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!

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.

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.

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.