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Ed Williams is widely regarded as one of the greatest hitters in baseball history. After his storied 21-year Hall of Fame career ended with his 1960 retirement, the Splendid Splinter returned to the game in 1969 as a manager. It didn’t go so well. Frustrated by players that weren’t his on-field equal, Williams sputtered through four sub-par years before being fired.
“All managers are losers,” Williams once said. “They are the most expendable pieces of furniture on earth.”
With all due respect to a sports legend, if you can’t connect with those you manage and help open up their skills to their greatest potential, your leadership success will ultimately be as limited as Teddy Ballgame’s.
Leaders solve problems. It’s what they do. It’s who they are.
Every company is led by a talented individual or individuals who showed a skill for spotting issues, devising ways around those issues, then leading the organization past those pitfalls. If those entrusted to make those decisions don’t come through or make the wrong choices…well, that company may not be around for long.
That often requires leaders to get creative. And successful managers can instill that same level of creativity and problem solving in their workforce too.
One way to do that is to train your brain to work like some of the greatest minds in business. Brilliant can help get a leader’s brain as well as those working around them to that next level of problem solving ability.
Brilliant is a different kind of learning
Brilliant is a unique online learning platform that doesn’t fall back on the old standbys of reading textbook chapters, dry classroom lectures, and regularly scheduled exams.
Rather than covering less rigorous subjects, Brilliant caters to educated, inquisitive, and motivated learners who feel like there may be a hole in their education with a roster of more than 60 courses focused on STEM-related topics.
Created by a team of teachers and professionals from prestigious places like MIT, Caltech, Microsoft, Google and others, Brilliant takes math and science topics that can feel impenetrable, then gamifies the learning to help make each area’s key takeaways more relatable. Through fun, challenging, and engaging puzzles and games coupled with inventive storytelling, Brilliant courses reach out and grab students ready to learn.
Instead of teaching learners to memorize dates and steps for understanding logic, the Brilliant course amps up the entertainment, while never losing sight of the learning. In their training, learners are told every citizen of London is either a human or a werewolf. If humans always tell the truth and werewolves always lie, the learned principles of logic can help you determine who’s human and who’s ready to tear open your neck.
Meanwhile, if you want to understand chemistry, Brilliant training guides learners through visually-centered basics like photosynthesis, chemical reactions, and more, then turns students loose to take those lessons forward — by making their own mini-volcano using baking soda and vinegar. If learners can wrap their minds around the fundamentals, Brilliant turns that foundation into exciting real-world practice that makes digesting new information what it should be: fun.
Here’s how to get smarter faster
As students work their way through math, science, computer science, and other involved academic disciplines, the training also has a cumulative effect on thought processes. The courses open up learners to new ways of approaching education, understanding and applying knowledge for both bedrock problem solving as well as accessing creative solutions they may never have reached before.
Right now, students can take a look at all the curriculum Brilliant offers on their website. And for learners among the first 200 to sign up, they’ll receive a discount of 20 percent off their annual subscription rate.
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