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Check our app for details. Ralph's, fresh for everyone. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Josh Ruschitz, I'm your host, and today we're going to continue our series on how to invest in your children at a very early age.

And we're going to pivot around third base, fourth base, or second base. I'm not sure which base it is because I've only got three bases here. But we're going to pivot away from talking about the body and the mind, and now we're going to talk about the spirit. The spirit of our children.

And I'm going to use this term spirit very loosely, sometimes talking about the spirit, the soul. Basically, I'm trying to turn away now from the physical. And there's nothing precise or scientific about my categorization scheme. It just is a way of organizing my thinking and my presentation that made sense to me to talk about the physical body of our children, talk about the mind of our children and developing the intellectual capacity.

But now I want to go beyond the mind. And I want to talk about some of those areas of child development that will make a huge difference in the life outcomes of our children. And they're things that go far beyond anything that we've talked about thus far. If you think about the stories that you have heard of successful people, what you'll find is while there are many cases of successful people who have achieved great success by being granted and given all of the privileges and benefits that we've talked about thus far, there are people who are born with beautiful, healthy bodies.

There are people who are born with incredibly powerful, strong, productive, intelligent minds. There are people who have the greatest educational system that surrounds them, et cetera. But there's a whole nother class of success stories that we can observe. And this class of success stories involves children and young people and old people too, all of whom have had no privileges in life.

They were born handicapped. They were not particularly attractive to look at. Their brains were not particularly powerful or they had some significant personal obstacles, some personal handicaps, some speech impediments, some issue that they faced. And yet they were able to defy the odds and raise themselves from failure to success.

And if you start thinking about and studying those people, you quickly recognize that they don't fit the mold of everything we've talked about thus far. And in some, I think there's a good argument we made that these are the people that we should spend a lot of our time focusing on.

When you see somebody get unusual results, it's important to analyze that person in order to understand what does this person do very well? Let's use an example. Let's say that you see an incredibly beautiful woman and that beautiful woman is able to attract a movie star husband. Well, you look at her and say, well, it's obvious why she was able to attract this movie star husband.

She's stunningly gorgeous. But it's more important for you, and she may have other good qualities as well, of course, but it's more important for analysis purposes to find the woman who is not a 10 out of 10 in terms of her physical beauty, and yet was still able to attract a movie star husband.

And ask yourself, what did she do? Who is she? What skills did she develop and exercise in order to attract this phenomenal husband? What was it? And maybe there's an element of randomness to attraction. I don't believe it much, but I'm much more interested to say like, to know, how did she treat him?

How does she speak? What are her mannerisms? Because those are the things that must have had some impact and influence over her ability to attract him. You could use examples from business as well. You find a guy who was given, lent a million dollars or $10 million from his father, and he went out and was able to use that, and he went to a great business school, and he started a business, and he turned the $10 million into $100 million.

Great, congratulations. What a phenomenal achievement. But it's more interesting to study the case of the guy who grew up in the hood, had no connections, had no money, and little by little made his way from $0 to $100 million and figure out what are the character qualities or what are the actions or behaviors that this guy did that allowed him to accomplish it?

Because it's truly a far more extraordinary outcome than the guy who was given $10 million by his wealthy parents to go and start a business. And these are some of the things that I wanna touch on in this particular part of the series. These features of the spirit, these character qualities, these virtues that don't fit beautifully into the structure that we've built so far.

I wanna begin with reading an excerpt from this book called, this is a book called "How Children Succeed, Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character." The author here is Paul Tuff. And in his introduction to the book, he describes exactly what I am talking about. In the beginning paragraphs, he describes his newborn son named Ellington.

And he describes how he's thinking about what is gonna help my son Ellington to be successful, et cetera. And he shares this little bit of background to the story. Ellington would be growing up in a culture saturated with an idea you might call the cognitive hypothesis. The belief rarely expressed aloud, but commonly held nonetheless, that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills.

The kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests, including the abilities to recognize letters and words, to calculate, to detect patterns. And that the best way to develop these skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible. The cognitive hypothesis has become so universally accepted that it is easy to forget that it is actually a relatively new invention.

You can trace its contemporary rise in fact to 1994, when the Carnegie Corporation published "Starting Points," meeting the needs of our youngest children. A report that sounded an alarm about the cognitive development of our nation's children. The problem, according to the report, was that children were no longer receiving enough cognitive stimulation in the first three years of life.

In part, because of the increasing number of single parent families and working mothers, and so they were arriving in kindergarten unready to learn. The report launched an entire industry of brain building zero to three products for worried parents. Billions of dollars worth of books and activity gyms and baby Einstein videos and DVDs were sold.

The Carnegie findings and the studies that followed in their wake had a powerful effect on public policy too. As legislators and philanthropists concluded that disadvantaged children were falling behind early on because of insufficient cognitive training. Psychologists and sociologists produced evidence linking the academic underperformance of poor children to a lack of verbal and mathematical stimulation at home and at school.

