2023-04-18_How_to_Invest_In_Your_Children_at_a_Very_Young_Age_-_Build_The_Spirit_and_Philosophy_of

00:00:00.000 | ♪

00:00:05.440 | California's top casino and entertainment destination

00:00:08.440 | is now your California to Vegas connection.

00:00:11.940 | Play at Yamaha Resort and Casino at San Manuel

00:00:14.480 | to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences

00:00:17.680 | for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas.

00:00:21.120 | ♪

00:00:23.660 | Two destinations, one loyalty card.

00:00:26.160 | Visit yamaha.com/palms to discover more.

00:00:30.620 | The holidays start here at Ralph's

00:00:32.460 | with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new.

00:00:36.120 | Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey

00:00:38.660 | or spicy turkey tacos,

00:00:40.500 | your go-to shrimp cocktail,

00:00:42.300 | or your first Cajun risotto,

00:00:44.200 | Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients

00:00:46.640 | to embrace your traditions.

00:00:48.240 | Ralph's, fresh for everyone.

00:00:50.500 | Choose from a great selection of digital coupons

00:00:52.740 | and use them up to five times in one transaction.

00:00:55.380 | Check our app for details.

00:00:56.940 | Ralph's, fresh for everyone.

00:00:59.900 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance,

00:01:01.200 | a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:01:02.800 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need

00:01:04.740 | to live a rich and meaningful life now,

00:01:06.880 | while building a plan for financial freedom

00:01:08.380 | in 10 years or less.

00:01:09.840 | My name is Josh Ruschitz, I'm your host,

00:01:11.340 | and today we're going to continue our series

00:01:12.980 | on how to invest in your children at a very early age.

00:01:16.780 | And we're going to pivot around third base,

00:01:19.580 | fourth base, or second base.

00:01:22.080 | I'm not sure which base it is

00:01:23.120 | because I've only got three bases here.

00:01:24.960 | But we're going to pivot away from talking about the body

00:01:28.000 | and the mind, and now we're going to talk about the spirit.

00:01:31.260 | The spirit of our children.

00:01:34.140 | And I'm going to use this term spirit very loosely,

00:01:37.460 | sometimes talking about the spirit, the soul.

00:01:40.780 | Basically, I'm trying to turn away now from the physical.

00:01:44.420 | And there's nothing precise or scientific

00:01:46.400 | about my categorization scheme.

00:01:47.980 | It just is a way of organizing my thinking

00:01:50.060 | and my presentation that made sense to me

00:01:52.320 | to talk about the physical body of our children,

00:01:54.100 | talk about the mind of our children

00:01:56.160 | and developing the intellectual capacity.

00:01:58.340 | But now I want to go beyond the mind.

00:02:00.580 | And I want to talk about some of those areas

00:02:03.260 | of child development that will make a huge difference

00:02:07.900 | in the life outcomes of our children.

00:02:11.900 | And they're things that go far beyond

00:02:14.020 | anything that we've talked about thus far.

00:02:17.100 | If you think about the stories that you have heard

00:02:20.640 | of successful people, what you'll find is

00:02:25.620 | while there are many cases of successful people

00:02:29.300 | who have achieved great success by being granted

00:02:34.300 | and given all of the privileges and benefits

00:02:38.940 | that we've talked about thus far,

00:02:40.700 | there are people who are born with beautiful, healthy bodies.

00:02:44.860 | There are people who are born with incredibly powerful,

00:02:48.020 | strong, productive, intelligent minds.

00:02:51.340 | There are people who have the greatest educational system

00:02:54.900 | that surrounds them, et cetera.

00:02:56.820 | But there's a whole nother class of success stories

00:02:59.180 | that we can observe.

00:03:00.420 | And this class of success stories involves children

00:03:03.620 | and young people and old people too,

00:03:06.160 | all of whom have had no privileges in life.

00:03:09.340 | They were born handicapped.

00:03:11.740 | They were not particularly attractive to look at.

00:03:14.620 | Their brains were not particularly powerful

00:03:16.860 | or they had some significant personal obstacles,

00:03:20.500 | some personal handicaps, some speech impediments,

00:03:24.020 | some issue that they faced.

00:03:26.460 | And yet they were able to defy the odds

00:03:30.380 | and raise themselves from failure to success.

00:03:34.260 | And if you start thinking about and studying those people,

00:03:37.540 | you quickly recognize that they don't fit the mold

00:03:40.820 | of everything we've talked about thus far.

00:03:44.660 | And in some, I think there's a good argument we made

00:03:47.020 | that these are the people that we should spend

00:03:49.100 | a lot of our time focusing on.

00:03:51.660 | When you see somebody get unusual results,

00:03:55.820 | it's important to analyze that person

00:03:58.860 | in order to understand what does this person do very well?

00:04:02.940 | Let's use an example.

00:04:04.220 | Let's say that you see an incredibly beautiful woman

00:04:08.340 | and that beautiful woman is able to attract

00:04:11.740 | a movie star husband.

00:04:14.080 | Well, you look at her and say, well, it's obvious why

00:04:16.540 | she was able to attract this movie star husband.

00:04:19.700 | She's stunningly gorgeous.

00:04:21.940 | But it's more important for you,

00:04:24.420 | and she may have other good qualities as well, of course,

00:04:26.360 | but it's more important for analysis purposes

00:04:29.100 | to find the woman who is not a 10 out of 10

00:04:33.820 | in terms of her physical beauty,

00:04:36.580 | and yet was still able to attract a movie star husband.

00:04:40.900 | And ask yourself, what did she do?

00:04:43.340 | Who is she?

00:04:45.660 | What skills did she develop and exercise

00:04:49.540 | in order to attract this phenomenal husband?

00:04:53.420 | What was it?

00:04:54.900 | And maybe there's an element of randomness to attraction.

00:04:58.740 | I don't believe it much, but I'm much more interested

00:05:00.900 | to say like, to know, how did she treat him?

00:05:03.780 | How does she speak?

00:05:05.020 | What are her mannerisms?

00:05:07.160 | Because those are the things that must have had some impact

00:05:11.500 | and influence over her ability to attract him.

00:05:14.160 | You could use examples from business as well.

00:05:17.940 | You find a guy who was given,

00:05:22.300 | lent a million dollars or $10 million from his father,

00:05:25.180 | and he went out and was able to use that,

00:05:27.620 | and he went to a great business school,

00:05:29.220 | and he started a business,

00:05:30.140 | and he turned the $10 million into $100 million.

00:05:32.760 | Great, congratulations.

00:05:34.100 | What a phenomenal achievement.

00:05:36.860 | But it's more interesting to study the case of the guy

00:05:40.900 | who grew up in the hood, had no connections, had no money,

00:05:45.560 | and little by little made his way from $0 to $100 million

00:05:49.740 | and figure out what are the character qualities

00:05:52.180 | or what are the actions or behaviors that this guy did

00:05:55.940 | that allowed him to accomplish it?

00:05:57.380 | Because it's truly a far more extraordinary outcome

00:06:01.080 | than the guy who was given $10 million

00:06:03.380 | by his wealthy parents to go and start a business.

00:06:06.460 | And these are some of the things that I wanna touch on

00:06:09.060 | in this particular part of the series.

00:06:12.420 | These features of the spirit,

00:06:15.420 | these character qualities, these virtues

00:06:18.340 | that don't fit beautifully into the structure

00:06:23.100 | that we've built so far.

00:06:24.700 | I wanna begin with reading an excerpt

00:06:26.620 | from this book called,

00:06:29.100 | this is a book called "How Children Succeed,

00:06:31.020 | Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character."

00:06:34.500 | The author here is Paul Tuff.

00:06:36.820 | And in his introduction to the book,

00:06:38.580 | he describes exactly what I am talking about.

00:06:43.140 | In the beginning paragraphs,

00:06:44.300 | he describes his newborn son named Ellington.

00:06:47.940 | And he describes how he's thinking about

00:06:49.540 | what is gonna help my son Ellington to be successful,

00:06:52.540 | et cetera.

00:06:53.380 | And he shares this little bit of background to the story.

00:06:56.740 | Ellington would be growing up in a culture saturated

00:06:59.020 | with an idea you might call the cognitive hypothesis.

00:07:03.020 | The belief rarely expressed aloud,

00:07:05.460 | but commonly held nonetheless,

00:07:07.420 | that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills.

00:07:11.620 | The kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests,

00:07:14.820 | including the abilities to recognize letters and words,

00:07:17.420 | to calculate, to detect patterns.

00:07:19.860 | And that the best way to develop these skills

00:07:21.780 | is to practice them as much as possible,

00:07:23.980 | beginning as early as possible.

00:07:26.100 | The cognitive hypothesis has become so universally accepted

00:07:29.860 | that it is easy to forget

00:07:31.740 | that it is actually a relatively new invention.

00:07:34.500 | You can trace its contemporary rise in fact to 1994,

00:07:38.220 | when the Carnegie Corporation published "Starting Points,"

00:07:41.140 | meeting the needs of our youngest children.

00:07:43.260 | A report that sounded an alarm

00:07:44.820 | about the cognitive development of our nation's children.

00:07:47.740 | The problem, according to the report,

00:07:49.500 | was that children were no longer receiving

00:07:51.340 | enough cognitive stimulation

00:07:53.340 | in the first three years of life.

00:07:55.140 | In part, because of the increasing number

00:07:56.820 | of single parent families and working mothers,

00:07:58.980 | and so they were arriving in kindergarten unready to learn.

00:08:02.700 | The report launched an entire industry of brain building

00:08:06.100 | zero to three products for worried parents.

00:08:08.780 | Billions of dollars worth of books and activity gyms

00:08:11.540 | and baby Einstein videos and DVDs were sold.

00:08:14.780 | The Carnegie findings and the studies

00:08:16.640 | that followed in their wake

00:08:17.700 | had a powerful effect on public policy too.

00:08:20.460 | As legislators and philanthropists concluded

00:08:22.940 | that disadvantaged children were falling behind early on

00:08:26.300 | because of insufficient cognitive training.

00:08:29.300 | Psychologists and sociologists produced evidence

00:08:32.120 | linking the academic underperformance of poor children

00:08:35.000 | to a lack of verbal and mathematical stimulation

00:08:38.700 | at home and at school.

00:08:40.480 | One of the most famous of these studies,

00:08:42.080 | which I wrote about in my first book, "Whatever It Takes,"

00:08:45.160 | was conducted by Betty Hart and Todd Risley,

00:08:47.640 | two child psychologists who, beginning in the 1980s,

00:08:51.080 | intensively studied a group of 42 children

00:08:53.260 | from professional, working class,

00:08:55.320 | and welfare families in Kansas City.

00:08:57.920 | Hart and Risley found that the crucial difference

00:09:00.080 | in the children's upbringings

00:09:01.380 | and the reason for the divergence in their later outcomes

00:09:04.420 | boiled down to one thing,

00:09:06.200 | the number of words that the children heard

00:09:08.160 | from their parents early in life.

00:09:10.200 | By age three, Hart and Risley determined,

00:09:12.780 | the children raised by professional parents

00:09:14.680 | had heard 30 million words spoken to them.

00:09:17.700 | The children with parents on welfare

00:09:19.240 | had heard just 10 million.

00:09:21.040 | That shortfall they concluded

00:09:22.560 | was at the root of the poorer kids' later failures

00:09:25.120 | in school and in life.

00:09:27.680 | There is something undeniably compelling

00:09:29.720 | about the cognitive hypothesis.

00:09:31.820 | The world it describes is so neat, so reassuringly linear,

00:09:36.820 | such a clear case of inputs here leading to outputs there.

00:09:41.280 | Fewer books in the home means less reading ability.

00:09:44.160 | Fewer words spoken by parents

00:09:45.780 | means a smaller vocabulary for their kids.

00:09:48.180 | More math worksheets at junior come on

00:09:50.600 | means better math scores.

00:09:52.600 | The correlations at times seemed almost comically exact.

00:09:57.560 | Hart and Risley calculated that a child

00:09:59.360 | who grew up on welfare would need precisely

00:10:01.640 | 41 hours of language intensive intervention each week

00:10:05.200 | in order to close the vocabulary gap

00:10:07.200 | with a working class child.

00:10:09.260 | But in the past decade,

00:10:10.480 | and especially in the past few years,

00:10:12.640 | a disparate congregation of economists, educators,

00:10:15.800 | psychologists, and neuroscientists

00:10:18.300 | have begun to produce evidence that calls into question

00:10:20.680 | many of the assumptions behind the cognitive hypothesis.

00:10:24.060 | What matters most in a child's development, they say,

00:10:26.560 | is not how much information we can stuff into her brain

00:10:29.400 | in the first few years.

00:10:31.000 | What matters instead is whether we are able to help her

00:10:33.380 | develop a very different set of qualities,

00:10:36.160 | a list that includes persistence, self-control,

00:10:40.280 | curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence.

00:10:45.280 | Economists refer to these as non-cognitive skills.

