"Discover your talent"

[Based on the story of Gillian Lynne from Ken Robinson’s famous speech “Schools kill creativity”]

There was this little girl, Gillian, and she was really hopeless. And the school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate, she was fidgeting.

So, she went to see a specialist with her mother. She was led to a room where she sat on a chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it - because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on, little kid of eight - in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, "Gillian, I've listened to all these things that your mother's told me, and I need to speak to her privately." He said, "Wait here, we'll be back, we won't be very long." and they went and left her.

But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her." And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick, she's a dancer. Take her to a dance school."

She did. It was the most wonderful experience for little Gillian. She walked in the room and it was full of people like her. People who couldn't sit still. People who had to move to think. Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern, they did contemporary.

She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School, she became a soloist, she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company - the Gillian Lynne Dance Company. She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multi-millionaire.

Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.