One of the most famous of these studies, which I wrote about in my first book, "Whatever It Takes," was conducted by Betty Hart and Todd Risley, two child psychologists who, beginning in the 1980s, intensively studied a group of 42 children from professional, working class, and welfare families in Kansas City.

Hart and Risley found that the crucial difference in the children's upbringings and the reason for the divergence in their later outcomes boiled down to one thing, the number of words that the children heard from their parents early in life. By age three, Hart and Risley determined, the children raised by professional parents had heard 30 million words spoken to them.

The children with parents on welfare had heard just 10 million. That shortfall they concluded was at the root of the poorer kids' later failures in school and in life. There is something undeniably compelling about the cognitive hypothesis. The world it describes is so neat, so reassuringly linear, such a clear case of inputs here leading to outputs there.

Fewer books in the home means less reading ability. Fewer words spoken by parents means a smaller vocabulary for their kids. More math worksheets at junior come on means better math scores. The correlations at times seemed almost comically exact. Hart and Risley calculated that a child who grew up on welfare would need precisely 41 hours of language intensive intervention each week in order to close the vocabulary gap with a working class child.

But in the past decade, and especially in the past few years, a disparate congregation of economists, educators, psychologists, and neuroscientists have begun to produce evidence that calls into question many of the assumptions behind the cognitive hypothesis. What matters most in a child's development, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years.

What matters instead is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as non-cognitive skills. Psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us sometimes think of them as character.

For certain skills, the stark calculus behind the cognitive hypothesis that what matters in developing a skill is starting earlier and practicing more is entirely valid. If you want to perfect your foul shot, shooting 200 free throws every afternoon is indeed going to be more helpful than shooting 20 free throws every afternoon.

If you're in fourth grade, reading 40 books over the summer is going to improve your reading ability more than reading four books. Some skills really are pretty mechanical, but when it comes to developing the more subtle elements of the human personality, things aren't so simple. We can't get better at overcoming disappointment just by working harder at it for more hours, and children don't lag behind in curiosity simply because they didn't start doing curiosity drills at an early enough age.

The pathways through which we acquire and lose these skills are certainly not random. Psychologists and neuroscientists have learned a lot in the past few decades about where these skills come from and how they are developed, but they are complex, unfamiliar, and often quite mysterious. A little bit later in the introduction, after being introduced to a man named Heckman, we are given an introduction to something called the PERI project.

What the GED study didn't give Heckman was any indication of whether it was possible to help children develop those so-called soft skills. His search for an answer to that question led him, almost a decade ago, to Ypsilanti, Michigan, an old industrial town west of Detroit. In the mid-1960s, in the early days of the war on poverty, a group of child psychologists and education researchers undertook an experiment there, recruiting low-income, low-IQ parents from the town's black neighborhoods to sign up their three- and four-year-old kids for the PERI preschool.

The recruited children were divided randomly into a treatment group and a control group. Children in the treatment group were admitted to PERI, a high-quality, two-year preschool program, and kids in the control group were left to fend for themselves. And then the children were tracked, not just for a year or two, but for decades, in an ongoing study that is intended to follow them for the rest of their lives.

The subjects are now in their 40s, which means that researchers have been able to trace the effects of the PERI intervention well into adulthood. The PERI preschool project is famous in social science circles, and Heckman had encountered it, glancingly, several times before in his career. As a case for early childhood intervention, the experiment had always been considered something of a failure.

The treatment children did do significantly better on cognitive tests while attending the preschool, and for a year or two afterward, but the gains did not last. And by the time the treatment children were in the third grade, their IQ scores were no better than the control groups. But when Heckman and other researchers looked at the long-term results of PERI, the data appeared more promising.

It was true that the PERI kids hadn't experienced lasting IQ benefits, but something important had happened to them in preschool, and whatever it was, the positive effects resonated for decades. Compared to the control group, the PERI students were more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to be employed at age 27, more likely to be earning more than $25,000 a year at age 40, less likely ever to have been arrested, and less likely to have spent time on welfare.

Heckman began to rummage more deeply into the PERI study, and he learned that in the 1960s and 1970s, researchers had collected some data on the students that had never been analyzed, reports from teachers in elementary school rating both the treatment and the control children on personal behavior and social development.

The first term tracked how often each student swore, lied, stole, or was absent or late. The second one rated each student's level of curiosity as well as his or her relationships with classmates and teachers. Heckman labeled these non-cognitive skills because they were entirely distinct from IQ. And after three years of careful analysis, Heckman and his researchers were able to ascertain that those non-cognitive factors, such as curiosity, self-control, and social fluidity, were responsible for as much as two thirds of the total benefit that PERI gave its students.

The PERI preschool project, in other words, worked entirely differently than everyone had believed. The good-hearted educators who set it up in the '60s thought that they were creating a program to raise the intelligence of low-income children. They, like everyone else, believed that was the way to help poor kids get ahead in America.

