I believe, I just have a central belief, that we all do have some unique gifts that we're meant to bring to our life and to the world, and it shows up in different forms, and one of the worst things we can do in trying to find that and express it is trying to be really good at everything.

I just think that's the most poisonous idea in the American mindset, that we're supposed to be really good at everything. On the other hand, I personally believe that we should try a variety of things so that we experience frustration and fail and eventually find what it is that is, you know, we're "meant to do." I do, but I feel also very fortunate that I was never really pushed to be excellent at everything.

I have terrible hand-eye coordination, but I'm pretty good at sports with my feet, but when I say pretty good, I mean passable. So I gave up on the idea of becoming a professional athlete very, very young. So I think we have to know that we have to play games with our hands and our feet in order to figure that out.

I tend not to put anyone on a pedestal. I feel like, and maybe part of it is, in part of my private practice for years, I saw, maybe I saw the Stanford grads who are then living in New York, and they weren't literally from Stanford, but I'd have all these late 20-year-olds and their pedigree, like all look the same.

Top of their class, Ivy League, Goldman Sachs, this MBA. And like so many of them had the same insane anxiety and emptiness. I still remember the way one of them described how they felt, and she was brilliant with her words, and she said, "I walk around, and it's like when I'm with people and doing things and at work, it's like there's a ton of color.

When I'm alone, I feel like I am an empty room with white walls." Oh, goodness. That's very sad. Very sad. It actually relates to my own childhood. I feel like I've, you know, grown a lot, had my therapy, and I feel like when I was younger, I was really hard-driving and really like somewhat people-pleasing.

And me and my friend who are both like that, were like that, have kids who aren't really like that. And they're amazing kids, and they do so well, and they have this internal confidence. But sometimes we joke, we're like, "But there's nothing that will drive you like feeling not good enough.

There's nothing that drives you like feeling like every test score defines yourself." And it's so sick, right? Because we're almost like conflicted with our kids, like they're all great kids, they're responsible, but they almost have a little bit more inner contentment, right? But I think about that young woman I saw, and how at work, she felt amazing, until, didn't happen until she was 28, she didn't get the promotion she thought she was getting.

And then, I mean... She never failed before. And it's not only the never failure. When your internal sense of self is built outside-in, which you actually can do if you have a lot of accomplishments, it works for a while. But as soon as that stops working, if you have nothing, you feel like in an empty room with white walls.

What's really compelling about the therapy over the course of a number of years is, as I still remember, over COVID, we were then Zooming, and she'd had her own place. And she actually went through this process, and she was very artistic of painting the walls in her actual room, talking about making something concrete, and kind of in the way that she was feeling a lot more lit up inside-out instead of outside-in.

That's great. I certainly don't hold up these ultra performers in all domains on a pedestal. I think they're in a very precarious place inside and outside. They've essentially given up all their power and agency to one incoming failure. And maybe they never experience it, and they get to the end without having done it, but what a terrible way to live anyway.

I've always looked up, since I was little, to people that really took a unique path. I've always found that they, yes, accomplished tremendous things, and they have interesting, sometimes painful flaws. Like, I'm a huge fan of the late neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, very incredible man, very complicated life, became that way and found his passion by realizing how terrible he was at certain things, including certain branches of medicine.

So I think that trying many things and being really realistic about whether or not something's for us or not is the key. But then I guess the question becomes, and this must be so hard from the perspective of parenting, but also just in terms of guiding ourselves through life, is how much friction do we experience before we say, "You know what?

I'm not a musician, and I'm cool with that. I love music, but I'm going to put my efforts into these other things, and this thing comes more easily for me." I do think we have a lot of natural tendencies, and I feel like, especially in the United States, there's been this complicated relationship with parenting and education whereby we don't want to push people to their own suffering and demise, but we also have to avoid not pushing them because then they don't ever find what they are proficient in, and they don't learn that overcoming friction thing.

So it's tricky. So how do you know when to keep pushing your kid to even engage in something? Maybe they're the kid that always is picked last for the team, but you know they should play sports. So I guess my first reaction is I'm reacting to the word "pushing" because I'm not sure that's the verb I would think about because I think the idea of pushing your kid, even like how much do I push, there's a lot about us there.

I guess I grew up in a town where a lot of kids got pushed. Oh, I mean, I grew up in a town where every kid got pushed. So maybe that's why I know something about it, right? I mean, I think we see this all the time, and it goes back to actually what side of the tennis court, like whose feelings are whose.

