Gold stars

~ trythisathomekids ~ 1 Comment

My mama told me when I was young, we’re all born superstars… So hold your head up girl and you’ll go far, listen to me when I say…

Born this Way, Lady Gaga

There’s a familiar knot in the plot line, when people who’ve found their calling reflect on their origins. It goes something like this “when I was young, my [mother / father / teacher / someone] told me I was good at [insert talent]”. Or, there’s a self realisation of this sort. A realisation that resonates and clicks in deeply.

And so it comes to pass.

Successful New York real estate agent Barbara Corcoran’s mother “pinned one thing on each kid… My thing was I had a wonderful imagination… and I fell for it, you know, and she’s right and I did have a good imagination, or at least maybe I learned to have it because of her.”

Journalist and professor Linda Villarosa had a great aunt who looked after her on Wednesdays and taught her to read “she said to me, you’re going to be a writer”.

Arnold Schwarzenegger goes to a small gym in Austria. He gets an award for a clean and jerk he did really well. That moment of positive feedback, sets him on a path and propels him forward.

In conversation with Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project, Daniel Gross of Y Combinator and now Pioneer, describes these as “catalysing moments”. Experiences that lead to positive feedback loops, which in turn lead to where we are today.

The act of naming the talent is an important ingredient in the catalyst. With naming and categorising come shortcuts to understanding. With understanding, comes the confidence to take action.

In a world with lots of choice for lots of kids, perhaps kids with a strong sense of a particular talent have the advantage of an early knot in their plot line. Something that helps orient them and gives them a stronger sense of how they might fit in and contribute. Perhaps it makes the first (and next) steps clearer and easier to take.

In many cases, it probably doesn’t matter what the step is, or if it turns out to be the best step. There’s value in getting started, to get feedback – test, learn and adjust. As author and teacher Jim Collins argues, a key to success is not a single idea or one plan, it is the act of turning the flywheel, slowly gaining momentum and eventually reaching a breakthrough.

Without considering the counterfactual, without a randomised control trial, perhaps these moments of talent-naming aren’t material. Perhaps it’s a strategy that fails as often as it succeeds. But if there’s value in just getting started…

Try this at home [mums and dads]

Tell your kids something you’ve noticed they’re really good at, and add the ‘so what’. Perhaps your future robot boss is a brilliant constructor. Transforming the recycling into creatures and vehicles. With a talent like that, perhaps creating the machines or buildings of the future to transform how we live, is for them.

The idea isn’t to be deterministic, but to get the flywheel spinning.

Thank you to Shane Parrish (@farnamstreet) and Daniel Gross (@danielgross), Tim Ferriss (@tferriss) and Jim Collins (@level5leaders), Barbara Corcoran (@BarbaraCorcoran) and Linda Villarosa (@lindavillarosa) for inspiration and insights.

Q and A

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American President, Franklin D Roosevelt, went on a fishing trip while the Battle of Britain raged and solved a problem baffling the bureaucracy.

…he came up with the whole idea of lend lease on a fishing trip because he was away from the turmoil of Washington where the bureaucratic structure couldn’t figure out how to lend money or lend supplies to England because of neutrality acts… A good yankee bargain… a simple thing, but no one could figure that out in Washington. 

Doris Kearns Goodwin, in conversation with Tim Ferriss

The fishing trip gave FDR time, but he came with a question.

Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit. 

Clayton Christensen via Jason Fried via Leisa Reichelt.

Like grit in an oyster, the question is the starter. The necessary irritant, and then there’s the white noise to work it through. The sort of time where ideas can tick over. Where you’re not being strictly productive, but your attention is your own. Runs, walks and showers. Especially showers.

Both sides of the ledger matter.

And Clayton Christensen’s framing points us to how much. It weaponises questions, making them agents of change, opening up fissures that weaken old beliefs and make space for new ones.

A question and time. Is that it? The secret to the-making-of-progress in ideas and the re-making of the status quo? Hiding in plain sight.

And it’s an alarming thought too, when technology captures and demands our attention. Turning it away from questions and transforming the white noise into active, but often  not productive time, for the-making-of-progress.

Try this at home kids

How can we create scaffolding in our everyday lives with our kids for questions that resonate and time to work them through?

Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital uses train trips. In conversation with Shane Parrish he talks about using train trips with his kids to deep dive on questions and topics. He also talks about using questions to plant seeds in his kids’ minds to encourage critical thinking.

And then here’s a different take on putting questions to work. You could try asking your child – What would Batman do?” (or insert name of alternative  hero of the hour.)  This one has the added benefit of supporting improvements in executive functions in five year olds (skills used for planning and doing tasks, organising, regulating behaviour, working memory, impulse control, and attention).

Thanks to Tim Ferriss (@tferriss) for his great interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin (@DorisKGoodwin), Shane Parrish (@farnamstreet) for his great interview with Josh Wolfe (@wolfejosh), Leisa Reichelt (@leisa) and Jason Fried (@jasonfried) for bring Clayton Christensen’s (@claychristensen) insight to us.