Surprise number one was that they created a program that didn't do much in the long term for IQ, but did improve behavior and social skills. Surprise number two was that it helped anyway. For the kids in Ypsilanti, those skills and the underlying traits they reflected turned out to be very valuable indeed.

Now, if you're interested in reading the book, the book, again, is called "How Children Succeed, "Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character." And the author, again, is Paul Tuff. This is one of probably two of the most well-known books in this space. The other really well-known book is a book called "Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance" by Angela Duckworth, which talks a lot about the importance of grit, which will be my first thing that I talk about.

Now, I've struggled to figure out the scope of what I want to share with you here on the podcast, because certainly if somebody were offering today a five-day seminar on how to develop these soft skills in children, I would be signing up. These two books that I've mentioned combined are probably what, 800 pages, I would say.

And I am not an expert in this space. And what's more challenging is I'm humbled by my own personal results in these areas. I'm generally satisfied with my work as a parent, with the development of my children's bodies, with the development of my children's minds, and I'm dissatisfied with my work as a parent in the developing of my children's spirits on some of these dimensions.

I'm working hard at it, but I'm quite humbled at a lot of my failures in this area. And I desire very much to be the student, not to be the teacher. So in that spirit, I'm going to present to you some ideas that I think are the correct direction to be looking, but I don't have as many good answers in this area of discussion as I have in some of the other areas that we've discussed.

I'm very much learning, and I hope I can come back in a year or two years or three years or 10 years and have a lot more insight into some of the specific things that are important. And so with that in mind and in that spirit, I wanna share with you some things that I think really matter.

And just for the sake of organizing my own thinking, I think about this in terms of installing the skills of success or installing the mindset of success, stability and significance. And I wanna give a metaphor for how I consider this. I think of this particular area of our work as parents as simply installing a high quality operating system into the minds of our children.

That's how I think of it. And obviously it's the computer analogy. By way of the computer analogy, we have the physical infrastructure of a computer that is going to determine its ultimate capability. And then we install the operating system. And body, what we talked about in terms of body was the physical infrastructure of our children on a very physical level.

When we started to talk about the mind, that is a physical development discussion, but then we're moving over into enhancing the ability to run more powerful software, et cetera. But in this area where we're talking about the spirit, we're very much talking about software. We're talking about the way that our children interpret life and the things that happen to them.

And having been a student of this, from my own psychology for a long time, I consider this to be one of the most fruitful areas of discussion for us as adults, because the software operating system that we have is something that was usually given to us. And yet it's something that we can systematically pull apart, we can choose the things that are useful to us, and we can set aside the things that are not.

None of us are victims of our childhood, unless we choose to continue to be victims of our childhood. We get to take the experiences that we have had and interpret them in a very different light. I'd like to persuade you of this point with a story and just a quick introduction.

This comes from, to me, the most powerful story that is contained in the book called "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, "Powerful Lessons in Personal Change." It's a classic personal development book by Stephen R. Covey. And in this section, he talks about the power of a paradigm shift.

Perhaps the most important insight to be gained from the perception demonstration is in the area of paradigm shifting, what we might call the aha experience, when someone finally sees the composite picture in another way. The more bound a person is by the initial perception, the more powerful the aha experience is.

It's as though a light were suddenly turned on inside. The term paradigm shift was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in his highly influential landmark book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Kuhn shows how almost every significant breakthrough in the field of scientific endeavor is first a break with tradition, with old ways of thinking, with old paradigms.

For Ptolemy, the great Egyptian astronomer, the earth was the center of the universe, but Copernicus created a paradigm shift and a great deal of resistance and persecution as well by placing the sun at the center. Suddenly, everything took on a different interpretation. The Newtonian model of physics was a clockwork paradigm and is still the basis of modern engineering, but it was partial, incomplete.

The scientific world was revolutionized by the Einsteinian paradigm, the relativity paradigm, which had much higher predictive and explanatory value. Until the germ theory was developed, a high percentage of women and children died during childbirth and no one could understand why. In military skirmishes, more men were dying from small wounds and diseases than from the major traumas on the front lines.

But as soon as germ theory was developed, a whole new paradigm, a better improved way of understanding what was happening, made dramatic, significant medical improvement possible. The United States today is the fruit of a paradigm shift. The traditional concept of government for centuries had been a monarchy, the divine right of kings.

Then a different paradigm was developed, government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And a constitutional democracy was born, unleashing tremendous human energy and ingenuity and creating a standard of living, of freedom and liberty, of influence and hope unequaled in the history of the world. Not all paradigm shifts are in positive directions.

As we have observed, the shift from the character ethic to the personality ethic has drawn us away from the very roots that nourish true success and happiness. But whether they shift us in positive or negative directions, whether they are instantaneous or developmental, paradigm shifts move us from one way of seeing the world to another.

And those shifts create powerful change. Our paradigms, correct or incorrect, are the sources of our attitudes and behaviors and ultimately our relationships with others. I remember a mini paradigm shift that I experienced one Sunday morning on a subway in New York. People were sitting quietly, some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed.

