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Josh Allan Dykstra
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Josh Allan Dykstra

Josh Allan Dykstra is the optimistic futurist who creates clarity from chaos. A keynote speaker, serial entrepreneur, podcast host, and former rockstar, Josh helps leaders and change-makers master Future Design™ to help build a tomorrow that doesn’t suck.

396 articles published
LegacyAugust 20, 2007

The Educated & Scholarly

A few more words of wisdom from our friend, the "other" J.D.:
"Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them -- if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful, reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry. I'm not trying to tell you that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It's not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they're brilliant and creative to begin with -- which, unfortunately, is rarely the case -- tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And -- most important -- nine times out of ten they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker. Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it'll begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What it'll fit and, maybe, what it won't. After a while, you'll have an idea what kind of thoughts your particular size mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that don't suit you, aren't becoming to you. You'll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly." - J.D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye (p. 246-247)
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LifeAugust 17, 2007

Education: Time For Something New

On my vacation, my beautiful family-in-law and I visited the Mackinac Island area of Michigan (which I highly recommend if you haven't been). While traipsing around the commercial tourist trap that is Main Street Mackinaw City, we found a small ice cream shop, and, as it was vacation forgoodnesssake, we knew it was time to partake. While waiting for said processed dairy, I found a tattered TIME magazine from December 10, 2006 lying on the coffee table in the corner. The cover story was called "How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century." As I get older (I know that sounds lame, and I'm not that old yet, but it's true), I find myself knowing more people with kids, and thinking about having some myself someday (gasp!), and the issue of education is becoming more and more frontburner. I know I'm going to have a boatload of issues that get ferried to the surface when my as-yet unconceived child enters schoolworld, but for now I can remain idealistically detatched, and mostly livid. What's it going to take for us to get our schools out of their archaic modern mindset? //
LegacyAugust 15, 2007

Holden Caulfield On Jesus, Etc.

Thus spake Holden Caulfield:
"I felt like praying or something, when I was in bed, but I couldn't do it. I can't always pray when I feel like it. In the first place, I'm sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down. I like almost anybody in the Bible better than the Disciples. If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the Disciples, that poor bastard. I used to get in quite a few arguments about it, when I was at the Whooton School, with this boy that lived down the corridor, Arthur Childs. Old Childs was a Quaker and all, and he read the Bible all the time. He was a very nice kid, and I liked him, but I could never see eye to eye with him on a lot of stuff in the Bible, especially the Disciples. He kept telling me if I didn't like the Disciples, then I didn't like Jesus and all. He said that because Jesus picked the Disciples, you were supposed to like them. I said I knew He picked them, but that He picked them at random. I said He didn't have time to go around analyzing everybody. I said I wasn't blaming Jesus or anything. It wasn't His fault that He didn't have any time. I remember I asked old Childs if he thought Judas, the one that betrayed Jesus and all, went to Hell after he committed suicide. Childs said certainly. That's exactly where I disagreed with him. I said I'd bet a thousand bucks that Jesus never sent old Judas to Hell. I still would, too, if I had a thousand bucks. I think any one of the Disciples would've sent him to Hell and all -- and fast, too -- but I'll bet anything Jesus didn't do it. Old Childs said the trouble with me was that I didn't go to church or anything. He was right about that, in a way. I don't. In the first place, my parents are different religions, and all the children in our family are atheist. If you want to know the truth, I can't even stand ministers. The ones they've had at every school I've gone to, they have these Holy Joe voices when they start giving their sermons. God, I hate that. I don't see why the hell they can't talk in their natural voice. They sound so phony when they talk." - J.D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye (p. 130-131)
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