Tag: Kids

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.

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!

 

 

Editing: old school for iterating

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‘Come with me. A superhero soon you’ll be’! Choose a costume: shield or cape? Boots to make a quick escape? What’s your power? Strength or speed? These are things all heroes need.

How to Be a Superhero by @SueFliess

Getting your superhero just right takes a few goes.

IMG_3641

Kids can spend hours drawing. Getting what they see in their heads down on paper. Iteration is core business.

Writing seems to be approached differently. Perhaps because dabbling is more difficult for younger kids or, in a school context, there’s a draft or two, but that’s it. Hand it in. Onto the next thing.

Editing prose – drafting and redrafting, getting to heart of the matter – isn’t fashionable, but it’s incredibly valuable in business.  Consider how written material contributes to compelling brand identifies and value propositions.  When consumers are time poor and platforms are crowded, getting to the point is critical.

Also, experts who can also write well, have a real competitive advantage.  Equipped with great knowledge and the capacity to translate complex ideas into words that speak to people? Now that’s a real super power.

Yet editing is a skill rarely overtly taught in schools.

Try this at home kids!

Here’s an activity for older kids, taken from Jason Fried’s blog post The writing class I’d like to teach. It can help encourage kids to bring the approach they often bring to drawing, to writing.

Pick a topic, any topic, and write a three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version.

Each step requires asking ‘What’s really important?’ That’s the most important question you can ask yourself about anything….Whittling it all down until all that’s left is the point.

Jason Fried, co-founder and CEO of Basecamp in episode #329 of The Tim Ferriss Show and in a Signal v. Noise.

Thanks for the inspiration @jasonfried and @tferriss.

Once upon a time, waiting for an Uber

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In the first season of StartUp, Alex Blumberg talks about an early pitch to Chris Sacca, for what would later become Gimlet Media. On a sidewalk, under pressure, it doesn’t go well. Chris Sacca steps in and translates. He plays the conversation back with the contemporary constraint “in the two minutes it’ll take for an Uber to arrive”.  Compelling and to the point, its pitch perfect.

The ‘pitch’ is a modern form of storytelling. And the pitch itself can be enough; to win investors, partners, even customers. In business, as in life, stories matter. A lot.

The value of authenticity and narrative arc are widely acknowledged in shaping how compelling a story is. In ‘A Debate with Malcolm Gladwell from WorkLife with Adam Grant’, however, Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant focus-in on another quality of storytelling “interestingness”.

For Malcolm, “…that quality of being specific and being able to illustrate your larger points with… precision is the quality of what makes something interesting.”

For Adam, interestingness has its origins in a certain kind of… pause. Drawing on the work of sociologist Murray Davis he suggests that “If someone just affirms your assumptions, you don’t get curious, you don’t get intrigued, there’s no surprise… when you’re interested is when it’s like ‘huh’, that’s the opposite of what I would have thought, or that’s different from what I would have believed”.

So if M. Sanjayan’s right and storytelling is a way to rule the world, well that’s a craft to master. Time to take “Once upon a time” and crank up the ‘interesting’.

Try this at home kids!

  1. Pocket full of stories: without little eyes watching, pop four or five everyday items into the pocket of a coat. This is now the storytelling coat. Get the kid(s) to put it on, check their pockets and then tell a story incorporating the objects they find.
  2. First half / second half: begin by telling a story out loud. Right after you get to a critical point, stop and let the kid(s) take over.
  3. The pitch over dinner: at breakfast time, ask the kid(s) to keep an eye out during the day for a ‘problem’ they encounter and to come to dinner with an idea to solve it.  The problem doesn’t need to be enormous – a top that’s hard to get on, pens and socks that keep disappearing – anything that doesn’t go smoothly will do.

In each case, encourage the kid(s) to make the story as interesting as possible. Talk about what might help with this. Perhaps by incorporating a real story, something they have experienced, getting very specific or getting characters to do the opposite to what you might expect.

Thank you for the inspiration Alex Blumberg (@abexlumberg), Chris Sacca (@sacca), Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant), Malcolm Gladwell (@Gladwell), Guy Raz (@HowIBuiltThis) and M. Sanjayan (@msanjayan) ℅ Tim Ferriss (@tferriss). All masters of their particular storytelling craft.

Postscript

For more inspiration, Nancy Duarte‘s Resonate is a masterclass, and modern take, on “Once upon a time…”.

Kan ban worry / build confidence

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Agile methods like Kanban are awesome.

Kanban can help with team planning, task management and delivery. Kanban is Japanese for ‘visual signal’ (among other things), and it certainly is.

Get your Post It notes and Sharpies ready. If you’re not already engaged in a battle for wall space, Scrum, Kanban and their agile variants are coming to a workplace near you.

Agile methods can help teams do some things that can be particularly difficult, including:

  • identifying and staying focused on specific goals;
  • breaking goals down into steps and ultimately very do-able (and much less intimidating) tasks;
  • providing a sense of progress and achievement – as coloured Post-it notes (or digital cards) move across the board from ‘to do’, to ‘doing’ and then ‘done’; and
  • providing a stronger sense of ownership and control.

Kids (and anyone really) can worry or feel unsure about how to go about achieving a goal or task, from a homework assignment to learning a new skill.  Kanban can help. Practical, visual and logical, Kanban might be just the thing to bring a goal into focus and help future robot bosses figure out how to get there.

Try this at home kids! 

Kanban with kids works really well. This article by Rafa Garcia for Productive! Magazine has some great tips.

Building a basic Kanban board is a great place to start.

  • A whiteboard, chalkboard or few pieces of paper stuck together work just fine. Here are some examples.  It doesn’t need to be perfect, just three columns with the labels ‘to do’, ‘doing’ and ‘done’ and a section at the bottom somewhere for an ‘icebox’ (where you pop things that need to be done at some point, but don’t need to be tackled right away).

Then, next time your future robot boss is concerned about something or has an excellent idea for an age-appropriate entrepreneurial venture – try kanbaning it.

Start with the the goal or thing your future robot boss is working towards (for example – doing a great job on an upcoming class assignment – see picture). Write it down.  Be as specific as possible. Next, break down the goal into the steps needed to get there, writing each one a separate Post-it note.

Now it’s time to take action – specific, do-able and Post-it-noted actions – to reach that goal!

Good luck (and let us know how you go, we’d love to hear from you).

Post script – Here’s a great article from  the Harvard Business Review on the rational for breaking task down into smaller steps until it feels doable.