It was a calm, peaceful scene. Then suddenly a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed. The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people's papers.

It was very disturbing. And yet the man sitting next to me did nothing. It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated too.

So finally, with what I felt was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, "Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. "I wonder if you couldn't control them a little more?" The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, "Oh, you're right.

"I guess I should do something about it. "We just came from the hospital where their mother died "about an hour ago. "I don't know what to think, "and I guess they don't know how to handle it either." Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted.

Suddenly I saw things differently. And because I saw differently, I thought differently. I felt differently. I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn't have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior. My heart was filled with the man's pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely. "Your wife just died?

"I'm so sorry. "Can you tell me about it? "What can I do to help?" Everything changed in an instant. Now Covey goes on and continues that theme. But for me, that story is one that is burned in my memory as the most powerful example of a relatively instant paradigm shift.

And I hope that, especially if it's the first time you've been exposed to it, I hope it does the same for you. We realize in an instant that though the outward circumstances are completely unchanged, our attitude about those circumstances is different. And this is extraordinarily powerful for us as adults is to practice imposing on ourselves ways of thinking that are helpful, that are useful to us in accomplishing our long-term goals.

Now, I am imperfect at this. I'd like to be better. I'm sure in 10 years I will be much better. But one of the ways I do it is to focus on just little sayings. You've heard me say on the podcast, sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn.

That's a powerful way to affect your thinking, to recognize that I win and I learn. Losses are simply learning. And here we talk about the importance of failure in a bit as we get through some of what I have planned to share with you. And in your life, there are so many things you can do.

I'm amazed at, a good example would be traffic incidents. Perhaps all of us have, I'm sure all of us, if someone has done something in traffic or treated us in a way that was rude and just made us frustrated and we instantly felt that surge of emotion pour over us and we wanted to react and lash out.

And yet how stupid would that be to surge, to lash out, to engage in some road rage incident and find ourselves imprisoned or paying a fine or causing an accident or causing harm to another human in some way because of an example. And so one of the things I try to do is always assume the very best.

All of us have inadvertently done something in traffic that we didn't mean to. Cut someone else off, disobeyed a rule, et cetera. And so I have worked to train myself to do two things. Number one, to always assume that the other person just inadvertently made a mistake. Oh, they didn't see me.

That's why they cut me off. Or the guy's in a hurry. He has something really important. And in the same way that the story on the subway, I've just said, if you just to say that the reason that guy is driving like a maniac is not because that's some kid who just drives like a maniac, but rather there's a guy who has a dying wife in the car and he's trying to get her to the hospital or a birthing wife or something like that, he's gotta go.

Then it changes your attitude. And it doesn't matter whether it's true. It could be true or it could not be true. What matters is that it changes your way of thinking. And then simultaneous with that, I have a big commitment to the basic idea of, am I gonna remember this in 10 years or 20 years?

Or is this gonna matter in 10 years or 20 years? I ask myself, is this experience that I'm going through, is it gonna matter in 20 years? Am I gonna be upset about this in 20 years? If I'm not gonna be upset about this in 20 years, then why don't I just skip that?

Skip there, right? Let me go right to 20 years from now and just assume that. I'm not gonna remember that someone cut me off 20 years from now. I'm not gonna be upset about the fact that my tent is full of water and it's a miserable night. I'm gonna laugh about it.

So why not just go ahead and skip forward and laugh now? 'Cause as human beings, we can control our minds. We can control our thoughts. It's one of the very few things in the world that we have control over. We can't control our external world. We can't control the people around us.

We can't control the circumstances in which we are. But we can control our minds. We can control the thoughts that we choose to think. And so this is fundamentally useful. It's a useful way of thinking. And we should be dedicated to training ourselves to adopt these useful ways of thinking.

One more example. In interpersonal relationships, I believe it's always important to believe the best about other people. I was taught this myself as a child, both explicitly in religious instruction, as well as by example, by the example of my parents. And in Christianity, this comes from 1 Corinthians 13, the famous chapter on love.

But it says that love believes all things, looking for the best in each one. That this is what love does. And so if we're going to love another man, that means that I need to believe him. I need to believe the best. I need to always order things. Love believes all things.

It hopes all things. It endures all things. And so we believe the best about each one, regardless of what comes. We bear with one another. We hope all things, always holding out hope that for the very best possible, we endure all things without weakening. That's what it means to love another person.

And so when we apply this in human relationships, the practical application is, you always believe the very best version of the circumstances that are in front of you. If somebody comes to you and you're not sure if they're telling you the truth or if they're lying, believe the best.

Believe them. Believe they're telling you the truth. If somebody comes to you and says he's sincere, then believe that he's sincere. Don't automatically assume he's insincere and cast him aside. Believe the very best. This is not to be naive. If there is evidence that somebody is lying, then you believe the very best about the evidence.

