What do you want to be when you grow up? This is a question we were all asked at some point in our early childhoods. Typically, it was posed by someone who wasn’t very good with kids. As those little kids, we did our best to respond. Um, fireman/woman, policeman/woman, astronaut? Meanwhile, our little kid inner voices were saying something else, an innocent version of: just how the hell am I supposed to know what I want to be when I grow up? I can’t even tie my shoes, dude!

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Learning thinking is implicitly tied up in all the learning that we do throughout school and life. Thinking, despite how central it is to everything we do, is typically not taught head on. We don’t grow up taking classes in effective thinking. Think about that for a moment. It arguably is the point of much education, learning effective thinking, and yet the entire design of K-12 and beyond is to teach thinking indirectly. We can take steps to help our kids think better, just as we can make progress improving our own thinking. In my own experiment of one with my son, I have seen that it can work far better than I even anticipated.

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Let’s assume that at 18 she comes into a trust worth $25 million. And then there are going to be several inheritances in the ensuing years such that the little girl’s future estate will eventually grow to hundreds of millions of dollars. Somewhere in the wake of the oohing over the adorable tiny skis and taking in all the sweetness, I started thinking about Prudence Celery’s fabulous wealth, and I decided that it was deeply unfair and that I would dedicate the rest of my life to lobbying for an aggressive inheritance tax targeted at young alpinists. Actually, that is not where this is going.

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There are lots of well-founded reasons why parents work to shield kids from failure. And some un-founded. We worry that if our kids learn about all the failing, they might end up as failures. They will catch failure. And we will end up the parent with the adult kid living in out in the garage in their thirties, surviving on cans of Chef Boyardee, while spending years trying to finish the application to their tattoo art college safety school. Whatever the reasons that we keep failure on the down low, the degree to which we do is a mistake, as navigating failure is unambiguously one of central keys to an effective and meaningful life.

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There is an old line that gets floated in writing circles that goes something like: you can’t teach writing. Presumably, the line is about gifted writers and teaching what they have. It could be that many years ago someone said it to a writing teacher, but they were emphasizing the you, as in you-specific-writing-teacher can’t teach people to write. But that teacher failed to pick up on the dig, and in turn the teacher started telling others, spreading misinformation about the teachability of writing that has been discouraging would-be writers ever since. Whoopsie.

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Two men are walking down a city sidewalk on the way to make a sales call. One is the leader and the other his subordinate. As they walk, they spot a vintage Porsche 911 parked on the street, gleaming in the sun. The leader says to the subordinate, “You see that beautiful car? Well, someday, if you work really hard, and you do all of the right things,” at which point he pauses briefly. The subordinate thinks he knows where this is going and is instantly picturing his future successful self in that sweet ride. “You do all that hard work,” the leader continues, “and someday, I will be able to afford that car.” It is a funny story, but there is a lot more to it than good dark corporate humor.

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I think you should consider documenting some of your life story and the lessons you want to pass down, whether it is for kids, grandkids, or TBD. For a number of readers, this suggestion will, at the moment, be an especially ironic one—those of you who have kids who are currently going through a phase of life where parental input is particularly unwanted, where simply asking ‘how was your day’ has somehow become super annoying. But how many of us have lost parents and wished deeply that we could have captured their stories and life insights before it was too late? And how many others of us have parents alive, but getting up there, and we keep meaning to do something about this?

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Is there anything as ludicrous as the 1972 Stanford marshmallow experiment? Yes, I know. Dark socks with sandals. Whole life insurance policies. Grandpa's new lower back tattoo. The stores in malls where you can go to have someone stretch you out while you just lay there. The plot to the Glass Onion sequel. All sexting. Interest in the British monarchy. Countries that allow TV commercials for the gambling industry. We are surrounded by absurdity. But I am talking true nonsensicalness. For that, the marshmallow experiment stands alone.

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Before plunging into the way in which we can all harness the newness of this year as an opportunity for personal and familial greatness, we have to address the elephant in the make-the-most-of-the-new-year room: New Year’s resolution deniers. “Resolutions don’t work! Everyone knows that! Just go to gym on January 31 and you’ll see everyone has already given up! Besides, my therapist says we are still all building up our psychic resilience after the trauma of COVID and I shouldn’t worry about growth now!” It has become fashionable in recent years to not only forgo the age-old practice of making—and failing to keep—New Year’s resolutions, but to respond to anyone expressing interest such a resolution tradition with disdain. When did New Year’s resolutions become triggering?

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We were fortunate to have a short-lived period of wild ice here in Minneapolis recently. Wild ice—for those readers in sunnier climes whose primary exposure to ice is as a tool for drink cooling—is a coveted, but rare winter phenomenon in the deep north.  You get a sense for its spectacle in the photo that accompanies this post. It is of my daughter out on a lake on some ice that is frozen perfectly smooth, so that the crisp, sunny day sky is reflected brilliantly below her, like she is crawling on the heavens. What you can’t see is the countless adults walking by who are made nervous by this scene. The ice is fairly newly formed, and the grownups are flashing back to all of the times their parents aggressively warned them of the dangers of thin ice over and over. And they are wondering where the girl’s parents are. To the point that the situation almost spirals out of control.