00:10:50.960 | Psychologists call them personality traits,

00:10:53.840 | and the rest of us sometimes think of them as character.

00:10:58.120 | For certain skills,

00:10:59.220 | the stark calculus behind the cognitive hypothesis

00:11:02.820 | that what matters in developing a skill

00:11:04.640 | is starting earlier and practicing more is entirely valid.

00:11:08.680 | If you want to perfect your foul shot,

00:11:11.060 | shooting 200 free throws every afternoon

00:11:13.500 | is indeed going to be more helpful

00:11:15.480 | than shooting 20 free throws every afternoon.

00:11:18.400 | If you're in fourth grade,

00:11:19.600 | reading 40 books over the summer

00:11:21.560 | is going to improve your reading ability

00:11:23.760 | more than reading four books.

00:11:25.640 | Some skills really are pretty mechanical,

00:11:28.720 | but when it comes to developing the more subtle elements

00:11:31.140 | of the human personality, things aren't so simple.

00:11:34.720 | We can't get better at overcoming disappointment

00:11:37.240 | just by working harder at it for more hours,

00:11:40.000 | and children don't lag behind in curiosity

00:11:42.660 | simply because they didn't start doing curiosity drills

00:11:45.320 | at an early enough age.

00:11:47.080 | The pathways through which we acquire and lose these skills

00:11:50.240 | are certainly not random.

00:11:51.920 | Psychologists and neuroscientists have learned a lot

00:11:54.900 | in the past few decades about where these skills come from

00:11:57.600 | and how they are developed,

00:11:59.360 | but they are complex, unfamiliar,

00:12:01.880 | and often quite mysterious.

00:12:04.720 | A little bit later in the introduction,

00:12:06.600 | after being introduced to a man named Heckman,

00:12:09.360 | we are given an introduction

00:12:10.840 | to something called the PERI project.

00:12:13.540 | What the GED study didn't give Heckman

00:12:15.400 | was any indication of whether it was possible

00:12:17.240 | to help children develop those so-called soft skills.

00:12:21.040 | His search for an answer to that question

00:12:22.680 | led him, almost a decade ago, to Ypsilanti, Michigan,

00:12:26.200 | an old industrial town west of Detroit.

00:12:29.000 | In the mid-1960s, in the early days of the war on poverty,

00:12:32.840 | a group of child psychologists and education researchers

00:12:36.280 | undertook an experiment there,

00:12:38.080 | recruiting low-income, low-IQ parents

00:12:41.080 | from the town's black neighborhoods

00:12:43.000 | to sign up their three- and four-year-old kids

00:12:45.280 | for the PERI preschool.

00:12:47.080 | The recruited children were divided randomly

00:12:49.080 | into a treatment group and a control group.

00:12:52.140 | Children in the treatment group were admitted to PERI,

00:12:54.800 | a high-quality, two-year preschool program,

00:12:57.400 | and kids in the control group

00:12:58.920 | were left to fend for themselves.

00:13:00.920 | And then the children were tracked,

00:13:02.560 | not just for a year or two, but for decades,

00:13:05.440 | in an ongoing study that is intended to follow them

00:13:07.800 | for the rest of their lives.

00:13:09.640 | The subjects are now in their 40s,

00:13:11.180 | which means that researchers have been able

00:13:12.840 | to trace the effects of the PERI intervention

00:13:15.400 | well into adulthood.

00:13:17.640 | The PERI preschool project is famous

00:13:19.440 | in social science circles,

00:13:20.880 | and Heckman had encountered it, glancingly,

00:13:23.440 | several times before in his career.

00:13:26.040 | As a case for early childhood intervention,

00:13:28.840 | the experiment had always been considered

00:13:30.680 | something of a failure.

00:13:32.360 | The treatment children did do significantly better

00:13:36.860 | on cognitive tests while attending the preschool,

00:13:39.880 | and for a year or two afterward,

00:13:41.520 | but the gains did not last.

00:13:43.560 | And by the time the treatment children

00:13:45.120 | were in the third grade,

00:13:46.040 | their IQ scores were no better than the control groups.

00:13:49.340 | But when Heckman and other researchers

00:13:51.360 | looked at the long-term results of PERI,

00:13:53.540 | the data appeared more promising.

00:13:56.040 | It was true that the PERI kids

00:13:58.160 | hadn't experienced lasting IQ benefits,

00:14:01.560 | but something important had happened to them in preschool,

00:14:04.320 | and whatever it was,

00:14:05.600 | the positive effects resonated for decades.

00:14:08.840 | Compared to the control group,

00:14:10.240 | the PERI students were more likely

00:14:11.740 | to graduate from high school,

00:14:13.280 | more likely to be employed at age 27,

00:14:15.960 | more likely to be earning more than $25,000 a year at age 40,

00:14:20.120 | less likely ever to have been arrested,

00:14:22.200 | and less likely to have spent time on welfare.

00:14:25.600 | Heckman began to rummage more deeply into the PERI study,

00:14:28.400 | and he learned that in the 1960s and 1970s,

00:14:31.600 | researchers had collected some data on the students

00:14:34.120 | that had never been analyzed,

00:14:35.860 | reports from teachers in elementary school

00:14:37.920 | rating both the treatment and the control children

00:14:40.440 | on personal behavior and social development.

00:14:44.180 | The first term tracked how often each student swore,

00:14:48.040 | lied, stole, or was absent or late.

00:14:51.880 | The second one rated each student's level of curiosity

00:14:54.600 | as well as his or her relationships

00:14:57.160 | with classmates and teachers.

00:14:59.320 | Heckman labeled these non-cognitive skills

00:15:02.160 | because they were entirely distinct from IQ.

00:15:05.480 | And after three years of careful analysis,

00:15:07.920 | Heckman and his researchers were able to ascertain

00:15:11.200 | that those non-cognitive factors,

00:15:13.480 | such as curiosity, self-control, and social fluidity,

00:15:17.480 | were responsible for as much as two thirds

00:15:19.640 | of the total benefit that PERI gave its students.

00:15:22.860 | The PERI preschool project, in other words,

00:15:25.420 | worked entirely differently than everyone had believed.

00:15:29.100 | The good-hearted educators who set it up in the '60s

00:15:31.720 | thought that they were creating a program

00:15:34.000 | to raise the intelligence of low-income children.

00:15:36.860 | They, like everyone else, believed that was the way

00:15:39.560 | to help poor kids get ahead in America.

00:15:42.560 | Surprise number one was that they created a program

00:15:44.920 | that didn't do much in the long term for IQ,

00:15:47.400 | but did improve behavior and social skills.

00:15:50.920 | Surprise number two was that it helped anyway.

00:15:53.780 | For the kids in Ypsilanti, those skills

00:15:56.120 | and the underlying traits they reflected

00:15:58.480 | turned out to be very valuable indeed.

00:16:01.760 | Now, if you're interested in reading the book,

00:16:04.200 | the book, again, is called "How Children Succeed,

00:16:06.200 | "Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character."

00:16:10.080 | And the author, again, is Paul Tuff.

00:16:13.600 | This is one of probably two of the most well-known books

00:16:17.360 | in this space.

00:16:18.200 | The other really well-known book is a book called

00:16:19.760 | "Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance"

00:16:22.880 | by Angela Duckworth, which talks a lot about

00:16:26.880 | the importance of grit,

00:16:27.720 | which will be my first thing that I talk about.

00:16:29.840 | Now, I've struggled to figure out the scope

00:16:32.760 | of what I want to share with you here on the podcast,

00:16:35.800 | because certainly if somebody were offering today

00:16:39.400 | a five-day seminar on how to develop these soft skills

00:16:44.260 | in children, I would be signing up.

00:16:46.600 | These two books that I've mentioned combined

00:16:48.200 | are probably what, 800 pages, I would say.

00:16:50.520 | And I am not an expert in this space.

00:16:53.200 | And what's more challenging is I'm humbled

00:16:56.560 | by my own personal results in these areas.

00:17:01.200 | I'm generally satisfied with my work as a parent,

00:17:04.360 | with the development of my children's bodies,

00:17:06.320 | with the development of my children's minds,

00:17:08.400 | and I'm dissatisfied with my work as a parent

00:17:12.320 | in the developing of my children's spirits

00:17:14.280 | on some of these dimensions.

00:17:16.060 | I'm working hard at it, but I'm quite humbled

00:17:18.600 | at a lot of my failures in this area.

00:17:22.240 | And I desire very much to be the student,

00:17:25.320 | not to be the teacher.

00:17:26.900 | So in that spirit, I'm going to present to you some ideas

00:17:30.280 | that I think are the correct direction to be looking,

00:17:33.840 | but I don't have as many good answers

00:17:36.880 | in this area of discussion as I have

00:17:40.840 | in some of the other areas that we've discussed.

00:17:44.020 | I'm very much learning, and I hope I can come back

00:17:46.360 | in a year or two years or three years or 10 years

00:17:49.200 | and have a lot more insight into some of the specific things

00:17:52.360 | that are important.

00:17:54.680 | And so with that in mind and in that spirit,

00:17:57.380 | I wanna share with you some things

00:17:58.560 | that I think really matter.

00:18:00.320 | And just for the sake of organizing my own thinking,

00:18:04.120 | I think about this in terms of installing the skills

00:18:09.120 | of success or installing the mindset of success,

00:18:13.600 | stability and significance.

00:18:16.480 | And I wanna give a metaphor for how I consider this.

00:18:20.180 | I think of this particular area of our work as parents

00:18:23.700 | as simply installing a high quality operating system

00:18:28.360 | into the minds of our children.

00:18:31.240 | That's how I think of it.

00:18:33.040 | And obviously it's the computer analogy.

00:18:35.800 | By way of the computer analogy,

00:18:37.840 | we have the physical infrastructure of a computer

00:18:41.220 | that is going to determine its ultimate capability.

00:18:45.020 | And then we install the operating system.

00:18:47.540 | And body, what we talked about in terms of body

00:18:50.300 | was the physical infrastructure of our children

00:18:53.100 | on a very physical level.

00:18:55.020 | When we started to talk about the mind,

00:18:56.820 | that is a physical development discussion,

00:18:59.420 | but then we're moving over into enhancing the ability

00:19:02.840 | to run more powerful software, et cetera.

00:19:05.780 | But in this area where we're talking about the spirit,

00:19:08.380 | we're very much talking about software.

00:19:10.740 | We're talking about the way that our children

00:19:14.020 | interpret life and the things that happen to them.

00:19:17.460 | And having been a student of this,

00:19:19.300 | from my own psychology for a long time,

00:19:22.020 | I consider this to be one of the most fruitful areas

00:19:25.180 | of discussion for us as adults,

00:19:28.420 | because the software operating system that we have

00:19:33.140 | is something that was usually given to us.

00:19:35.820 | And yet it's something that we can systematically

00:19:37.900 | pull apart, we can choose the things that are useful to us,

00:19:42.540 | and we can set aside the things that are not.

00:19:44.860 | None of us are victims of our childhood,

00:19:47.580 | unless we choose to continue to be victims of our childhood.

00:19:50.480 | We get to take the experiences that we have had

00:19:55.180 | and interpret them in a very different light.

00:19:57.840 | I'd like to persuade you of this point with a story

00:20:00.860 | and just a quick introduction.

00:20:02.380 | This comes from, to me, the most powerful story

00:20:05.540 | that is contained in the book called

00:20:07.580 | "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,

00:20:09.660 | "Powerful Lessons in Personal Change."

00:20:11.580 | It's a classic personal development book

00:20:14.100 | by Stephen R. Covey.

00:20:16.740 | And in this section, he talks about

00:20:18.120 | the power of a paradigm shift.

00:20:20.860 | Perhaps the most important insight to be gained

00:20:22.740 | from the perception demonstration

00:20:24.220 | is in the area of paradigm shifting,

00:20:27.240 | what we might call the aha experience,

00:20:29.860 | when someone finally sees the composite picture

00:20:32.940 | in another way.

00:20:34.340 | The more bound a person is by the initial perception,

00:20:37.360 | the more powerful the aha experience is.

00:20:40.900 | It's as though a light were suddenly turned on inside.

00:20:44.180 | The term paradigm shift was introduced by Thomas Kuhn

00:20:47.500 | in his highly influential landmark book,

00:20:50.540 | "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."

00:20:53.020 | Kuhn shows how almost every significant breakthrough

00:20:55.780 | in the field of scientific endeavor

00:20:57.760 | is first a break with tradition,

00:21:00.140 | with old ways of thinking, with old paradigms.

00:21:03.820 | For Ptolemy, the great Egyptian astronomer,

00:21:06.100 | the earth was the center of the universe,

00:21:08.380 | but Copernicus created a paradigm shift

00:21:10.900 | and a great deal of resistance and persecution as well

00:21:13.460 | by placing the sun at the center.

00:21:15.700 | Suddenly, everything took on a different interpretation.