If there's evidence that someone's lying, you believe they're lying, but you believe that they may not have meant to lie. They may not have intended to lie. They may have been blackmailed into lying. You look for the very best explanation. And this is a magical transformative belief. It's a magical transformative practice because it takes your interpersonal relationships.

And instead of you sitting back and judging other people and talking about how they're wrong, you're always putting them in the best possible light. And this helps people to feel good. And what happens is when people feel good about themselves, or when people feel good about you and they feel good about themselves, it leads to more positive human relationships.

And so these software programs, or these lines of code that we put into our mind have a fundamentally powerful impact on our lives as adults. And these are all components of the lessons that we need to teach our children, consistently teach our children. And this principle is something that you can take and you can apply in many, many ways.

So let me just cover some big picture discussions. As I said, I feel willfully inadequate in presenting these ideas to you because this is deserving of a week long seminar and I'm not yet capable of delivering that seminar. So let me just share some high level ideas, starting with success.

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Don't lose out on your chance to get a Maverick X3. Visit Del Amo Motorsports of Orange County in Santa Ana and get yours. Offer in soon, see dealer for details. - So we're trying to instill a high quality operating system of success. Here, the world of things are very, very important, but here are some of the ones that are most important to me.

The first has to do with persistence or grit. This is again, the title of Angela Duckworth's book, "Grit." And if I had to summarize her findings is basically people who have grit overcome no matter what. And I've observed this so many times. If you think about the people who win in the longterm, it's people who have grit.

They just kind of ignore what happens and they keep on going. And this persistence, this grit that represents somebody's determination to continue no matter the odds, their passion, their motivation to continue pressing through, this separates people in the fullness of time from everyone else. And it basically is a belief that what I'm doing matters and if I just keep going, it'll work.

This is something that I personally believe and it's something that I use for myself and I hope to install into my children. My belief is this, I'm not the smartest guy out there. I'm not the most capable guy out there. I have all kinds of weaknesses, just like everybody else.

I do believe everyone has these weaknesses, but as long as I don't quit, my success is inevitable. As long as I don't quit, my success is inevitable because the only thing that can keep me from achieving success in an area that I have applied myself to is if I quit.

And this forms the foundation of my basic operating system for goal achievement. I have failed on so many goals that I have set for myself. I have virtually never hit a deadline or a target date of accomplishment. I virtually never do that. My success is in anything. I've almost never bat 100%, meaning I do this every day.

This is something that I do every day. I virtually never do that, but I pride myself on I never quit. And so I might set out on a plan and say, you know, I don't know, right now I'm learning Greek. So I might say, you know what, my goal is in one year I'm gonna learn Greek and I'm gonna be able to read the Koine Greek New Testament with some degree of fluidity.

I might achieve it or I might not, I don't know. We're four months into the project, I'm behind schedule as usual. But I know that as long as I don't quit, I'll achieve it eventually. And it doesn't matter whether it takes me one year or 10 years or 60 years.

I might be an old man sitting in the back on my back porch in my rocking chair and I'll be steadily working my way through the accomplishment of this goal. Because as long as I don't quit, I'm guaranteed to be successful, guaranteed. Doesn't matter whether it takes me twice as long as everyone else or half the time as everyone else, the important thing is that I don't quit.

I consider this an incredibly powerful operating system, an incredibly powerful thing. It motivates me, it inspires me, because what it does is simply takes away from me every excuse as to why I can't do something. And it keeps me in a position of power. It keeps me in the position to say, I gotta do it.

And by the way, it doesn't even matter if I quit. I've quit so many things, tons of times. All that matters is if I decide I wanna do it again, I unquit. Quitting is something you can do in an instant. And it doesn't matter whether you've quit and unquit a hundred times before, what matters is that you quit again.

Or sorry, whatever, if we're talking about giving up negative things or positive things, the point is that it's just a decision. You don't have to continue, you just decide and stop. There's no reason to ascribe more meaning to it than anything else. You wouldn't tell, you don't tell a guy who's, I don't know, who's failed at college and he's failed out five times.

You don't tell him, yeah, you just better quit for the rest of your life. If you ask him, do you wanna finish college? And he says, yeah, I wanna finish college. All right, well, we gotta figure something else out 'cause we've just learned five things that haven't worked for you.

So we gotta find a new solution, but we're not gonna quit. And what happens is we tell stories about our heroes. We tell stories about Thomas Edison who tried 10,000 things and they said, how do you feel after trying 10,000 things? And aren't you a failure? And he says, no, I've just found 10,000 things that won't work.

But then we failed often to turn around and apply it to our own lives. But that's a powerful principle, it's a powerful software. The guy who refuses to quit ever is the guy who's eventually gonna get there. And once you articulate this principle clearly, you see it everywhere in society.

You see it in the stories that we tell of our heroes, whether it's Einstein or some indomitable military hero, we tell it in Aesop's fables, the fable of the tortoise and the hare. And so what I think we need to do for children is identify these things explicitly and install into them the ideas that these basic character qualities and grit and persistence and not giving up are the fundamental components of long-term success.

