The twin engines of altruism and ambition are a powerful force for positive change in the world.

They need to be balanced. Ambition without altruism and change may not be positive. Altruism without ambition may be nice without impact. But put the two together, for example with a mission-driven business like B-corps, and it can be a recipe for wonderful, positive, and meaningful change — and probably what we need to deal with the challenges of our times.

This lovely concept is from Richard Reed, co-founder of Innocent drinks, and I learned it from Holly Tucker's Conversations of Inspiration podcast.

Altruism and ambition

School mathematics refresher: when faced with a calculation that looks like it could be tackled multiple ways, use BODMAS to help clear it up (See PEMDAS at the end).

BODMAS is an acronym (as opposed to an initialism) that tells you the order of operations to tackle in a calculation.

BODMAS stands for Brackets, Order/Indices, Division, Multiplication, Addition, and Subtraction. So in 2 + 4 x 2 you don't end up with 6 x 2 = 12 but instead, 2 + 8 = 10

BODMAS is generally built into calculators (you can search 2 + 4 x 2 in Google to see). If you need additions or subtractions to be carried out first you can surround them in brackets eg (2 + 4) x 2

I always learned it as BODMAS, but many people told me they learned this as PEMDAS. The idea is the same just the words are different, and the ordering of Division and Multiplication, which are interchangeable:

PEMDAS: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, and Subtraction

BODMAS

Bloom's taxonomy has 6 levels of increasingly sophisticated thinking skills. It was originally developed, in a slightly different form to here, for classifying educational objectives and with additional variations, dimensions and sub-levels in the full models, is still useful for teaching and learning. The hierarchy reflects, among other things, that a strong foundation for learning is knowledge.

The 6 levels in the revised Bloom's Taxonomy for learning are: Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create

Also see: the learning pit, the third teacher, zone of proximal development

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Bloom's Taxonomy