00:21:19.820 | The Newtonian model of physics was a clockwork paradigm

00:21:23.700 | and is still the basis of modern engineering,

00:21:26.380 | but it was partial, incomplete.

00:21:28.740 | The scientific world was revolutionized

00:21:30.960 | by the Einsteinian paradigm,

00:21:33.100 | the relativity paradigm,

00:21:34.460 | which had much higher predictive and explanatory value.

00:21:38.180 | Until the germ theory was developed,

00:21:40.180 | a high percentage of women and children died

00:21:42.060 | during childbirth and no one could understand why.

00:21:45.320 | In military skirmishes,

00:21:46.560 | more men were dying from small wounds and diseases

00:21:49.820 | than from the major traumas on the front lines.

00:21:52.620 | But as soon as germ theory was developed,

00:21:54.500 | a whole new paradigm,

00:21:55.860 | a better improved way of understanding what was happening,

00:21:59.100 | made dramatic, significant medical improvement possible.

00:22:03.140 | The United States today is the fruit of a paradigm shift.

00:22:06.460 | The traditional concept of government for centuries

00:22:08.500 | had been a monarchy, the divine right of kings.

00:22:11.060 | Then a different paradigm was developed,

00:22:14.340 | government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

00:22:18.340 | And a constitutional democracy was born,

00:22:20.780 | unleashing tremendous human energy and ingenuity

00:22:23.820 | and creating a standard of living, of freedom and liberty,

00:22:27.020 | of influence and hope unequaled in the history of the world.

00:22:30.680 | Not all paradigm shifts are in positive directions.

00:22:34.500 | As we have observed,

00:22:35.540 | the shift from the character ethic to the personality ethic

00:22:39.580 | has drawn us away from the very roots

00:22:41.620 | that nourish true success and happiness.

00:22:44.440 | But whether they shift us in positive or negative directions,

00:22:48.160 | whether they are instantaneous or developmental,

00:22:51.140 | paradigm shifts move us

00:22:53.020 | from one way of seeing the world to another.

00:22:55.820 | And those shifts create powerful change.

00:22:59.300 | Our paradigms, correct or incorrect,

00:23:02.340 | are the sources of our attitudes and behaviors

00:23:05.620 | and ultimately our relationships with others.

00:23:08.940 | I remember a mini paradigm shift

00:23:11.020 | that I experienced one Sunday morning

00:23:12.920 | on a subway in New York.

00:23:14.780 | People were sitting quietly, some reading newspapers,

00:23:17.900 | some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed.

00:23:21.940 | It was a calm, peaceful scene.

00:23:24.740 | Then suddenly a man and his children entered the subway car.

00:23:28.180 | The children were so loud and rambunctious

00:23:30.180 | that instantly the whole climate changed.

00:23:32.500 | The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes,

00:23:35.580 | apparently oblivious to the situation.

00:23:38.220 | The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things,

00:23:41.180 | even grabbing people's papers.

00:23:42.620 | It was very disturbing.

00:23:44.300 | And yet the man sitting next to me did nothing.

00:23:48.100 | It was difficult not to feel irritated.

00:23:50.660 | I could not believe that he could be so insensitive

00:23:53.020 | as to let his children run wild like that

00:23:55.100 | and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all.

00:23:58.340 | It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway

00:24:00.260 | felt irritated too.

00:24:01.900 | So finally, with what I felt was unusual patience

00:24:05.300 | and restraint, I turned to him and said,

00:24:07.780 | "Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people.

00:24:10.860 | "I wonder if you couldn't control them a little more?"

00:24:14.340 | The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness

00:24:17.960 | of the situation for the first time and said softly,

00:24:21.760 | "Oh, you're right.

00:24:23.860 | "I guess I should do something about it.

00:24:26.940 | "We just came from the hospital where their mother died

00:24:29.080 | "about an hour ago.

00:24:30.700 | "I don't know what to think,

00:24:32.240 | "and I guess they don't know how to handle it either."

00:24:35.220 | Can you imagine what I felt at that moment?

00:24:40.180 | My paradigm shifted.

00:24:42.460 | Suddenly I saw things differently.

00:24:44.900 | And because I saw differently, I thought differently.

00:24:48.640 | I felt differently.

00:24:50.780 | I behaved differently.

00:24:53.580 | My irritation vanished.

00:24:56.260 | I didn't have to worry about controlling my attitude

00:24:58.500 | or my behavior.

00:24:59.740 | My heart was filled with the man's pain.

00:25:02.080 | Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely.

00:25:05.380 | "Your wife just died?

00:25:06.820 | "I'm so sorry.

00:25:08.020 | "Can you tell me about it?

00:25:09.040 | "What can I do to help?"

00:25:10.660 | Everything changed in an instant.

00:25:13.260 | Now Covey goes on and continues that theme.

00:25:17.600 | But for me, that story is one that is burned

00:25:20.580 | in my memory as the most powerful example

00:25:24.860 | of a relatively instant paradigm shift.

00:25:28.540 | And I hope that,

00:25:29.780 | especially if it's the first time

00:25:30.860 | you've been exposed to it,

00:25:31.820 | I hope it does the same for you.

00:25:33.600 | We realize in an instant

00:25:35.540 | that though the outward circumstances

00:25:38.100 | are completely unchanged,

00:25:39.680 | our attitude about those circumstances is different.

00:25:44.380 | And this is extraordinarily powerful for us as adults

00:25:48.180 | is to practice imposing on ourselves

00:25:52.340 | ways of thinking that are helpful,

00:25:55.300 | that are useful to us

00:25:57.060 | in accomplishing our long-term goals.

00:25:59.860 | Now, I am imperfect at this.

00:26:02.220 | I'd like to be better.

00:26:03.460 | I'm sure in 10 years I will be much better.

00:26:05.860 | But one of the ways I do it

00:26:07.060 | is to focus on just little sayings.

00:26:10.420 | You've heard me say on the podcast,

00:26:11.700 | sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.

00:26:14.020 | Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn.

00:26:16.000 | That's a powerful way to affect your thinking,

00:26:19.020 | to recognize that I win and I learn.

00:26:21.780 | Losses are simply learning.

00:26:23.380 | And here we talk about the importance of failure

00:26:25.860 | in a bit as we get through

00:26:28.420 | some of what I have planned to share with you.

00:26:30.540 | And in your life,

00:26:32.060 | there are so many things you can do.

00:26:33.500 | I'm amazed at,

00:26:34.980 | a good example would be traffic incidents.

00:26:38.660 | Perhaps all of us have,

00:26:40.140 | I'm sure all of us,

00:26:41.300 | if someone has done something in traffic

00:26:43.100 | or treated us in a way that was rude

00:26:44.660 | and just made us frustrated

00:26:46.280 | and we instantly felt that surge of emotion

00:26:48.980 | pour over us and we wanted to react and lash out.

00:26:52.660 | And yet how stupid would that be

00:26:56.780 | to surge, to lash out,

00:26:59.120 | to engage in some road rage incident

00:27:01.900 | and find ourselves imprisoned

00:27:03.600 | or paying a fine or causing an accident

00:27:05.540 | or causing harm to another human in some way

00:27:07.800 | because of an example.

00:27:09.700 | And so one of the things I try to do

00:27:11.680 | is always assume the very best.

00:27:14.680 | All of us have inadvertently done something in traffic

00:27:18.000 | that we didn't mean to.

00:27:18.840 | Cut someone else off,

00:27:20.600 | disobeyed a rule, et cetera.

00:27:22.600 | And so I have worked to train myself

00:27:25.480 | to do two things.

00:27:27.060 | Number one,

00:27:28.140 | to always assume that the other person

00:27:30.560 | just inadvertently made a mistake.

00:27:32.800 | Oh, they didn't see me.

00:27:33.860 | That's why they cut me off.

00:27:34.900 | Or the guy's in a hurry.

00:27:37.100 | He has something really important.

00:27:39.120 | And in the same way that the story on the subway,

00:27:41.200 | I've just said,

00:27:42.040 | if you just to say that the reason that guy

00:27:43.680 | is driving like a maniac

00:27:45.080 | is not because that's some kid

00:27:46.760 | who just drives like a maniac,

00:27:48.040 | but rather there's a guy who has a dying wife in the car

00:27:51.160 | and he's trying to get her to the hospital

00:27:52.400 | or a birthing wife or something like that,

00:27:54.440 | he's gotta go.

00:27:55.520 | Then it changes your attitude.

00:28:00.360 | And it doesn't matter whether it's true.

00:28:02.160 | It could be true or it could not be true.

00:28:03.960 | What matters is that it changes your way of thinking.

00:28:06.440 | And then simultaneous with that,

00:28:08.500 | I have a big commitment to the basic idea of,

00:28:12.020 | am I gonna remember this in 10 years or 20 years?

00:28:14.860 | Or is this gonna matter in 10 years or 20 years?

00:28:17.760 | I ask myself,

00:28:18.600 | is this experience that I'm going through,

00:28:19.900 | is it gonna matter in 20 years?

00:28:22.060 | Am I gonna be upset about this in 20 years?

00:28:24.620 | If I'm not gonna be upset about this in 20 years,

00:28:26.340 | then why don't I just skip that?

00:28:27.380 | Skip there, right?

00:28:28.220 | Let me go right to 20 years from now and just assume that.

00:28:31.060 | I'm not gonna remember

00:28:31.900 | that someone cut me off 20 years from now.

00:28:33.980 | I'm not gonna be upset about the fact

00:28:36.860 | that my tent is full of water

00:28:38.380 | and it's a miserable night.

00:28:39.740 | I'm gonna laugh about it.

00:28:40.740 | So why not just go ahead and skip forward and laugh now?

00:28:43.460 | 'Cause as human beings, we can control our minds.

00:28:45.380 | We can control our thoughts.

00:28:46.700 | It's one of the very few things in the world

00:28:48.460 | that we have control over.

00:28:50.180 | We can't control our external world.

00:28:52.460 | We can't control the people around us.

00:28:54.180 | We can't control the circumstances in which we are.

00:28:56.860 | But we can control our minds.

00:28:59.180 | We can control the thoughts that we choose to think.

00:29:02.820 | And so this is fundamentally useful.

00:29:05.460 | It's a useful way of thinking.

00:29:07.500 | And we should be dedicated to training ourselves

00:29:10.340 | to adopt these useful ways of thinking.

00:29:13.060 | One more example.

00:29:15.340 | In interpersonal relationships,

00:29:18.820 | I believe it's always important

00:29:21.260 | to believe the best about other people.

00:29:24.260 | I was taught this myself as a child,

00:29:26.580 | both explicitly in religious instruction,

00:29:29.540 | as well as by example, by the example of my parents.

00:29:33.140 | And in Christianity, this comes from 1 Corinthians 13,

00:29:36.780 | the famous chapter on love.

00:29:39.420 | But it says that love believes all things,

00:29:42.220 | looking for the best in each one.

00:29:44.420 | That this is what love does.

00:29:46.420 | And so if we're going to love another man,

00:29:49.580 | that means that I need to believe him.

00:29:52.060 | I need to believe the best.

00:29:53.660 | I need to always order things.

00:29:56.980 | Love believes all things.

00:29:58.140 | It hopes all things.

00:29:59.220 | It endures all things.

00:30:00.420 | And so we believe the best about each one,

00:30:02.940 | regardless of what comes.

00:30:04.580 | We bear with one another.

00:30:05.860 | We hope all things, always holding out hope

00:30:08.340 | that for the very best possible,

00:30:09.740 | we endure all things without weakening.

00:30:12.140 | That's what it means to love another person.

00:30:14.420 | And so when we apply this in human relationships,

00:30:17.220 | the practical application is,

00:30:19.180 | you always believe the very best version

00:30:23.180 | of the circumstances that are in front of you.

00:30:25.820 | If somebody comes to you and you're not sure

00:30:29.380 | if they're telling you the truth or if they're lying,

00:30:32.180 | believe the best.

00:30:33.060 | Believe them.

00:30:33.900 | Believe they're telling you the truth.

00:30:35.380 | If somebody comes to you and says he's sincere,

00:30:38.300 | then believe that he's sincere.

00:30:39.860 | Don't automatically assume he's insincere

00:30:41.660 | and cast him aside.

00:30:42.780 | Believe the very best.

00:30:44.780 | This is not to be naive.

00:30:47.180 | If there is evidence that somebody is lying,

00:30:50.380 | then you believe the very best about the evidence.

00:30:52.980 | If there's evidence that someone's lying,

00:30:54.380 | you believe they're lying,

00:30:55.580 | but you believe that they may not have meant to lie.

00:30:58.380 | They may not have intended to lie.

00:31:00.300 | They may have been blackmailed into lying.

00:31:02.060 | You look for the very best explanation.

00:31:04.780 | And this is a magical transformative belief.

00:31:07.380 | It's a magical transformative practice

00:31:09.660 | because it takes your interpersonal relationships.

00:31:12.500 | And instead of you sitting back and judging other people

00:31:15.420 | and talking about how they're wrong,

00:31:16.740 | you're always putting them in the best possible light.