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It is hard to picture now, but in the early days of widespread automobile ownership, families would, of their own volition, take Sunday drives—totally random, aimless driving around as a family. Just get in the car, don’t buckle up (no seat belts), and drive. For fun. Can you imagine? Driving without a destination? I am tempted to try it out this coming Sunday without explaining what we are doing. I can hear the kids asking, “Wait, where are we going?” And me cheerfully, “Nowhere!” And then them, “I still don’t get it--we’re going where?” “I told you, nowhere!” There is certainly a case to be made for directionless wandering at times in life (backpacking in Europe comes to mind), but of late it has occurred to me that too much my kids’ education is more like ye old Sunday drives than I should be comfortable with.

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Documentaries have changed radically, something that started toward in the 1980s and 1990s with Roger and Me, Hoop Dreams (still a great option to share with teens), and the entire Ken Burns oeuvre, and they are experiencing a full golden age in the current era of proliferating streaming services. Massive budgets, great storytelling, computer-generated imagery, and hosts who are amazing communicators and have taken on celebrity status (Neil deGrasse Tyson and David Attenborough) or were celebrities to begin with (Will Smith and Leonardo DiCaprio). Consider the recently released series docu-series Limitless. It teaches viewers about advances in brain science and human performance optimization while following one of the top ten top grossing and most popular actors on the planet, Chris Hemsworth, on series of mini-quests to push his own limits (equally amazingly, acclaimed director, Darren Aronofsky, is the executive producer of the series). These aren’t documentaries. They are highly advanced learning content systems that turn screen time into brain enhancement events and, when consumed at scale, will give your kid an unfair learning advantage that calls to mind Lance Armstrong’s blood doping.

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National test scores are plummeting. Teachers are quitting. School budgets are shrinking. The bad news keeps rolling in, like waves in an ocean that is really mean and hellbent on discouraging parents. But reader, this unrelenting bad news is not going to derail us or our kids. There is too much that we can do to help supplement our kids' learning and to coach/coax them toward a better educational experience than we ever had. It is like the famous scene in The Wizard of Oz when young Dorothy Gale opens the door of her house, which has just plummeted from the sky, and steps from her sepia-colored bedroom into the brilliant Technicolor world of Munchkinland. That is the level of transformation in the education of our kids that we can facilitate, though admittedly the shift to a more Technicolor educational experience may be a more gradual process. We really can do it, though, and this post provides a number of especially practical strategies to try out with your kids, all of which have the potential to help nudge your kids toward enjoying a more vivid educational experience.

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In a world in which neither you nor I were ever instructed in how to be great at learning how to learn—whether acquiring new knowledge or mastering skills—Tim Ferriss has sold millions and millions of books and hosts one of the most popular podcasts largely because he is a learning savant who is also committed to teaching others his insights. The only problem is that Tim Ferriss, like many of the leading life improvement gurus, does not currently have kids. Once he does, and is forced to encounter the degree to which schools still don’t teach kids how to lear, he will experience the sense that his head is about to pop off in frustration, after which he will spend a few weeks thinking, and then reinvent the whole system, so that our kids can all rapidly and efficiently acquire information and master skills on the way to all graduating high school at the age of nine. The only question is what are parents to do in the meantime.

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In schools today, kids study a small number of subjects—math, reading, social studies, science, etc.—in large part to learn how to think; in the future, the focus will be more on learning to think itself in order to rapidly learn new subjects and skills. This shift will be the result of a confluence of factors: the reality of instant access to an infinite amount of information, continued advances in brain science, and the way our rapidly changing world prioritizes the ability to efficiently learn new skills. In the meantime, we can bridge the gap by exposing our kids to great thinking tools, including mental models, mindset shifts, and other powerful concepts for developing their minds. Think of these mental resources like the different moves that a martial arts student learns on their way on up to earning a black belt.

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I was born fifty-seven years ago on this day. I entered the world slippery, screaming, and without an owner’s manual. My childhood conviction was that I contained the potential for big things, but also for great ineptitude; and what I needed was a manual or operator’s guide to figure out how I most optimally worked, so I could access the good version—a conviction that would haunt me for decades. It was clear early on that school was not going to provide the answers. By 18, it managed to only teach me my first language, some math (mostly forgotten), some science, some very rough Spanish, and a heavy dose of American history through a conventional lens (presidents, politics, wars). No missing manual.

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You are busy, to the point that you may not be able to make it through this article, no matter how many cliffhangers I embed in the text to urge you on (though I really would stick with this, as the advice to come really is potentially life changing. Seriously!). We parents are often in relationships in which each spouse has a career, while also trying to be active in our kids’ lives, and also hopefully sharing domestic chores, and even aiming to get in a date night—which too often is the Jenga piece that brings things tumbling down and sets parents to fighting. The issue is time. In the face of this struggle with the lack of time to do all we need to for our kids, including supplementing their educations in ways that are necessary given trends in the school system, we can look to the work and lifestyle productivity gurus, like Tim Ferriss, who often make the case for seeking out what they refer to as lead dominoes to save the day.

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There’s a mistake that nearly all parents make at one time or another, one that I myself have been guilty of on multiple occasions. As understandable as it is, this post will hopefully help millions of parents avoid falling into the trap in the future. The issue arises when we are engaged in the act of parenting, and we are communicating some valuable information, possibly some excellent life lesson, and then our child begins to respond, to speak—and here it comes, the parental gaffe…We listen to them. This is not to say that we parents should never listen to our kids. Obviously, any time they express their love for us…

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