I had my 15th tutoring session today with my delightful 5th grader. It's been a fascinating, rewarding and challenging experience. And by "challenging," I mean that in the most positive sense of the word: stimulating, interesting, thought-provoking.

I am not a teacher, at least not in the sense of having been formally trained in how to educate the young.

But I do have 30 years of experience as a parent and 30 years of experience as a leader. In both the home and the workplace, I continuously adjusted my approaches in the hopes of bringing out the best in the people for whom I had responsibility and to whom I had an obligation to nurture and develop.

As I reflect on these experiences as well as stories I've heard over my lifetime, I'm struck by a recurring theme: some individuals have struggled to fit into a narrow definition of academic and professional success—a world in which their talents were neither recognized nor valued—while others have, sometimes by chance, encountered a parent, a teacher or a coach who recognized an aptitude for something and encouraged them to pursue it.

This got me thinking of a 2006 TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson, which—at more than 76,000,000 views—remains the most watched TED Talk of all time. And with good reason. In addition to being highly entertaining, with numerous hilarious sidebars that nevertheless helped him to make his points, Robinson made a compelling case for "creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity."

Robinson quoted Picasso as having said that all children are born artists. "The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up," said Robinson, who maintained that "we don't grow into creativity; we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it."

Robinson stated that no matter where you go in the world, the public education system rewards certain disciplines more than others. He observed: "every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects.... At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities. At the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth. And in pretty much every system, too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance." He added: "the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized."

Creativity isn't associated solely with the arts, Robinson clarified in a 2018 interview with TED's Chris Anderson. "Science, mathematics, technology, humanities, engineering—name any form of human intellectual activity or any activity that engages our intelligence, and it's a scene of potential creative achievement," he said. Robinson defined creativity as "the process of having original ideas that have value"—ideas that often result from the different ways that various disciplines see things.

Robinson told Anderson: "I'm just arguing for forms of education that give people the skills and the competencies and the hope and the confidence to have the life they deserve in a community that they feel proud of."

That's what I want for the boy I'm tutoring, for my kids, and for every person I ever had the privilege of leading: that they—or some kind, wise, generous person around them—will recognize their talents and see not only what they are today but what they can become tomorrow.