00:31:19.140 | And this helps people to feel good.

00:31:21.340 | And what happens is when people feel good about themselves,

00:31:25.740 | or when people feel good about you

00:31:27.220 | and they feel good about themselves,

00:31:28.580 | it leads to more positive human relationships.

00:31:31.580 | And so these software programs,

00:31:35.660 | or these lines of code that we put into our mind

00:31:38.980 | have a fundamentally powerful impact

00:31:42.100 | on our lives as adults.

00:31:45.100 | And these are all components of the lessons

00:31:48.860 | that we need to teach our children,

00:31:51.140 | consistently teach our children.

00:31:53.940 | And this principle is something that you can take

00:31:57.220 | and you can apply in many, many ways.

00:32:02.220 | So let me just cover some big picture discussions.

00:32:06.580 | As I said, I feel willfully inadequate

00:32:08.700 | in presenting these ideas to you

00:32:10.100 | because this is deserving of a week long seminar

00:32:13.260 | and I'm not yet capable of delivering that seminar.

00:32:15.900 | So let me just share some high level ideas,

00:32:18.460 | starting with success.

00:32:20.020 | - Now for a limited time

00:32:21.100 | at Del Amo Motorsports of Orange County,

00:32:23.220 | get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months

00:32:26.900 | on select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3.

00:32:30.100 | Considering the Mavericks taking home trophies everywhere

00:32:32.740 | from King of the Hammers to Uncle Ned's Backcountry Rally,

00:32:36.140 | you're not going to find a better deal

00:32:38.060 | on front row seats to a championship winner.

00:32:40.900 | Don't lose out on your chance to get a Maverick X3.

00:32:43.820 | Visit Del Amo Motorsports of Orange County

00:32:45.980 | in Santa Ana and get yours.

00:32:47.860 | Offer in soon, see dealer for details.

00:32:50.780 | - So we're trying to instill

00:32:52.060 | a high quality operating system of success.

00:32:55.900 | Here, the world of things are very, very important,

00:33:00.180 | but here are some of the ones that are most important to me.

00:33:03.180 | The first has to do with persistence or grit.

00:33:08.060 | This is again, the title of Angela Duckworth's book, "Grit."

00:33:11.460 | And if I had to summarize her findings

00:33:14.140 | is basically people who have grit overcome no matter what.

00:33:18.220 | And I've observed this so many times.

00:33:20.300 | If you think about the people who win in the longterm,

00:33:22.780 | it's people who have grit.

00:33:24.180 | They just kind of ignore what happens

00:33:26.260 | and they keep on going.

00:33:27.340 | And this persistence, this grit

00:33:30.700 | that represents somebody's determination to continue

00:33:35.020 | no matter the odds, their passion, their motivation

00:33:37.500 | to continue pressing through,

00:33:39.700 | this separates people in the fullness of time

00:33:41.980 | from everyone else.

00:33:43.700 | And it basically is a belief that what I'm doing matters

00:33:48.700 | and if I just keep going, it'll work.

00:33:52.740 | This is something that I personally believe

00:33:55.500 | and it's something that I use for myself

00:33:57.540 | and I hope to install into my children.

00:34:00.620 | My belief is this, I'm not the smartest guy out there.

00:34:04.620 | I'm not the most capable guy out there.

00:34:07.420 | I have all kinds of weaknesses, just like everybody else.

00:34:11.660 | I do believe everyone has these weaknesses,

00:34:13.940 | but as long as I don't quit, my success is inevitable.

00:34:19.580 | As long as I don't quit, my success is inevitable

00:34:23.220 | because the only thing that can keep me

00:34:26.820 | from achieving success in an area

00:34:29.020 | that I have applied myself to is if I quit.

00:34:33.020 | And this forms the foundation of my basic operating system

00:34:37.220 | for goal achievement.

00:34:38.860 | I have failed on so many goals that I have set for myself.

00:34:43.620 | I have virtually never hit a deadline

00:34:46.580 | or a target date of accomplishment.

00:34:48.900 | I virtually never do that.

00:34:50.660 | My success is in anything.

00:34:53.740 | I've almost never bat 100%, meaning I do this every day.

00:34:58.460 | This is something that I do every day.

00:34:59.780 | I virtually never do that,

00:35:01.660 | but I pride myself on I never quit.

00:35:04.780 | And so I might set out on a plan and say,

00:35:07.380 | you know, I don't know, right now I'm learning Greek.

00:35:09.580 | So I might say, you know what,

00:35:10.620 | my goal is in one year I'm gonna learn Greek

00:35:12.700 | and I'm gonna be able to read

00:35:13.580 | the Koine Greek New Testament with some degree of fluidity.

00:35:18.220 | I might achieve it or I might not, I don't know.

00:35:20.580 | We're four months into the project,

00:35:22.020 | I'm behind schedule as usual.

00:35:24.540 | But I know that as long as I don't quit,

00:35:28.540 | I'll achieve it eventually.

00:35:29.740 | And it doesn't matter whether it takes me one year

00:35:32.020 | or 10 years or 60 years.

00:35:34.820 | I might be an old man sitting in the back

00:35:37.180 | on my back porch in my rocking chair

00:35:39.220 | and I'll be steadily working my way

00:35:41.420 | through the accomplishment of this goal.

00:35:43.620 | Because as long as I don't quit,

00:35:46.220 | I'm guaranteed to be successful, guaranteed.

00:35:50.140 | Doesn't matter whether it takes me twice as long

00:35:52.300 | as everyone else or half the time as everyone else,

00:35:54.700 | the important thing is that I don't quit.

00:35:57.220 | I consider this an incredibly powerful operating system,

00:36:01.580 | an incredibly powerful thing.

00:36:03.500 | It motivates me, it inspires me,

00:36:05.620 | because what it does is simply takes away from me

00:36:09.340 | every excuse as to why I can't do something.

00:36:15.300 | And it keeps me in a position of power.

00:36:18.180 | It keeps me in the position to say, I gotta do it.

00:36:20.900 | And by the way, it doesn't even matter if I quit.

00:36:24.740 | I've quit so many things, tons of times.

00:36:27.780 | All that matters is if I decide I wanna do it again,

00:36:30.180 | I unquit.

00:36:31.500 | Quitting is something you can do in an instant.

00:36:33.780 | And it doesn't matter whether you've quit

00:36:35.940 | and unquit a hundred times before,

00:36:37.780 | what matters is that you quit again.

00:36:39.580 | Or sorry, whatever, if we're talking about giving up

00:36:41.820 | negative things or positive things,

00:36:43.060 | the point is that it's just a decision.

00:36:46.340 | You don't have to continue, you just decide and stop.

00:36:49.580 | There's no reason to ascribe more meaning to it

00:36:52.260 | than anything else.

00:36:53.420 | You wouldn't tell, you don't tell a guy who's,

00:36:59.380 | I don't know, who's failed at college

00:37:00.940 | and he's failed out five times.

00:37:02.620 | You don't tell him, yeah, you just better quit

00:37:04.500 | for the rest of your life.

00:37:05.540 | If you ask him, do you wanna finish college?

00:37:08.740 | And he says, yeah, I wanna finish college.

00:37:10.460 | All right, well, we gotta figure something else out

00:37:12.340 | 'cause we've just learned five things

00:37:14.260 | that haven't worked for you.

00:37:15.580 | So we gotta find a new solution, but we're not gonna quit.

00:37:17.940 | And what happens is we tell stories about our heroes.

00:37:20.540 | We tell stories about Thomas Edison

00:37:22.660 | who tried 10,000 things and they said,

00:37:24.860 | how do you feel after trying 10,000 things?

00:37:27.900 | And aren't you a failure?

00:37:29.340 | And he says, no, I've just found 10,000 things

00:37:31.060 | that won't work.

00:37:31.980 | But then we failed often to turn around

00:37:34.420 | and apply it to our own lives.

00:37:36.060 | But that's a powerful principle, it's a powerful software.

00:37:41.100 | The guy who refuses to quit ever

00:37:43.620 | is the guy who's eventually gonna get there.

00:37:45.820 | And once you articulate this principle clearly,

00:37:48.420 | you see it everywhere in society.

00:37:51.020 | You see it in the stories that we tell of our heroes,

00:37:54.220 | whether it's Einstein or some indomitable military hero,

00:37:59.220 | we tell it in Aesop's fables,

00:38:01.780 | the fable of the tortoise and the hare.

00:38:03.740 | And so what I think we need to do for children

00:38:06.460 | is identify these things explicitly

00:38:09.420 | and install into them the ideas

00:38:12.140 | that these basic character qualities

00:38:15.780 | and grit and persistence and not giving up

00:38:18.620 | are the fundamental components of long-term success.

00:38:24.540 | Another one that is extremely important to me

00:38:26.660 | is a growth mindset.

00:38:28.580 | This again is made famous in recent days

00:38:32.180 | by a book by, is it Dweck, Carol Dweck, I think,

00:38:37.180 | who wrote a book called "Mindset, Growth Mindset."

00:38:41.140 | Yeah, "Mindset, the New Psychology of Success"

00:38:43.340 | by Carol Dweck.

00:38:44.500 | And this, again, if I had to summarize this book

00:38:47.340 | in a sentence, it's basically,

00:38:48.940 | if you see yourself as on a journey to growth

00:38:51.020 | and you continue growing, you're unbeatable.

00:38:53.380 | That's the mindset we need to have.

00:38:55.140 | And so with regard to our children,

00:38:57.140 | I think we want to install in them a growth mindset.

00:39:00.700 | We want to help them see themselves as learners,

00:39:05.100 | people who are not on a journey

00:39:07.020 | that's going to end at a certain day

00:39:08.500 | and they're gonna develop this fixed mindset,

00:39:10.460 | the contrast is between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset,

00:39:13.460 | but rather see themselves as people who are growing,

00:39:16.140 | who are expanding, and this is a lifelong joy.

00:39:18.420 | And this process of growth

00:39:21.540 | is going to fundamentally transform them

00:39:24.600 | because they believe in it.

00:39:25.820 | Let me take a moment here and read you an excerpt

00:39:27.620 | from the introduction of the book to make this clear.

00:39:29.340 | I had not planned to cover it, but I wanna cover it.

00:39:33.460 | And so reading from "Mindset" by Carol Dweck.

00:39:36.680 | "What does all this mean for you, the two mindsets?

00:39:40.780 | It's one thing to have pundits spouting their opinions

00:39:43.220 | about scientific issues.

00:39:44.780 | It's another thing to understand

00:39:45.980 | how these views apply to you.

00:39:48.540 | For 20 years, my research has shown

00:39:50.820 | that the view you adopt for yourself

00:39:53.560 | profoundly affects the way you lead your life.

00:39:57.060 | It can determine whether you become

00:39:58.460 | the person you want to be

00:39:59.980 | and whether you accomplish the things you value.

00:40:02.820 | How does this happen?

00:40:04.180 | How can a simple belief have the power

00:40:06.140 | to transform your psychology and, as a result, your life?

00:40:11.140 | Believing that your qualities are carved in stone,

00:40:14.460 | the fixed mindset, creates an urgency

00:40:17.380 | to prove yourself over and over.

00:40:19.460 | If you have only a certain amount of intelligence,

00:40:21.540 | a certain personality, and a certain moral character,

00:40:24.240 | well, then you'd better prove

00:40:25.340 | that you have a healthy dose of them.

00:40:26.980 | It simply wouldn't do to look or feel deficient

00:40:29.260 | in these most basic characteristics.

00:40:31.500 | Some of us are trained in this mindset from an early age.

00:40:34.500 | Even as a child, I was focused on being smart,

00:40:37.420 | but the fixed mindset was really stamped in

00:40:39.260 | by Mrs. Wilson, my sixth grade teacher.

00:40:41.940 | Unlike Alfred Bennett, she believed that people's IQ scores

00:40:45.500 | told the whole story of who they were.

00:40:47.740 | We were seated around the room in IQ order,

00:40:50.100 | and only the highest IQ students

00:40:51.780 | could be trusted to carry the flag,

00:40:53.580 | clap the erasers, or take a note to the principal.

00:40:56.380 | Aside from the daily stomach aches she provoked

00:40:58.700 | with her judgmental stance,

00:41:00.380 | she was creating a mindset in which everyone in the class

00:41:03.060 | had one consuming goal, look smart, don't look dumb.

00:41:07.820 | Who cared about or enjoyed learning

00:41:09.580 | when our whole being was at stake

00:41:10.980 | every time she gave us a test or called on us in class?

00:41:14.400 | I've seen so many people with this one consuming goal

00:41:17.100 | of proving themselves in the classroom, in their careers,

00:41:19.980 | and in their relationships.

00:41:21.540 | Every situation calls for a confirmation

00:41:24.060 | of their intelligence, personality, or character.

00:41:26.580 | Every situation is evaluated.

00:41:28.740 | Will I succeed or fail?