The world needs more prototyping

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We prototype to test and learn – “everything is a guess until you do something and then, once you do something, you can learn”, Amy Whitaker on the Goop podcast.

In science this has a rigour to it. An hypothesis is made: the fact prototype. The scientist sets out to disprove it, methodically.

In design thinking and typically human centred design, the prototype is arrived at after a period of divergent thinking in concert with humans (imagine), into the second of the Double Diamonds.

In play, small children don’t need criteria met or particular preceding steps to prototype. Small children seem to know intuitively, it’s just the best way to figure something out. With paper, card, sticky tape. Whatever’s around.

As adults, we often need the permission of a recognised methodology to prototype. Perhaps because prototyping is applied and applied practices can get a bad rap. Seen as inferior to their theoretical counterparts. Less lofty. But guess what? The kids have known it all along. Prototyping works. Testing and iterating ‘the thing’, even in a very rudimentary way, leads to better things and things not foreseen at the outset.

Tom Chi, of Google Glass fame talks about prototyping eloquently as “the realm of using paper, clay and tape in order to go and find a new insight in an ancient technology”.

Getting from A to B more efficiently won’t cut it in the future. We need kids to become adults engaged in expansive learning, primed to invent new point Bs, not yet imagined. Prototyping – with basic construction materials, pen and paper, even words – is the all important doing, the means to test and learn, to get us there.

Try this at home kids (and parents)

Value prototyping. Model it and keep it in play (puns definitely intended), through school and beyond. And try the marshmallow challenge!

https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/spaghetti-marshmallow-challenge

Thank you for the inspiration @theamywhit (via @goop),  @dintersmith and @thegoodtomchi.

End of the bitumen

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You’ll look up and down streets. Look ’em over with care. About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.” With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet, you’re too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

Oh the Places You’ll Go, Dr Seuss 

Talking to Alec Baldwin on Here’s the Thing, comedian Steve Young describes working on The Harvard Lampoon as a pivotal moment. It was here he realised  “there have been people who have gone before… and for the first time, maybe in your life, you think ‘oh’ this is something people do for a living”.

Experiences like this matter. They are the forks in the road that divert people into jobs that lead to careers.

But how does this work when the road isn’t well travelled? When the jobs don’t exist yet or are unrecognisable as work? When the bitumen hasn’t been poured.

We need more modern day equivalents of Steve Young’s Lampoon experience.

For Zoe Baird, CEO of the Markle Foundation, it’s about finding ways to literally show people the new jobs.

…advanced manufacturing jobs, people don’t see themselves in those because their uncle or their brother isn’t working in advanced manufacturing, but if their Facebook friends show them what advanced manufacturing jobs looked like and that people like them were doing those jobs then they can see themselves.

Zoe Baird on McKinsey & Company podcast The New World of Work.

She goes on to say Google is putting significant effort into figuring out “how to use its assets to help people see better what (new) jobs look like”.

“It’s not what you know, it’s what you see”?

Try this at home kids

Practice what Zoe Baird suggests and take advantage of technology to see the jobs of the future – TED talks, profiles, social networks.

Research shows that when it comes to finding a job, it’s the ‘weak ties’ between people – the more tenuous links, the friends-of-friends – that matter the most. Perhaps in the future the research will substitute ‘friends-of-friends’ with ‘social network platforms’ showing people what the jobs of the future look like, helping people see themselves in those roles.

… And here’s an analogue tip, from Tyler Cowen, economics professor, author, and creator of the blog, Marginal Revolution in discussion with Shane Parrish of the Knowledge Project: introduce your kids to your friends with different and interesting careers.

* ‘End of the bitumen‘ by Slim Dusty

Future talent stack

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Like bacon and maple syrup, culinary magic lies in unexpected combinations.

Uncommon skill combinations can be magical too.

Think technology and ethnography (good on you Genevieve Bell – @feraldata), economics and psychology (behavioural economics) and design, with well just about anything.

Layer on something like leadership or storytelling, and you’re getting to what writer and satirist Scott Adams calls a ‘talent stack’. A combination of multiple skills and knowledge areas that can have commercial value and be an alternative to being the best in a single field.

Talent stacks don’t superseded notions of generalists and specialists, or polymaths, but with advances in machine learning, in narrower functions in particular, people with great talent stacks seem likely to be important lynch pins in organisations and communities.

Try this at home kids!

Today’s suggestion is a twist on the classic “What would you like to be when you grow up?”

If our kids can expect to ‘be’ a range of things in a lifetime and talent stacks can be an effective means of giving individuals more power and autonomy, this seems to be an FAQ ripe for re-framing.

Next time the discussion turns to ‘What would you like to be when you grow up?”, how about asking instead ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’, ‘What interest/skills can you bring to a job or problem that needs solving?’ or ‘What will your talent stack be?’

Thank you Emily Painter (@CoatOfPainter) for drawing our attention to talent stacks. Thank you Tim Ferriss (@tferriss) for reminding us of the importance of asking better questions.

Postscript – (indirect) stamp of approval from the excellent Adam Grant!