Another one that is extremely important to me is a growth mindset. This again is made famous in recent days by a book by, is it Dweck, Carol Dweck, I think, who wrote a book called "Mindset, Growth Mindset." Yeah, "Mindset, the New Psychology of Success" by Carol Dweck. And this, again, if I had to summarize this book in a sentence, it's basically, if you see yourself as on a journey to growth and you continue growing, you're unbeatable.

That's the mindset we need to have. And so with regard to our children, I think we want to install in them a growth mindset. We want to help them see themselves as learners, people who are not on a journey that's going to end at a certain day and they're gonna develop this fixed mindset, the contrast is between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset, but rather see themselves as people who are growing, who are expanding, and this is a lifelong joy.

And this process of growth is going to fundamentally transform them because they believe in it. Let me take a moment here and read you an excerpt from the introduction of the book to make this clear. I had not planned to cover it, but I wanna cover it. And so reading from "Mindset" by Carol Dweck.

"What does all this mean for you, the two mindsets? It's one thing to have pundits spouting their opinions about scientific issues. It's another thing to understand how these views apply to you. For 20 years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.

It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value. How does this happen? How can a simple belief have the power to transform your psychology and, as a result, your life? Believing that your qualities are carved in stone, the fixed mindset, creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over.

If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character, well, then you'd better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn't do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics. Some of us are trained in this mindset from an early age.

Even as a child, I was focused on being smart, but the fixed mindset was really stamped in by Mrs. Wilson, my sixth grade teacher. Unlike Alfred Bennett, she believed that people's IQ scores told the whole story of who they were. We were seated around the room in IQ order, and only the highest IQ students could be trusted to carry the flag, clap the erasers, or take a note to the principal.

Aside from the daily stomach aches she provoked with her judgmental stance, she was creating a mindset in which everyone in the class had one consuming goal, look smart, don't look dumb. Who cared about or enjoyed learning when our whole being was at stake every time she gave us a test or called on us in class?

I've seen so many people with this one consuming goal of proving themselves in the classroom, in their careers, and in their relationships. Every situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality, or character. Every situation is evaluated. Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected?

Will I feel like a winner or a loser? But doesn't our society value intelligence, personality, and character? Isn't it normal to want these traits? Yes, but there's another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you're dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you're secretly worried it's a pair of 10s.

In this mindset, the hand you're dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way, in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments, everyone can change and grow through application and experience.

Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything? That anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person's true potential is unknown and unknowable, that it's impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.

Did you know that Darwin and Tolstoy were considered ordinary children? That Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers of all time, was completely uncoordinated and graceless as a child? That the photographer Cindy Sherman, who has been on virtually every list of the most important artists of the 20th century, failed her first photography course?

That Geraldine Page, one of our greatest actresses, was advised to give it up for lack of talent? You can see how the belief that cherished qualities can be developed creates a passion for learning. Why waste time proving over and over how great you are when you could be getting better?

Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it even, or especially, when it's not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset.

This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives. Now for a limited time at Del Amo Motorsports of Orange County. Get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on Select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3. Considering the Mavericks taking home trophies everywhere from King of the Hammers to Uncle Ned's Backcountry Rally, you're not going to find a better deal on front row seats to a championship winner.

Don't lose out on your chance to get a Maverick X3. Visit Del Amo Motorsports of Orange County in Santa Ana and get yours. Offer in soon, see dealer for details. A view from the two mindsets. To give you a better sense of how the two mindsets work, imagine as vividly as you can that you are a young adult having a really bad day.

One day you go to a class that is really important to you and that you like a lot. The professor returns the midterm papers to the class. You got a C plus. You're very disappointed. That evening on your way back to your home, you find that you've gotten a parking ticket.

Being really frustrated, you call your best friend to share your experience but are sort of brushed off. What would you think? What would you feel? What would you do? When I ask people with a fixed mindset, this is what they said. I'd feel like a reject. I'm a total failure.

I'm an idiot. I'm a loser. I'd feel worthless and dumb. Everyone's better than me. I'm slime. In other words, they'd see what happened as a direct measure of their competence and worth. This is what they think about their lives. My life is pitiful. I have no life. Somebody upstairs doesn't like me.

The world is out to get me. Someone is out to destroy me. Nobody loves me. Everybody hates me. Life is unfair and all efforts are useless. Life stinks. I'm stupid. Nothing good ever happens to me. I'm the most unlucky person on this earth. Excuse me? Was there death and destruction or just a grade, a ticket and a bad phone call?

Are these just people with low self-esteem or card-carrying pessimists? No. When they aren't coping with failure, they feel just as worthy and optimistic and bright and attractive as people with a growth mindset. So how would they cope? I wouldn't bother to put so much time and effort into doing well in anything.