00:41:30.380 | Will I look smart or dumb?

00:41:32.180 | Will I be accepted or rejected?

00:41:34.260 | Will I feel like a winner or a loser?

00:41:36.820 | But doesn't our society value intelligence,

00:41:38.820 | personality, and character?

00:41:40.220 | Isn't it normal to want these traits?

00:41:42.700 | Yes, but there's another mindset in which these traits

00:41:45.980 | are not simply a hand you're dealt and have to live with,

00:41:48.660 | always trying to convince yourself and others

00:41:50.860 | that you have a royal flush when you're secretly worried

00:41:53.300 | it's a pair of 10s.

00:41:54.740 | In this mindset, the hand you're dealt

00:41:56.500 | is just the starting point for development.

00:41:58.900 | This growth mindset is based on the belief

00:42:01.160 | that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate

00:42:03.500 | through your efforts.

00:42:04.820 | Although people may differ in every which way,

00:42:07.420 | in their initial talents and aptitudes,

00:42:09.500 | interests, or temperaments, everyone can change

00:42:12.540 | and grow through application and experience.

00:42:15.220 | Do people with this mindset believe

00:42:16.740 | that anyone can be anything?

00:42:18.500 | That anyone with proper motivation or education

00:42:20.940 | can become Einstein or Beethoven?

00:42:23.420 | No, but they believe that a person's true potential

00:42:26.380 | is unknown and unknowable, that it's impossible

00:42:30.260 | to foresee what can be accomplished

00:42:32.020 | with years of passion, toil, and training.

00:42:35.100 | Did you know that Darwin and Tolstoy

00:42:36.820 | were considered ordinary children?

00:42:39.100 | That Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers of all time,

00:42:41.700 | was completely uncoordinated and graceless as a child?

00:42:45.300 | That the photographer Cindy Sherman,

00:42:46.780 | who has been on virtually every list

00:42:48.180 | of the most important artists of the 20th century,

00:42:50.380 | failed her first photography course?

00:42:52.820 | That Geraldine Page, one of our greatest actresses,

00:42:55.540 | was advised to give it up for lack of talent?

00:42:58.380 | You can see how the belief that cherished qualities

00:43:01.140 | can be developed creates a passion for learning.

00:43:03.900 | Why waste time proving over and over how great you are

00:43:06.900 | when you could be getting better?

00:43:08.500 | Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them?

00:43:11.220 | Why look for friends or partners

00:43:12.740 | who will just shore up your self-esteem

00:43:14.940 | instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow?

00:43:17.420 | And why seek out the tried and true

00:43:19.620 | instead of experiences that will stretch you?

00:43:22.060 | The passion for stretching yourself

00:43:23.820 | and sticking to it even, or especially,

00:43:26.500 | when it's not going well,

00:43:27.900 | is the hallmark of the growth mindset.

00:43:30.300 | This is the mindset that allows people to thrive

00:43:33.220 | during some of the most challenging times in their lives.

00:43:36.540 | Now for a limited time

00:43:37.620 | at Del Amo Motorsports of Orange County.

00:43:39.740 | Get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months

00:43:43.420 | on Select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3.

00:43:46.620 | Considering the Mavericks taking home trophies everywhere

00:43:49.260 | from King of the Hammers

00:43:50.740 | to Uncle Ned's Backcountry Rally,

00:43:52.660 | you're not going to find a better deal

00:43:54.540 | on front row seats to a championship winner.

00:43:57.420 | Don't lose out on your chance to get a Maverick X3.

00:44:00.340 | Visit Del Amo Motorsports of Orange County

00:44:02.460 | in Santa Ana and get yours.

00:44:04.380 | Offer in soon, see dealer for details.

00:44:07.700 | A view from the two mindsets.

00:44:10.180 | To give you a better sense of how the two mindsets work,

00:44:12.620 | imagine as vividly as you can

00:44:14.740 | that you are a young adult having a really bad day.

00:44:18.180 | One day you go to a class that is really important to you

00:44:20.940 | and that you like a lot.

00:44:22.300 | The professor returns the midterm papers to the class.

00:44:25.300 | You got a C plus.

00:44:27.140 | You're very disappointed.

00:44:28.660 | That evening on your way back to your home,

00:44:30.620 | you find that you've gotten a parking ticket.

00:44:33.140 | Being really frustrated,

00:44:34.420 | you call your best friend to share your experience

00:44:36.580 | but are sort of brushed off.

00:44:38.820 | What would you think?

00:44:40.180 | What would you feel?

00:44:41.740 | What would you do?

00:44:42.860 | When I ask people with a fixed mindset,

00:44:45.900 | this is what they said.

00:44:47.420 | I'd feel like a reject.

00:44:49.300 | I'm a total failure.

00:44:51.460 | I'm an idiot.

00:44:53.300 | I'm a loser.

00:44:54.900 | I'd feel worthless and dumb.

00:44:56.460 | Everyone's better than me.

00:44:58.460 | I'm slime.

00:45:00.500 | In other words, they'd see what happened

00:45:02.380 | as a direct measure of their competence and worth.

00:45:06.420 | This is what they think about their lives.

00:45:08.500 | My life is pitiful.

00:45:10.220 | I have no life.

00:45:11.860 | Somebody upstairs doesn't like me.

00:45:14.380 | The world is out to get me.

00:45:16.540 | Someone is out to destroy me.

00:45:18.820 | Nobody loves me.

00:45:20.500 | Everybody hates me.

00:45:22.420 | Life is unfair and all efforts are useless.

00:45:26.020 | Life stinks.

00:45:27.540 | I'm stupid.

00:45:29.140 | Nothing good ever happens to me.

00:45:31.620 | I'm the most unlucky person on this earth.

00:45:34.300 | Excuse me?

00:45:36.340 | Was there death and destruction or just a grade,

00:45:38.660 | a ticket and a bad phone call?

00:45:40.780 | Are these just people with low self-esteem

00:45:43.180 | or card-carrying pessimists?

00:45:45.300 | No.

00:45:46.140 | When they aren't coping with failure,

00:45:48.060 | they feel just as worthy and optimistic

00:45:50.460 | and bright and attractive as people with a growth mindset.

00:45:53.620 | So how would they cope?

00:45:55.620 | I wouldn't bother to put so much time and effort

00:45:57.700 | into doing well in anything.

00:45:59.420 | In other words, don't let anyone measure you again.

00:46:01.940 | Do nothing.

00:46:03.060 | Stay in bed.

00:46:04.420 | Get drunk.

00:46:05.740 | Eat.

00:46:06.580 | Yell at someone if I get a chance to.

00:46:08.580 | Eat chocolate.

00:46:09.740 | Listen to music and pout.

00:46:11.300 | Go into my closet and sit there.

00:46:13.220 | Pick a fight with somebody.

00:46:14.900 | Cry.

00:46:16.020 | Break something.

00:46:17.460 | What is there to do?

00:46:19.300 | What is there to do?

00:46:20.940 | You know, when I wrote the vignette,

00:46:22.380 | I intentionally made the grade a C plus, not an F.

00:46:25.540 | It was a midterm rather than a final.

00:46:27.220 | It was a parking ticket, not a car wreck.

00:46:29.500 | They were sort of brushed off, not rejected outright.

00:46:32.460 | Nothing catastrophic or irreversible happened.

00:46:35.540 | Yet from this raw material,

00:46:37.180 | the fixed mindset creates the feeling

00:46:39.060 | of utter failure and paralysis.

00:46:41.700 | When I gave people with a growth mindset the same vignette,

00:46:45.020 | here's what they said.

00:46:46.260 | They'd think, "I need to try harder in class,

00:46:49.180 | "be more careful when parking the car,

00:46:51.020 | "and wonder if my friend had a bad day."

00:46:53.780 | The C plus would tell me

00:46:54.820 | that I'd have to work a lot harder in the class,

00:46:56.500 | but I have the rest of the semester to pull up my grade.

00:46:59.460 | There were many, many more like this,

00:47:02.300 | but I think you get the idea.

00:47:04.140 | Now, how would they cope?

00:47:06.020 | Directly.

00:47:07.300 | I'd start thinking about studying harder

00:47:09.420 | or studying in a different way

00:47:10.900 | for my next test in that class.

00:47:12.980 | I'd pay the ticket and I'd work things out

00:47:14.620 | with my best friend the next time we speak.

00:47:17.100 | I'd look at what was wrong on my exam,

00:47:19.140 | resolve to do better, pay my parking ticket,

00:47:21.740 | and call my friend to tell her I was upset the day before.

00:47:25.300 | Work hard on my next paper, speak to the teacher,

00:47:28.120 | be more careful where I park or contest the ticket,

00:47:30.940 | and find out what's wrong with my friend.

00:47:33.660 | You don't have to have one mindset

00:47:35.540 | or the other to be upset.

00:47:37.140 | Who wouldn't be?

00:47:38.380 | Things like a poor grade

00:47:39.660 | or a rebuff from a friend or loved one,

00:47:41.460 | these are not fun events.

00:47:43.200 | No one was smacking their lips with relish.

00:47:45.780 | Yet those people with the growth mindset

00:47:47.660 | were not labeling themselves and throwing up their hands.

00:47:50.740 | Even though they felt distressed,

00:47:52.220 | they were ready to take the risks,

00:47:53.980 | confront the challenges, and keep working at them.

00:47:57.460 | So if that sounds interesting to you,

00:48:00.140 | I commend the rest of the book to you,

00:48:01.780 | again, called "Mindset" by Carol Dweck.

00:48:04.980 | But the point is that you can take events

00:48:07.980 | and you can interpret them in two different ways.

00:48:10.380 | And one way, as you could see,

00:48:12.760 | is healthy and leads to good outcomes.

00:48:15.200 | The guy who says, "I gotta study harder,

00:48:17.160 | "be more careful where I park,

00:48:18.660 | "and try to reach out to my friend another time,"

00:48:22.080 | is a guy who's ultimately gonna wind up passing the class,

00:48:25.200 | probably get a B plus, an A minus when he does better,

00:48:27.880 | figure out a solution,

00:48:29.240 | he's gonna have a healthy friendship,

00:48:30.840 | and he's gonna learn that it's always cheaper

00:48:33.120 | to just feed the meter than it is to pay the ticket.

00:48:35.400 | But these are no big deal.

00:48:36.920 | The guy with the growth mindset is gonna get drunk,

00:48:39.080 | he's gonna destroy a relationship with a friend,

00:48:41.580 | and, or get fat, and everything is gonna get worse,

00:48:45.580 | he's gonna drop out of the class and not learn anything.

00:48:48.780 | So giving our children this growth mindset

00:48:52.460 | from an early age, I think is fundamentally important.

00:48:57.140 | Other components of this, right?

00:48:58.960 | Teaching about passion.

00:49:00.740 | And I fear a lot of times that passion is over-discussed.

00:49:05.540 | It was once under-discussed, I think,

00:49:07.640 | but now I think it's over-discussed.

00:49:09.020 | But it really does matter, right?

00:49:10.700 | Connect with the things that you're really enthusiastic

00:49:13.220 | about, and then an important lesson is,

00:49:15.700 | do whatever you're doing with passion.

00:49:18.180 | Do it heartily, do it with passion.

00:49:20.500 | If you can't be passionate about a subject,

00:49:23.060 | at least you can be passionate about the way that you do

00:49:26.020 | whatever it is that you are doing.

00:49:28.900 | Learning to fail.

00:49:30.400 | I feel like I'd just be repetitive if I go deeply into this,

00:49:33.540 | but one of the fundamental components is just to learn

00:49:37.920 | that failure is an important part of life.

00:49:41.140 | The guy who can fail the most in life

00:49:43.340 | is generally gonna go the farthest,

00:49:45.300 | because those lessons learned in failure

00:49:48.380 | are in many ways more important

00:49:51.500 | than the lessons learned in success.

00:49:54.300 | And so learning to fail is super, super important.

00:49:57.660 | Now, this list is not all-inclusive.

00:49:59.940 | There are so many other topics that I could list and discuss,

00:50:03.780 | but I don't wanna take the time to do that.

00:50:06.820 | I wanna encourage you to consider

00:50:08.960 | what are those fundamental attributes

00:50:11.360 | that you consider to be non-negotiable,

00:50:13.760 | and for you to consider how you can build

00:50:17.520 | those useful beliefs into your children

00:50:21.120 | from the earliest of ages,

00:50:22.760 | and how you can help them to practice these things.

00:50:27.760 | In a future episode in this,

00:50:29.440 | I'll talk about how I believe that virtually

00:50:31.880 | all of these virtues and character traits are skills,

00:50:35.360 | and the distinction of how a skill

00:50:37.700 | means it's something that can be acquired,

00:50:39.620 | and it's something that can be developed.

00:50:41.340 | These are not innate, fundamental, unacquired traits.

00:50:46.060 | They are skills that can be developed,

00:50:47.500 | but I wanna deal with that in a second,

00:50:48.900 | in a different episode.

