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So how do we future proof our children?
So you need to raise someone who when the world changes, they adapt. And that may be easy to say, but it turns out, humans do not like to adapt. And that is a profoundly rarified skill.
We need to focus on building better craftsmen. That's my job as a parent. We have so many fabulous tools available.
But tools without a craftsman is pointless. And if you're a parent right now, particularly upper middle class, and you're thinking what I desperately need to do is build the right tools, study the right things, get great test scores, the right university, onto the right job, you're not building a craftsman. This is the mistake so many parents make trying to guess the life that their kid will lead at and then leading it for them in their heads.
You want to know why Google pays a million dollars as a bonus to sign a high-end data scientist nowadays? They do it because those people know how to explore the unknown. Build that explorer. Oh, that was supposed to be a short answer, wasn't it?
Yeah, it was. Yeah. Yeah.
So if you want to be an amazing parent, I'm not saying it's easy. But I am saying that there are some simple notions. Be the person you want your child to be and don't, don't, don't reward them for being good. Being good is its own good. It's not something that someone should get a Twinkie for, or a $1, or anything else.
When someone shows you something, my daughter draws pictures, it is amazing. She's actually a really good artist. And I never say that, oh my goodness, this is beautiful, your beautiful, nothing like that. I tell her what I actually see.
This is part of how she learns. I see what's different than what was there before. You know what the best reward for a kid is? Attention.
It's not praise. It's not stuff. You need them to be passionate about their craft, and that will never come from being worried about whether they're getting the right grades or worried about whether they're making you happy, or whether their friends will think less of them. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to master a new tool. But they will have spent their whole life learning how to master anything that comes their way.