In other words, don't let anyone measure you again. Do nothing. Stay in bed. Get drunk. Eat. Yell at someone if I get a chance to. Eat chocolate. Listen to music and pout. Go into my closet and sit there. Pick a fight with somebody. Cry. Break something. What is there to do?

What is there to do? You know, when I wrote the vignette, I intentionally made the grade a C plus, not an F. It was a midterm rather than a final. It was a parking ticket, not a car wreck. They were sort of brushed off, not rejected outright. Nothing catastrophic or irreversible happened.

Yet from this raw material, the fixed mindset creates the feeling of utter failure and paralysis. When I gave people with a growth mindset the same vignette, here's what they said. They'd think, "I need to try harder in class, "be more careful when parking the car, "and wonder if my friend had a bad day." The C plus would tell me that I'd have to work a lot harder in the class, but I have the rest of the semester to pull up my grade.

There were many, many more like this, but I think you get the idea. Now, how would they cope? Directly. I'd start thinking about studying harder or studying in a different way for my next test in that class. I'd pay the ticket and I'd work things out with my best friend the next time we speak.

I'd look at what was wrong on my exam, resolve to do better, pay my parking ticket, and call my friend to tell her I was upset the day before. Work hard on my next paper, speak to the teacher, be more careful where I park or contest the ticket, and find out what's wrong with my friend.

You don't have to have one mindset or the other to be upset. Who wouldn't be? Things like a poor grade or a rebuff from a friend or loved one, these are not fun events. No one was smacking their lips with relish. Yet those people with the growth mindset were not labeling themselves and throwing up their hands.

Even though they felt distressed, they were ready to take the risks, confront the challenges, and keep working at them. So if that sounds interesting to you, I commend the rest of the book to you, again, called "Mindset" by Carol Dweck. But the point is that you can take events and you can interpret them in two different ways.

And one way, as you could see, is healthy and leads to good outcomes. The guy who says, "I gotta study harder, "be more careful where I park, "and try to reach out to my friend another time," is a guy who's ultimately gonna wind up passing the class, probably get a B plus, an A minus when he does better, figure out a solution, he's gonna have a healthy friendship, and he's gonna learn that it's always cheaper to just feed the meter than it is to pay the ticket.

But these are no big deal. The guy with the growth mindset is gonna get drunk, he's gonna destroy a relationship with a friend, and, or get fat, and everything is gonna get worse, he's gonna drop out of the class and not learn anything. So giving our children this growth mindset from an early age, I think is fundamentally important.

Other components of this, right? Teaching about passion. And I fear a lot of times that passion is over-discussed. It was once under-discussed, I think, but now I think it's over-discussed. But it really does matter, right? Connect with the things that you're really enthusiastic about, and then an important lesson is, do whatever you're doing with passion.

Do it heartily, do it with passion. If you can't be passionate about a subject, at least you can be passionate about the way that you do whatever it is that you are doing. Learning to fail. I feel like I'd just be repetitive if I go deeply into this, but one of the fundamental components is just to learn that failure is an important part of life.

The guy who can fail the most in life is generally gonna go the farthest, because those lessons learned in failure are in many ways more important than the lessons learned in success. And so learning to fail is super, super important. Now, this list is not all-inclusive. There are so many other topics that I could list and discuss, but I don't wanna take the time to do that.

I wanna encourage you to consider what are those fundamental attributes that you consider to be non-negotiable, and for you to consider how you can build those useful beliefs into your children from the earliest of ages, and how you can help them to practice these things. In a future episode in this, I'll talk about how I believe that virtually all of these virtues and character traits are skills, and the distinction of how a skill means it's something that can be acquired, and it's something that can be developed.

These are not innate, fundamental, unacquired traits. They are skills that can be developed, but I wanna deal with that in a second, in a different episode. What I wanna finish this episode with is back to this metaphor of the operating system. If at all possible, I believe that you want to take these skills of success, and you want to teach them to your children with the greatest possible level of conviction.

You certainly want to model these skills. You want them to see you, but you want to articulate them, and you want to articulate them precisely so that your children can understand them at the earliest age possible. I wanna take a moment to, for a focused excursus on my own journey, and how over time I came to believe more strongly and deeply in my successful life as I developed a more coherent philosophical identity.

When I was younger, I was exposed to Christian theological teaching, and I was exposed to success, kind of success teaching. I exposed myself to these things intentionally. And for a long time, there was no connection between these two fields. And yeah, a lot of the success gurus would kind of wave their hand at God and a higher power and other stuff, but I didn't really have any conviction about those things.

And so I absorbed the success gurus' teachings, and I had my biblical understanding, but they weren't really strongly connected. But over time, I came to see them much more strongly connected in a way that has brought me huge amounts of confidence in my life. And let me give you a glimpse of that, because this is what I do teach my children, what I intend to teach my children, and I believe that it's fundamentally powerful if somebody believes these things, as I do, and it brings together life and this kind of success skills in a coherent and real way.