00:50:50.200 | What I wanna finish this episode with

00:50:53.960 | is back to this metaphor of the operating system.

00:50:58.260 | If at all possible,

00:50:59.700 | I believe that you want to take these skills of success,

00:51:04.580 | and you want to teach them to your children

00:51:09.500 | with the greatest possible level of conviction.

00:51:13.560 | You certainly want to model these skills.

00:51:16.520 | You want them to see you,

00:51:17.700 | but you want to articulate them,

00:51:19.180 | and you want to articulate them precisely

00:51:21.700 | so that your children can understand them

00:51:24.100 | at the earliest age possible.

00:51:26.740 | I wanna take a moment to,

00:51:30.980 | for a focused excursus on my own journey,

00:51:35.100 | and how over time I came to believe more strongly

00:51:39.460 | and deeply in my successful life

00:51:44.460 | as I developed a more coherent philosophical identity.

00:51:50.260 | When I was younger,

00:51:52.100 | I was exposed to Christian theological teaching,

00:51:58.540 | and I was exposed to success,

00:52:02.180 | kind of success teaching.

00:52:03.420 | I exposed myself to these things intentionally.

00:52:05.860 | And for a long time,

00:52:08.080 | there was no connection between these two fields.

00:52:10.860 | And yeah, a lot of the success gurus

00:52:13.300 | would kind of wave their hand at God

00:52:15.540 | and a higher power and other stuff,

00:52:17.720 | but I didn't really have any conviction about those things.

00:52:20.380 | And so I absorbed the success gurus' teachings,

00:52:25.060 | and I had my biblical understanding,

00:52:27.340 | but they weren't really strongly connected.

00:52:31.140 | But over time,

00:52:32.220 | I came to see them much more strongly connected

00:52:35.060 | in a way that has brought me huge amounts

00:52:37.500 | of confidence in my life.

00:52:38.940 | And let me give you a glimpse of that,

00:52:40.780 | because this is what I do teach my children,

00:52:43.540 | what I intend to teach my children,

00:52:44.900 | and I believe that it's fundamentally powerful

00:52:48.140 | if somebody believes these things, as I do,

00:52:51.340 | and it brings together life

00:52:54.420 | and this kind of success skills

00:52:57.180 | in a coherent and real way.

00:52:59.960 | When I was in my early to mid-20s, early 20s, I guess,

00:53:03.180 | I started reading the Bible a lot.

00:53:04.660 | And I'd grown up around Christianity,

00:53:07.180 | but I hadn't read the Bible a lot.

00:53:10.460 | And so I really just,

00:53:12.300 | I started reading the Bible again and again

00:53:14.300 | and again and again.

00:53:15.660 | And along the way,

00:53:16.480 | that process of just reading the Bible

00:53:18.600 | completely transformed several significant aspects

00:53:22.540 | of my understanding of the world and of my theology.

00:53:26.500 | A major change that happened to me

00:53:30.580 | had to do with having a deeper appreciation

00:53:33.820 | of the sovereignty of God.

00:53:36.000 | Sovereignty is a word that means the control,

00:53:38.980 | the power, the authority of God.

00:53:41.540 | When I was a boy,

00:53:42.380 | I didn't think much of God controlling the world

00:53:44.980 | and manipulating the affairs of the world.

00:53:47.340 | I kind of, I was very focused on the freedom of man.

00:53:51.380 | There's this classic debate in theological circles

00:53:55.780 | between the sovereignty of God and the free will of man.

00:53:58.620 | It's a debate across all levels of all philosophies,

00:54:01.140 | et cetera, the sovereignty of God

00:54:02.700 | versus the free will of man.

00:54:04.540 | And I just didn't think much about the sovereignty of God.

00:54:07.500 | But when I read my Bible a bunch of times,

00:54:09.060 | all of a sudden I came to this deep, strong conviction

00:54:11.540 | that God is ordering the universe.

00:54:14.220 | God is controlling the affairs of the universe

00:54:17.300 | in a very strong and powerful way.

00:54:19.380 | And this increased my faith.

00:54:21.020 | And it caused me to start to see myself

00:54:23.460 | and to see how these things work together

00:54:28.100 | and to believe that God was involved in my life.

00:54:31.260 | He was ordering all of the affairs around me.

00:54:33.820 | And this is an incredibly powerful thing.

00:54:36.180 | If you believe, as I do, in a personal, omnipotent,

00:54:40.140 | omniscient, omnipresent God,

00:54:42.340 | meaning God who is all powerful, all knowing,

00:54:45.420 | and is in all places, and he is personal,

00:54:49.260 | he cares about my life, and he orders the steps of my life,

00:54:54.140 | it brings this profound sense of relief

00:54:56.500 | 'cause I don't have to do it all anymore.

00:54:57.980 | I don't have to figure it out.

00:54:59.220 | God is conspiring for my good.

00:55:02.620 | And when I matched that over, for example,

00:55:06.340 | Brian Tracy was one of my early success guru mentors

00:55:09.500 | that I really appreciated 'cause he was just so clear.

00:55:11.380 | And he would say things like,

00:55:12.580 | "Believe that the world is conspiring for your good.

00:55:15.260 | "Believe that everything is for your good," et cetera.

00:55:17.740 | But I didn't have an anchoring, a grounding for that.

00:55:20.180 | I believed, okay, that's a useful mental model.

00:55:23.180 | That's appropriate.

00:55:24.660 | But I didn't believe it at a deep level.

00:55:26.540 | It was more of, okay, I could see,

00:55:27.820 | I could turn that on or off.

00:55:29.340 | But as I grew to believe it at a deep level,

00:55:31.900 | it brought a completely different experience of life to me,

00:55:34.860 | an experience of faith, of conviction,

00:55:36.980 | that God is ordering the steps of my life.

00:55:39.660 | God is arranging things for my good.

00:55:42.260 | And then what's so powerful about this

00:55:44.660 | is that this works in Christian theology

00:55:47.660 | regardless of what the outcome is.

00:55:49.820 | In the Bible, there's clear examples

00:55:52.220 | of how when we trust God and we follow God and we obey Him,

00:55:56.460 | there are times in which that leads

00:55:57.980 | to what we call blessings, meaning positive feedback,

00:56:02.060 | things that make us feel like we are doing well.

00:56:05.540 | We may have riches, we may have joy,

00:56:07.460 | we may have, or happiness even.

00:56:10.060 | We may have just this experience where we say,

00:56:12.900 | "God is really blessing me.

00:56:14.020 | "Man, my business is going well," et cetera.

00:56:16.660 | On the other hand, Christians are frequently admonished

00:56:19.860 | that don't judge what is happening in your life

00:56:23.820 | based upon the perspective of external blessings.

00:56:27.140 | So I may be going through tremendous trials,

00:56:29.180 | tremendous difficulties, my business may be failing,

00:56:32.020 | and I still bless God in the middle of it.

00:56:34.180 | And this is what's so powerful

00:56:35.340 | about Christianity specifically,

00:56:37.840 | is that the external evidence, quote-unquote,

00:56:42.060 | for success or failure is not the arbiter,

00:56:45.220 | the real arbiter of success and failure.

00:56:48.220 | After all, Jesus Christ Himself ended His life,

00:56:51.900 | or His life was ended, His life was ended

00:56:54.460 | when He was completely impoverished, had nothing,

00:56:58.500 | died in what seemed to be the world's greatest failure,

00:57:02.040 | and yet, and all of His disciples betrayed Him

00:57:05.240 | and forsook Him at the last time, at the last moment.

00:57:08.660 | And yet, from that depth of despair,

00:57:12.020 | from that seemingly quite inauspicious beginning,

00:57:16.060 | the world has been utterly transformed

00:57:18.320 | over the past 2,000 years.

00:57:19.980 | And so you can't judge from external evidence.

00:57:24.480 | So, and again, in Scripture itself,

00:57:27.220 | Scriptures are commanded, right?

00:57:28.180 | Paul says, "I've learned to abound,

00:57:30.300 | "and I've learned to be abased," right?

00:57:31.780 | "I've learned to be in want,

00:57:33.900 | "and I've learned to be in plenty,

00:57:35.160 | "and I will bless God in the middle of both of those things."

00:57:38.040 | So this is what's so powerful,

00:57:39.440 | is what does God want from me in these circumstances?

00:57:43.420 | Well, He wants faithfulness, He wants a faithful heart,

00:57:46.020 | and what matters is not the outcome.

00:57:49.140 | What matters is how I go through the circumstances.

00:57:52.540 | What matters is what I do.

00:57:55.340 | And what is so powerful about religious conviction

00:57:58.260 | and religious belief is that you have hope,

00:58:01.420 | and that hope is not dependent upon current circumstances.

00:58:06.380 | That hope is for this life,

00:58:08.860 | but it is also for that next life.

00:58:11.780 | And so in the halls of heroes,

00:58:13.800 | we look back in Christian tradition,

00:58:16.040 | and we see that many people's hopes

00:58:18.760 | were never rewarded in this life.

00:58:21.360 | Many faithful men and women have been sawn in two,

00:58:24.840 | many have been put up as torches,

00:58:26.680 | many have been impoverished and starved to death,

00:58:30.360 | and yet their reward, their success is guaranteed,

00:58:35.560 | because that success comes in heaven.

00:58:38.240 | That success comes in the new heavens and the new earth.

00:58:41.520 | That success comes in the next life.

00:58:43.560 | And this life and how we proceed through this life

00:58:47.400 | is preparation for the next life.

00:58:50.320 | And what matters is not the specific outcome,

00:58:54.000 | but what matters is what we do.

00:58:56.200 | Over time, I came to what I think

00:58:59.200 | is a more mature understanding of this interplay

00:59:02.540 | between my responsibility and God's divine ordering.

00:59:06.640 | Currently, my current understanding of scripture

00:59:10.080 | is on this issue is what I would align

00:59:12.680 | with what is called Molinism.

00:59:13.960 | It's not Calvinism, it's not Arminianism, it's Molinism.

00:59:17.080 | And Molinius Calvin, of course,

00:59:19.360 | if you're, I shouldn't say of course,

00:59:21.680 | for the uninitiated, John Calvin

00:59:23.640 | is a famous Protestant theologian,

00:59:25.880 | and he was a French theologian,

00:59:29.080 | and he preached and lived in Geneva.

00:59:31.440 | And he developed these very strong persuasive arguments

00:59:36.240 | that have led to many people who identify themselves

00:59:40.200 | under the doctrine of what is called Calvinism.

00:59:43.160 | And Calvinism has a variety of distinctive features,

00:59:46.800 | but if we had to wrap it all up in one feature,

00:59:51.380 | I would say it's that God controls everything.

00:59:53.860 | God does everything, God controls everything.

00:59:55.760 | And there's different expressions of that

00:59:57.460 | in terms of how that gets applied.

00:59:59.800 | Now, there was another of his contemporaries

01:00:04.600 | named Arminius, what was his first name?

01:00:08.720 | Jacob Arminius, I think.

01:00:10.120 | And so Arminianism is a doctrine in Protestant Christianity

01:00:15.120 | that basically says, well, God does not do everything,

01:00:20.680 | but it's human beings that do everything.

01:00:23.160 | And human beings are the ones who are responsible to obey

01:00:27.960 | and who are responsible to do things

01:00:29.360 | and are responsible to respond, et cetera.

01:00:31.520 | And so there's this classic arguments between these things,

01:00:34.360 | and it's across all of, again,

01:00:37.680 | Christianity and philosophy broadly.

01:00:41.160 | Now, separately, there's a third guy

01:00:43.440 | who wound up weighing in on some of these battles,

01:00:46.520 | and he was not a Protestant theologian,

01:00:48.040 | but rather a Roman Catholic theologian

01:00:49.680 | named Louis de Molina.

01:00:51.360 | And he developed the ideas of what today

01:00:54.360 | are referred to as Molinism.

01:00:57.040 | And what I consider myself so powerful

01:01:00.640 | about the teachings of, or the idea,

01:01:03.160 | the philosophy of Molinism

01:01:05.440 | is that it unites these two forces

01:01:08.040 | in a really powerful way.

01:01:11.000 | And here's what Molina, what he taught, what Molinism is.

01:01:16.000 | Molinism is, it says that God has

01:01:19.080 | basically three forms of knowledge.

01:01:21.960 | So the first form of knowledge

01:01:24.680 | is that of necessary truths or natural knowledge.

01:01:29.680 | This kind of knowledge is truth

01:01:32.080 | that is independent of God's will and is non-contingent.

01:01:37.080 | So this is knowledge of facts.

01:01:39.320 | The classic example is that all bachelors are unmarried.

01:01:43.160 | The fact that all bachelors are unmarried

01:01:45.600 | is not a fact that's based upon God's will.

01:01:48.840 | It is simply a non-contingent statement.

01:01:52.720 | The second kind of knowledge that God has

01:01:54.960 | is that of what is called middle knowledge.

