemy. We put forth time and energy trying to accomplish some end result without any coherent understanding of the needs of the situation. We cannot fully address the protection of those mementos. There was no accomplishment as the intended protection failed. Her efforts were not successful. She committed time and effort to a valued purpose, but the valued result was not attained. What we can address is the general observation that most performance improvement comes from ceasing to do things that work poorly or not at all. In this case, my wife's efforts were ineffective. If she had done nothing, the cabinet would have been better protected. One of the most difficult lessons for most leaders is that they cannot improve things unless they actually work. We spend much time and effort trying to improve existing processes that do not yield value. The real improvement would come from ceasing to do ineffective things so that we can spend time and attention doing the things that do work. Consider the simple question of the origins of man and the continuing furor over teaching this as scientific truth. Consider again that there are no experiments to be run. There is no future application to predict. Consider that it took a jury trial to find this truth that we teach as scientific truth what was determined by agreement among people. What kind of science is that? It is distraction, not education. Learning that one or the other theories are true is not going to contribute to your becoming an effective adult. It is distraction, something to be put into the black box out of sight and no longer to even be considered. There are things that will help you to be effective and this is where you should be focusing your time and energy. There are things like math to help you learn precision and thinking. There is real science with the ability to predict what will happen in situations so that you can be effective in planning. There are lessons in art and music, lessons in communication, lessons in geography and history to help give you useful perspectives and indirect experience. The more of your time and effort you expend on unproductive lessons, the less you have available for the lessons that will increase your ability as an educated adult. So where do these directions come from? The answer is that they come from past education where truth is considered more valuable than the student. Truth comes from justifications based on the good of the public without even realizing that the public are the parents. That's right, our public is made up of parents, past, present and future. There is no other public. As a source of frustration there is little that you can do as a student to even influence such teaching directions. Your function is learning. But then you are also the only party in interest when it comes to investing your time and energy on any particular lesson. Where you see the value to be gained and it is in terms of the impact of education upon your future, you have a great deal of leeway in determining where you will focus your efforts. You can decide to direct your time and effort to those things that will most certainly impact upon your future. You can decide to just get along on the lessons of lesser import doing what you have to do in order to honor those who would make your decisions for you. The win-win scenario comes about when you minimize the time and effort you expend on learning lessons that are ineffective so you can focus more fully on where your future will see the greatest benefit. This all comes to center on you as the one real party in interest. Your parents may be customers of the educational process but you are the one who is active, the one who puts forth the time and effort in learning and the only one who receives the direct benefit of education. If it does not benefit you it benefits nobody. If it does not make you more valuable then it fails to meet any public purpose.