Inspiring Kids to Fail Faster
Helicopter and lawnmower parenting styles rob kids of necessary experiences early in life when the stakes are low. What if we embraced the opposite and encouraged kids to take more risks?
Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx (billion-dollar apparel company), credits her dad with instilling a risk-taking mindset at a young age. At the dinner table, he would ask Sara and her brother "What did you fail at today?" This was not meant to discourage or shame them. Rather, the dad intended to normalize that failure was an expected result of attempting new things.
In listening to a recent Tim Ferriss podcast episode with Chris Sacca (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED), this lesson was repeated again and again and again. Chris is a 49-year-old self-made billionaire investing in the next wave of world-changing companies. However, his observation is that there are scores of 20-year-old employees at his company who have no experience dealing with adversity. Their test scores are awesome, but they lack basic street smarts like knowing when someone is bullshitting them or how to negotiate out of a tense situation.
It got me thinking about my kids and how their upbringing is way different from the Gen X generation (the last of the "feral" kids). I was by no means a troublemaker, but I had some friends that liked to dabble in doing some crazy shit. We made napalm. We made 20-foot bonfires that the fire department detected. We broke into schools to play in the gyms. We raced our cars at 100 mph on the country roads. We made potato cannons and shot them at buildings. We installed rootkits on school computers to prank some kids
Did this get us into trouble? Rarely. But occasionally, you had to talk to a copy because you dropped off a duffle bag of beer to your underage younger brother, who needed a hookup for a small party, and they caught you thinking you were dealing drugs (boy, that was embarrassing, and the cops kept the beer, by the way).
Stupid as all this stuff was, I learned a lot. And today, I'm a boring, by-the-book adult. But because I've had the unfortunate experience of rushing a person near suicidal to MIT mental health, I have a much better calibration of what is a true crisis and what can be handled with some simple mediation. When others hit the panic button, I can stay more grounded and think clearly about a plan of attack.
I worry that my kids might be so determined to be good that they might miss pushing the boundaries a little bit… and lose out of life's rougher, necessary edges.
To that end, I'm trying to inspire some more risk-taking. Go try that big jump off that slide in the park. Let's go in the woods and play swords with sticks. Let's go run in the thunderstorms. Let's be willing to bust out a dance party in the middle of a coffee shop, and who cares what people say or think or if they laugh. Let's be a little weird, different, and risky.
I'm not going to say, "Hey, 10-year-old, you should try under-age drinking" because alcoholism runs in my family. But for things a bit more innocent, I'm going to challenge myself to challenge them. At the very least, I'm going to ask them at dinner… "So what did you fail at today?"