01:01:57.840 | And this kind of knowledge is that God knows all things

01:02:02.800 | that would happen in any infinite number

01:02:06.560 | of choices or decisions.

01:02:09.160 | So God knows what would happen

01:02:11.480 | if I leave my house at nine o'clock to drive to work.

01:02:14.720 | And God knows what would happen

01:02:16.360 | if I were to leave my house at 9.10 and drive to work.

01:02:20.400 | All of these, this kinds of knowledge

01:02:22.560 | is part of God's knowledge.

01:02:24.560 | And then the third kind of knowledge

01:02:26.080 | is God's free knowledge.

01:02:27.880 | And this knowledge is knowledge that consists

01:02:30.660 | of contingent truths that are dependent upon God's will,

01:02:35.160 | the things that he brings about, the things that he does.

01:02:39.600 | And in this third knowledge, this free knowledge,

01:02:42.660 | we have God specifically controlling the events of mankind.

01:02:46.640 | So the classic example here is God created the world.

01:02:49.180 | He caused the world to come into being.

01:02:52.920 | And he was the causal agent in that.

01:02:55.400 | So here would be an example of why this is so satisfying,

01:02:58.320 | at least to me, and perhaps to you also.

01:03:01.200 | Think about a specific, think about an example like this.

01:03:06.200 | Jesus Christ, when he was crucified

01:03:10.100 | by the Roman government, Pontius Pilate,

01:03:13.000 | did God cause Pontius Pilate to condemn Jesus Christ

01:03:18.160 | to death?

01:03:19.380 | If you read about the trial proceedings of Christ,

01:03:22.380 | here was an innocent man who was completely innocent

01:03:25.100 | of the crimes of which he was accused.

01:03:27.420 | Pilate said he was innocent,

01:03:29.220 | and Pilate had the opportunity to free him.

01:03:31.780 | So did God cause Pilate to free Christ?

01:03:36.700 | Was God a causal agent in that?

01:03:39.460 | Or was Pilate free to not condemn Jesus Christ to death?

01:03:47.740 | 'Cause Pilate had full control.

01:03:49.020 | Pilate could have said, "No, we're gonna set him free."

01:03:51.100 | And under the law at that time,

01:03:52.780 | the Jews would not have been able to crucify Christ,

01:03:55.800 | because it was Pilate's, it was his authority.

01:03:59.580 | So then would God's plan have been foiled?

01:04:03.060 | Because it was predicted from the beginning of mankind,

01:04:06.220 | from centuries, we have hundreds and hundreds of predictions

01:04:10.100 | about the life of Christ from centuries earlier.

01:04:13.180 | And so how would these things have come true

01:04:15.460 | if Jesus Christ had not fulfilled them?

01:04:17.100 | We know that Christ himself was in a very self-aware manner,

01:04:21.140 | specifically fulfilling the predictions made about him.

01:04:24.260 | And the ultimate prediction was that he was going to die

01:04:27.180 | and be raised.

01:04:29.180 | So how does this work?

01:04:30.540 | Well, I find it very satisfying

01:04:32.460 | to consider this concept of middle knowledge.

01:04:36.100 | And basically, I would defend this idea,

01:04:39.100 | that God knows all of the potential outcomes

01:04:45.020 | of any particular set of decisions,

01:04:48.100 | of what a man would do

01:04:50.420 | in any particular set of circumstances.

01:04:53.700 | So God knew that a man named Pontius Pilate,

01:04:57.900 | if he were put in this situation,

01:05:00.260 | he would freely choose of his own will

01:05:04.060 | to condemn Jesus Christ to death.

01:05:06.460 | Therefore God's will that his son would die

01:05:09.780 | would be brought to fruition.

01:05:12.500 | Would be brought to fruition through the free choices

01:05:16.820 | of all of the men involved.

01:05:19.700 | Now, let's bring it out of the theological

01:05:22.140 | and bring it back to my life, into my children's life.

01:05:25.580 | What this means is that God has divinely conspired

01:05:30.180 | to create and order all of the circumstances of my life

01:05:34.780 | so that I, of my own free choice and free action,

01:05:38.580 | will fulfill his will for my life.

01:05:42.020 | That leaves me fully responsible

01:05:47.260 | and yet God fully in control,

01:05:49.820 | which is the most incredibly freeing

01:05:51.980 | psychological place to be.

01:05:54.300 | I know that God is divinely conspiring for my success.

01:05:58.860 | And what I have to do is I have to do the work.

01:06:02.900 | I have to be faithful.

01:06:04.500 | I know what God's will is ultimately,

01:06:07.780 | but I also know that God has chosen to bring about his will

01:06:12.300 | through my active participation.

01:06:15.260 | And whether you apply that at the level

01:06:17.380 | of an individual life,

01:06:18.940 | or you apply that at the level of a family,

01:06:21.220 | or you apply that at the level of a community

01:06:24.860 | or of a nation, it's the most powerful thing

01:06:27.580 | that you could imagine if you actually believe it,

01:06:29.980 | if you genuinely believe it.

01:06:31.660 | It's one of the most incredible success programs

01:06:36.020 | that you could install into a human being.

01:06:38.460 | And it lends itself to a strong emotional stability.

01:06:43.020 | We'll talk about emotional stability in the next episode.

01:06:46.180 | Here I always think of the Greek Stoics

01:06:48.460 | and the Stoic philosophy that's very extreme,

01:06:50.940 | become quite popular today,

01:06:53.340 | even among in the success circles.

01:06:56.380 | But I don't ascribe myself to Stoic philosophy,

01:06:59.460 | but I pull out basically the same foundation

01:07:03.260 | in Christianity.

01:07:04.540 | The idea of Stoicism is accept what comes

01:07:07.860 | and focus on how you act through it.

01:07:10.860 | And so in Christian theology, here's a trial.

01:07:14.900 | Book of James says, "Praise God for the trial.

01:07:17.060 | "Thank you, God, for this trial.

01:07:18.960 | "I'm grateful for it.

01:07:20.040 | "I know that it's come to do a good work in my life.

01:07:22.160 | "I'm glad that it's here.

01:07:23.520 | "Now what matters is how do I respond through it?

01:07:27.820 | "What do I do in the face of this trial?"

01:07:31.020 | Or a blessing, right?

01:07:32.860 | A wonderful something to be excited about.

01:07:35.020 | Thank you, God, for this blessing.

01:07:36.500 | Now what matters is what do I do?

01:07:38.940 | How do I behave?

01:07:40.020 | How do I act in the middle of this?

01:07:42.460 | And so I know that's a fairly

01:07:44.980 | theologically involved argument,

01:07:46.620 | but I wanna make this practical and show you how

01:07:48.900 | if we can connect these success principles

01:07:51.700 | at a very deep level, at a philosophical level,

01:07:54.820 | at a deep theological level of conviction,

01:07:57.900 | then they become so much more powerful.

01:08:00.940 | And so let's be faithful to identify these things

01:08:03.900 | and identify the things that are useful

01:08:06.820 | and then help our children to understand them

01:08:09.540 | intellectually, to identify and be very clear

01:08:12.940 | on the impact of these things,

01:08:15.020 | and then to practice them continually throughout their life

01:08:18.520 | because virtues and character is practiced.

01:08:22.340 | It's a skill that needs to be developed

01:08:24.820 | and it's developed in the beginning in a small way.

01:08:27.300 | It's developed in adolescence and in young adulthood

01:08:29.500 | in a stronger way, and then ideally it flourishes

01:08:33.180 | and blooms as our children come into adulthood.

01:08:35.700 | As I wind down this theme,

01:08:37.940 | I wanna mention a few practical considerations.

01:08:42.020 | I wish I had a longer list,

01:08:45.620 | but I do have some things that I'm,

01:08:48.940 | at least I have noticed that I try to encourage

01:08:51.580 | and focus on.

01:08:52.940 | With each of these success features or success attributes,

01:08:57.300 | I think we can take them and then think about

01:09:00.100 | the process of child training and ask,

01:09:02.060 | how do we incorporate them?

01:09:03.380 | So let me begin with the one that I mentioned,

01:09:07.460 | learning to fail, okay?

01:09:09.300 | Failure, what does failure mean?

01:09:12.300 | Well, I think there's something fundamentally at odds

01:09:15.860 | with how we teach in the school system,

01:09:19.620 | with the way that we inculcate the idea that failure is bad.

01:09:23.900 | And you see this a lot if you look at many thinkers

01:09:28.380 | in the modern space.

01:09:29.340 | For example, Peter Diamandis is someone I've followed

01:09:32.460 | for years, and he talks a lot about this,

01:09:35.420 | and he has a white minor paper that he wrote on education.

01:09:39.620 | This was a big point of his

01:09:40.860 | that I thought was really well taken,

01:09:42.700 | where he talks about the importance of that we know

01:09:47.420 | that successful business owners and really anybody

01:09:50.780 | understands that failure is a fundamental part.

01:09:53.140 | Failure is not to be avoided, failure is to be embraced.

01:09:55.660 | It's how we learn.

01:09:57.580 | We could see this when we watch our children learn to walk.

01:10:00.860 | What do they do?

01:10:01.700 | Well, they fall down.

01:10:03.020 | They start with little steps, they stand up, they fall down.

01:10:06.340 | They stand up, they fall down.

01:10:07.460 | They stand up, they fall down.

01:10:08.460 | Eventually, they take a step and they fall down.

01:10:09.980 | They take a step and they fall down, et cetera.

01:10:11.820 | And eventually, after falling down lots of times,

01:10:15.180 | they learn how to walk.

01:10:16.500 | And you can see this at a later stage.

01:10:18.620 | If you go to your local skate park

01:10:20.180 | and you watch a skater learning a trick on a skateboard,

01:10:24.940 | oh, he'll fail and fail and fail and fail and fail.

01:10:27.980 | And eventually, he'll sort of kind of start to get it

01:10:30.260 | and then he'll fail and fail and fail and he'll continue on.

01:10:33.020 | Well, we understand that it's most basic level

01:10:35.380 | that this failure is a necessary part of the system.

01:10:38.220 | But then we build this fear of failure into children

01:10:42.020 | with the way that we grade them,

01:10:43.220 | the way that we do testing, et cetera.

01:10:45.260 | And we say that somehow if you fail a test,

01:10:47.660 | then that's gonna wreck you for the rest of time.

01:10:49.580 | Or if you fail school,

01:10:50.540 | it's gonna wreck you for the rest of time.

01:10:52.500 | And some people come out of this,

01:10:54.380 | but how many more people would come out of this

01:10:56.260 | if we change the system in some way?

01:10:58.580 | So my practical application of this

01:11:01.020 | is to eliminate testing as a methodology

01:11:06.020 | that has any kind of emotional impact.

01:11:11.500 | The reason I'm struggling a little for the words

01:11:14.140 | is I used to say that I was completely opposed to testing

01:11:19.420 | in an individualized setting, right?

01:11:20.980 | 'Cause testing is primarily necessary

01:11:23.340 | as a form of communication between a teacher

01:11:26.020 | and his students if he's not able to identify

01:11:29.520 | where the students are at.

01:11:30.940 | So that's a fundamental problem.

01:11:32.100 | A teacher should know where each student is at.

01:11:34.020 | And it's only in an industrial setting

01:11:36.060 | where the teacher has too many students

01:11:37.380 | that he needs to assign a test

01:11:39.500 | of here's how much the student understands.

01:11:41.540 | And then the testing and the grade system

01:11:43.500 | is a form of communication between a parent and a teacher

01:11:46.340 | who don't have other good forms of communication.

01:11:49.860 | So these are not fundamentally important

01:11:51.660 | to the learning of the child

01:11:52.800 | or to the educational model of the child.

01:11:54.740 | Now, so I used to be completely opposed to testing.

01:11:57.520 | Then I started digging into some of the ways to learn,

01:12:01.740 | neuroscience ideas on ways to learn.

01:12:03.620 | And I become convinced that testing

01:12:06.260 | is actually an important mode of learning,

01:12:08.940 | an important way to learning.

01:12:11.340 | One way that people who are skilled at learning do

01:12:14.180 | is they just sit down and test themselves.

01:12:15.660 | A very popular method is called free recall.

01:12:17.900 | You sit down, you read something,

01:12:20.100 | and then you close your book or you turn off the lecture,

01:12:22.940 | and then you pull out a piece of paper

01:12:24.500 | and you write down everything that you remember.

01:12:26.020 | It's a test.

01:12:26.860 | And the actual testing process causes your brain

01:12:29.740 | to pay attention to what you know

01:12:34.100 | and to know it at a deeper level.

01:12:35.540 | So I have changed myself,

01:12:38.100 | my previous dismissiveness of testing.

01:12:42.740 | And I'm mostly focused on how can we incorporate testing

01:12:46.020 | as a method of learning

01:12:47.580 | rather than as a method of judgment, so to speak,

01:12:51.100 | or a method of stratification of students, et cetera.

01:12:54.400 | So back to the learning to fail.