Is this my unlived dreams as an athlete in my youth, or is this actually about my kid's soccer skills? You know, I think parents watching their kids playing sports is a prime example of am I living out my unfulfilled dreams and projecting that onto my daughter? Or does my daughter like soccer?

And like, how can I really differentiate those, right? I think actually, though, making it back to that, a lot of this actually goes back to frustration tolerance and why it matters so much to me. Like my approach to teaching frustration tolerance, which is like a hidden gem we have here at Kidd Inside, I really want, I want to be in every school.

I think it needs to be in every school, and I want to describe it to you, okay? So I literally have this graph, it's helpful, and I know you like to write things down too to make it concrete, where like point one is not knowing how to do something, okay?

And point two, which is very far away, is let's say knowing how to do it or being very proficient. It could be soccer, I think a good example is reading, okay? Like you, everybody starts out not knowing how to read, and let's say, not everybody, but a lot of people learn how to read.

The space between not knowing and knowing, I call the learning space. It has a name, and it's helpful to know where you are in a map, and the learning space has one feeling that you're supposed to have, frustration. That is the feeling you're supposed to have, and we have this idea that we jet from not knowing to knowing like this.

It's because of those damn Star Wars movies, and, oh, no, actually, Star Wars incorporated some frustration, but it's because of movies. Boom, you're supposed to just have the skill because you picked up the rock or the sword or the pen or the wand. And now, it's because if you think about the circuitry that kids get used to with dopamine, and the space between wanting and having, in general, is low because when you don't know something, you want to know it.

Here, you do know it. Our tolerance and our kids' tolerance for wanting and not having is so low that what's so sad is the learning space has gotten massively compressed, and people fear frustration. This image, when I've gone over this with kids and even teachers, I know teachers who teach us in their class, "Okay, today, we're going to learn this new thing.

We're going to learn whatever it is, you know, how to read a short word." Everybody in this class is here not knowing. Everybody in this class is going to get here. And probably today, most of us, and you can actually do it now, are going to be right here.

What does this say? The learning space. How are we supposed to feel when we're in the learning space? The class can say, "Frustrated, okay, here's an interesting assignment, different than you think. The goal today is not to tell me if you can read the letters that are in front of you.

I want you to raise your hand when you feel frustrated," which feels like this, "Oh, I can't do it," because I'm going to come up to you, and I'm going to give you a high five, and I'm going to say, "You are in the learning space. You are learning.

How amazing is that?" Like, "Andrea, I really believe this has the power to change learning." Because then when we talk about proficiency or when we talk about years from now, my kid is saying, this happens all the time, I get questions about this all the time, my kid says they want to do whatever, it could be a coding class, it could be a lacrosse class, and they do it once, and then they always come home, and they say, "I want to do it, I quit." Or maybe they're on a swim team, and they want to quit.

Do I let my kid quit, right? To me, the question is actually, like, most likely none of our kids are going to be Olympic swimmers or like professional basketball players. I think about this a lot with these sports. The whole goal in my mind for most people with youth sports, not everyone, but most, is learning how to deal with frustration, learning how to do things you thought you couldn't do, character, sharing, being a good teammate, sportsmanship, right?

All those things are hard skills to learn. So the reason I'm signing my kid up for basketball is actually just because it's like a good medium for all those things. And so I want to be sure that if my kid is quitting, it's not because they're escaping the very, very natural learning space that is so important to being in life.

I love, love, love this concept, which I believe to be entirely true, that the learning space between unskilled and skilled, if you will, is characterized by the feeling of frustration in mind and body. I don't want to rattle off another experiment, but there is just oh so much data, I'll share this with you offline, the papers that is, showing that brain plasticity changes in neural circuitry only occur when the chemical milieu of the brain is different than it normally is.

Otherwise, how would the brain know it should change? So what sets the context for massive change in our neural circuitry is when there's a lot of adrenaline in the body, sorry folks, it's true, adrenaline, also called epinephrine, and norepinephrine released in the brain. Now you don't want to be in a state of panic or stress to the point where you're debilitated, but that shift in the chemical milieu sets the stage for rewiring of connections between neurons.

I mean, this is known at the molecular level, it's known at the cellular level, it's known at the circuit level, and I'm excited to share that literature with you because it basically is a bunch of nerd speak and numbers to support the fact that you're nailing it right in the bullseye, which is, without frustration, there is no rewiring of the neural circuits.

And if you think about it, it had to be that way. Right. Otherwise, why would the circuits change? So that the error signal is what sets plasticity in motion.