Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Sternberg

There is a quiet bait-and-switch in Sternberg's line: he starts with the familiar currency of "success" and then smuggles in a more radical requirement - creativity as infrastructure, not ornament. That move matters because it meets his audience where they are (parents, students, institutions anxious about employability) while nudging them toward a broader view of human capability. He isn't selling art-class vibes; he's arguing for adaptability as a survival skill.

The phrase "in later life" stretches the time horizon. It's a rebuke to schooling that optimizes for the next exam, the next credential, the next narrow benchmark. Sternberg, a psychologist known for pushing beyond IQ toward multi-dimensional intelligence, is implicitly critiquing the educational assembly line: if the world won't hold still, training people to reproduce fixed answers is malpractice.

"Look at how fast the world is changing" is the rhetorical pressure point. It's deliberately unspecific - no mention of AI, globalization, or job churn - because the vagueness makes the claim portable across decades and policy debates. The subtext is urgency without panic: you can either treat change as a threat and double down on rote compliance, or treat it as the baseline condition and teach students to generate options, reframe problems, and improvise responsibly.

Sternberg's intent isn't just motivational. It's strategic. By tethering creativity to "succeed", he tries to make a soft-sounding value legible to hard-nosed systems that fund, measure, and rank. Creativity becomes the argument that educational reform can use in the boardroom, not just the classroom.