01:12:56.020 | Let's take out the fear of failure.

01:13:00.100 | And so, for example, what I do

01:13:02.260 | when I test my children in our homeschool

01:13:05.100 | is we do a modified form of free recall.

01:13:08.140 | We do narration.

01:13:09.260 | So I say, "Tell me everything that you know

01:13:11.220 | about President Grant."

01:13:13.980 | We're doing basically around Civil War time right now.

01:13:18.020 | "Tell me everything you know about Theodore Roosevelt."

01:13:21.340 | And the focus is on what you know,

01:13:24.500 | not on what you don't know.

01:13:25.740 | The focus is on having a chance to talk about

01:13:28.360 | all the things that you can say about a person

01:13:30.640 | rather than getting certain questions wrong

01:13:33.200 | because I couldn't figure out how to do the question.

01:13:35.460 | And so I see this as a healthy thing.

01:13:37.780 | And then in terms of failure,

01:13:39.720 | I think it's very important that we articulate,

01:13:43.020 | anytime there is failure, we articulate it

01:13:45.620 | from the perspective of what are the lessons.

01:13:48.180 | So you decided to start a business idea

01:13:50.300 | and you were gonna sell bread.

01:13:51.940 | Okay, well, what did people buy and what didn't people buy?

01:13:55.300 | Or you decided you were gonna go and try this new activity

01:13:58.200 | and you fail, what did you learn?

01:14:00.060 | We need to take away the emotional stigma from failure

01:14:03.620 | in every way, and we need to encourage failure

01:14:06.300 | as a learning process.

01:14:07.840 | And that's something that we as parents can facilitate.

01:14:10.000 | And I think we can do a much better job of that

01:14:12.680 | and the educational model of our children.

01:14:15.400 | It'd be, think about this,

01:14:17.280 | if you had the chance to hire somebody to work for you

01:14:22.280 | and you had the choice of two candidates,

01:14:26.480 | candidate A went and performed brilliantly

01:14:31.480 | in one specific field.

01:14:34.160 | Let's say that, it doesn't matter,

01:14:37.040 | I don't need to give more specificity.

01:14:39.420 | Candidate A performed brilliantly in one specific field,

01:14:42.700 | got straight 100s on all of the exams,

01:14:46.420 | did beautifully well on one field,

01:14:49.300 | but that candidate chose not to pursue other fields

01:14:53.860 | or to study other classes because that candidate

01:14:57.820 | didn't wanna mess up his GPA.

01:14:59.900 | And candidate two, on the other hand, comes in

01:15:02.480 | and candidate two got Bs in field A

01:15:07.280 | instead of straight As like candidate A had.

01:15:09.700 | So candidate B got Bs, but candidate B went to some classes

01:15:15.160 | in this subject and in that subject, et cetera,

01:15:18.080 | and he got a D on his classes in French history,

01:15:23.080 | but he really enjoyed them.

01:15:24.960 | He just didn't do very well, but he really enjoyed

01:15:27.080 | and he went to that and then he went

01:15:28.260 | into some welding classes and he got mediocre marks there

01:15:32.420 | and he completely failed out of art class

01:15:34.820 | because he was a terrible artist,

01:15:36.420 | but he loved looking at pictures.

01:15:38.460 | Which of those candidates is more attractive to you?

01:15:41.060 | The broader level of experience is what we want.

01:15:47.180 | It's not the grade that counts, it's the experience.

01:15:51.320 | Again, I think the best example is we think about

01:15:53.820 | how famously Steve Jobs' calligraphy class

01:15:56.740 | that he took informed his aesthetic sensibilities

01:16:00.420 | for the rest of his life.

01:16:02.060 | He didn't need the calligraphy class for a GPA,

01:16:04.580 | he just went and took it, but yet it taught him something.

01:16:07.540 | And so this is how I view learning.

01:16:08.980 | It's better to have 20% knowledge of something

01:16:12.500 | and have that than 0% because you didn't wanna

01:16:15.460 | not get a perfect grade.

01:16:18.140 | Remember when I spoke to you about language learning?

01:16:20.040 | Language learning is one of those cool things

01:16:21.740 | where just a little bit of knowledge is better than nothing.

01:16:25.140 | If you have 100 words in a foreign language,

01:16:28.820 | you're way better off than if you had zero words.

01:16:30.940 | Now, of course, you'll be better when you have 500 words,

01:16:33.620 | but the 100 words counts.

01:16:35.220 | And so we shouldn't, our systems should not be structured

01:16:39.460 | upon kind of pulling back, but rather on building up.

01:16:43.500 | There's another way we could focus on the same concept

01:16:45.860 | has to do with do we start at 100 and get marks wrong,

01:16:50.100 | 100%, or do we start at zero and build up?

01:16:53.940 | And so any way we can figure out how in our children's lives

01:16:56.820 | to focus on the fact that we're starting from zero

01:16:59.980 | and building up, I think is a more powerful move.

01:17:03.980 | If you think of a video game, a video game,

01:17:06.540 | the gamer goes through it and the gamer fails a level,

01:17:09.500 | but that doesn't mean that the gamer gets detracted

01:17:12.540 | from 100%, it just means that the gamer failed that level.

01:17:16.380 | So the gamer goes back and does the level again

01:17:18.740 | and does the level again and eventually passes the level.

01:17:21.060 | And it doesn't matter how many times

01:17:24.180 | the gamer approaches the level,

01:17:26.380 | what matters is how the,

01:17:30.500 | that is that they eventually pass it.

01:17:33.140 | And so in all learning endeavors,

01:17:35.580 | I think this is a more useful principle

01:17:38.140 | that we should incorporate into the approach.

01:17:41.340 | It doesn't matter how many times you fail a level,

01:17:45.340 | what matters is that eventually you pass the level

01:17:47.900 | and that you keep going through.

01:17:49.660 | This is a core component of learning to fail.

01:17:53.340 | This is a core component of that growth mindset.

01:17:56.260 | This is a core component of developing persistence and grit

01:18:00.100 | so that we press through.

01:18:02.340 | Another practical technique that we can use

01:18:04.580 | is to praise those attributes, those character qualities

01:18:09.580 | that we want to see grow and do it in a way

01:18:12.500 | that continues to lead to growth.

01:18:15.340 | I think, I forget where to, I read this somewhere,

01:18:17.500 | it could have been Dweck's book, I'm not sure,

01:18:18.980 | I haven't read that book in years,

01:18:19.980 | but there's a big difference between praising a child

01:18:24.980 | for being smart versus praising a child

01:18:29.620 | for working really hard and developing his intelligence

01:18:33.540 | or expressing his intelligence, et cetera.

01:18:36.180 | If you praise a child for being smart,

01:18:39.140 | then that can cause the child to say,

01:18:42.020 | well, yes, I'm smart, which may be a good thing,

01:18:44.820 | but to see then that any evidence that indicates

01:18:49.260 | that somehow he might not be smart

01:18:50.740 | 'cause he got a question wrong on the test

01:18:52.860 | or wasn't at the top score, et cetera,

01:18:55.500 | to harm his self-image.

01:18:56.940 | On the other hand, if you praise a child for his hard work,

01:19:00.340 | all the child needs to do to achieve that level of success

01:19:03.260 | is work hard, and that's an internal metric.

01:19:07.340 | So I know I worked hard, I'm satisfied.

01:19:09.660 | Doesn't matter whether I'm number one in the class

01:19:11.740 | or number 10, what matters is that I did the best

01:19:14.540 | that I could, that I worked really hard.

01:19:16.820 | Now, the other side is I think it's also useful

01:19:19.480 | to praise those attributes that are fundamental.

01:19:23.220 | I have an example that I'm personally passionate about

01:19:26.740 | is I think that girls should be repeatedly affirmed

01:19:31.740 | in their physical beauty without trying to go

01:19:37.060 | to an external metric of what is it that defines beauty.

01:19:42.820 | There may be an external standard of symmetry

01:19:46.780 | being the perfect definition of beauty,

01:19:49.020 | but at its core, one of the things I've noticed

01:19:50.680 | over the years is quite simply that it's very hard

01:19:55.020 | to find a girl who is not beautiful in any way,

01:20:00.020 | and what makes a huge difference in the beauty of a woman

01:20:04.980 | is her level of confidence in herself and in who she is.

01:20:10.360 | I want to praise continually the beauty

01:20:13.040 | that comes from within, character qualities,

01:20:15.360 | empathy, kindness, compassion, all of the virtues

01:20:18.760 | that a woman can embody, but at its core,

01:20:21.400 | a woman who is confident, who is confident in who she is,

01:20:25.200 | who's been told all her life by her father

01:20:28.540 | that she is beautiful, she becomes beautiful

01:20:32.460 | as a self-fulfilling prophecy

01:20:34.880 | because she is a human creature, she is a woman,

01:20:37.920 | and if she's not told that she's beautiful,

01:20:41.300 | then she may doubt her beauty,

01:20:42.760 | and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy

01:20:45.080 | where am I beautiful enough, et cetera.

01:20:47.280 | And so that's just something I personally care a lot about,

01:20:51.500 | but there are many other attributes as well.

01:20:55.080 | And so the role, and I gotta cut off here

01:20:58.680 | 'cause I don't wanna steal my thunder from the next episode,

01:21:00.660 | but recognize that there is always the virtues

01:21:06.680 | that a person has are always present in some quality.

01:21:11.520 | None of us would go to another human being and say,

01:21:15.160 | there is nothing beautiful about you.

01:21:18.040 | You take the most disfigured human being,

01:21:20.960 | somebody who's been horrifically burned,

01:21:23.120 | horrifically scarred, et cetera,

01:21:25.280 | and by all objective metrics,

01:21:28.440 | that person is ugly as anything.

01:21:32.680 | And yet even in that, you'll look and behold that person

01:21:37.360 | and based upon the inward beauty of character,

01:21:40.600 | or even just the fact that this is a living soul,

01:21:45.480 | someone who has endured incredible adversity and pain,

01:21:50.400 | that is a beautiful person.

01:21:54.840 | And so virtually all of these things,

01:21:59.520 | they're not objectively true or not.

01:22:02.380 | The things that make a person ugly

01:22:07.120 | are all virtues or characters.

01:22:11.200 | A person can be incredibly handsome,

01:22:13.760 | and yet if he's crass, right,

01:22:16.520 | or if she's really just obnoxious

01:22:19.480 | and dismissive of other people's

01:22:21.320 | and cuts people down, et cetera,

01:22:23.720 | no matter the level of physical beauty,

01:22:26.880 | that's an ugly person

01:22:28.660 | because the ugliness is expressed from within

01:22:31.840 | and no one wants to be around someone like that.

01:22:34.360 | And so my point is to say that

01:22:36.320 | don't think that these things are,

01:22:38.800 | that you either are or aren't.

01:22:40.640 | Life doesn't work that way.

01:22:42.840 | We all are in a measure,

01:22:46.360 | but I'm getting ahead of myself.

01:22:48.660 | I'm gonna cut myself off there,

01:22:49.880 | pick that up in a future episode.

01:22:52.440 | Recognize that as you think about cultivating

01:22:55.640 | and investing into the spirit of your child,

01:22:58.320 | one component of which you want to pay careful attention

01:23:03.100 | is to instill in your children

01:23:06.820 | an ideology, a philosophy of success.

01:23:11.820 | There are certain philosophies, ideas that are useful

01:23:18.580 | and that are much more likely to lead to your child

01:23:22.540 | being confident and successful in life.

01:23:27.220 | And if you can successfully install those ideologies,

01:23:32.220 | the child will see them and take them on as his own

01:23:37.180 | in the fullness of time.

01:23:38.780 | On the other hand,

01:23:40.020 | though you do everything else we've talked about,

01:23:42.660 | if you surround that child with ideologies

01:23:45.740 | that lead to failure,

01:23:47.580 | that can be enough to harm

01:23:49.500 | the future prospects of your children.

01:23:53.280 | Thank you so much for listening.

01:23:54.300 | I hope that these thoughts have been useful to you

01:23:56.780 | and I look forward to speaking with you again soon.

01:23:59.980 | - The holidays start here at Ralph's

01:24:01.740 | with a variety of options

01:24:03.060 | to celebrate traditions old and new.

01:24:05.420 | Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey

01:24:07.940 | or spicy turkey tacos,

01:24:09.780 | your go-to shrimp cocktail,

01:24:11.580 | or your first Cajun risotto,

01:24:13.460 | Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients

01:24:15.940 | to embrace your traditions.

01:24:17.500 | Ralph's, fresh for everyone.

01:24:19.780 | - Choose from a great selection of digital coupons

01:24:22.060 | and use them up to five times in one transaction.

01:24:24.660 | Check our app for details.

01:24:26.220 | Ralphs. Fresh for everyone.

01:24:28.220 | (upbeat music)

2023-04-18_How_to_Invest_In_Your_Children_at_a_Very_Young_Age_-_Build_The_Spirit_and_Philosophy_of_Success