When I was in my early to mid-20s, early 20s, I guess, I started reading the Bible a lot. And I'd grown up around Christianity, but I hadn't read the Bible a lot. And so I really just, I started reading the Bible again and again and again and again. And along the way, that process of just reading the Bible completely transformed several significant aspects of my understanding of the world and of my theology.

A major change that happened to me had to do with having a deeper appreciation of the sovereignty of God. Sovereignty is a word that means the control, the power, the authority of God. When I was a boy, I didn't think much of God controlling the world and manipulating the affairs of the world.

I kind of, I was very focused on the freedom of man. There's this classic debate in theological circles between the sovereignty of God and the free will of man. It's a debate across all levels of all philosophies, et cetera, the sovereignty of God versus the free will of man.

And I just didn't think much about the sovereignty of God. But when I read my Bible a bunch of times, all of a sudden I came to this deep, strong conviction that God is ordering the universe. God is controlling the affairs of the universe in a very strong and powerful way.

And this increased my faith. And it caused me to start to see myself and to see how these things work together and to believe that God was involved in my life. He was ordering all of the affairs around me. And this is an incredibly powerful thing. If you believe, as I do, in a personal, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God, meaning God who is all powerful, all knowing, and is in all places, and he is personal, he cares about my life, and he orders the steps of my life, it brings this profound sense of relief 'cause I don't have to do it all anymore.

I don't have to figure it out. God is conspiring for my good. And when I matched that over, for example, Brian Tracy was one of my early success guru mentors that I really appreciated 'cause he was just so clear. And he would say things like, "Believe that the world is conspiring for your good.

"Believe that everything is for your good," et cetera. But I didn't have an anchoring, a grounding for that. I believed, okay, that's a useful mental model. That's appropriate. But I didn't believe it at a deep level. It was more of, okay, I could see, I could turn that on or off.

But as I grew to believe it at a deep level, it brought a completely different experience of life to me, an experience of faith, of conviction, that God is ordering the steps of my life. God is arranging things for my good. And then what's so powerful about this is that this works in Christian theology regardless of what the outcome is.

In the Bible, there's clear examples of how when we trust God and we follow God and we obey Him, there are times in which that leads to what we call blessings, meaning positive feedback, things that make us feel like we are doing well. We may have riches, we may have joy, we may have, or happiness even.

We may have just this experience where we say, "God is really blessing me. "Man, my business is going well," et cetera. On the other hand, Christians are frequently admonished that don't judge what is happening in your life based upon the perspective of external blessings. So I may be going through tremendous trials, tremendous difficulties, my business may be failing, and I still bless God in the middle of it.

And this is what's so powerful about Christianity specifically, is that the external evidence, quote-unquote, for success or failure is not the arbiter, the real arbiter of success and failure. After all, Jesus Christ Himself ended His life, or His life was ended, His life was ended when He was completely impoverished, had nothing, died in what seemed to be the world's greatest failure, and yet, and all of His disciples betrayed Him and forsook Him at the last time, at the last moment.

And yet, from that depth of despair, from that seemingly quite inauspicious beginning, the world has been utterly transformed over the past 2,000 years. And so you can't judge from external evidence. So, and again, in Scripture itself, Scriptures are commanded, right? Paul says, "I've learned to abound, "and I've learned to be abased," right?

"I've learned to be in want, "and I've learned to be in plenty, "and I will bless God in the middle of both of those things." So this is what's so powerful, is what does God want from me in these circumstances? Well, He wants faithfulness, He wants a faithful heart, and what matters is not the outcome.

What matters is how I go through the circumstances. What matters is what I do. And what is so powerful about religious conviction and religious belief is that you have hope, and that hope is not dependent upon current circumstances. That hope is for this life, but it is also for that next life.

And so in the halls of heroes, we look back in Christian tradition, and we see that many people's hopes were never rewarded in this life. Many faithful men and women have been sawn in two, many have been put up as torches, many have been impoverished and starved to death, and yet their reward, their success is guaranteed, because that success comes in heaven.

That success comes in the new heavens and the new earth. That success comes in the next life. And this life and how we proceed through this life is preparation for the next life. And what matters is not the specific outcome, but what matters is what we do. Over time, I came to what I think is a more mature understanding of this interplay between my responsibility and God's divine ordering.

Currently, my current understanding of scripture is on this issue is what I would align with what is called Molinism. It's not Calvinism, it's not Arminianism, it's Molinism. And Molinius Calvin, of course, if you're, I shouldn't say of course, for the uninitiated, John Calvin is a famous Protestant theologian, and he was a French theologian, and he preached and lived in Geneva.

And he developed these very strong persuasive arguments that have led to many people who identify themselves under the doctrine of what is called Calvinism. And Calvinism has a variety of distinctive features, but if we had to wrap it all up in one feature, I would say it's that God controls everything.

God does everything, God controls everything. And there's different expressions of that in terms of how that gets applied. Now, there was another of his contemporaries named Arminius, what was his first name? Jacob Arminius, I think. And so Arminianism is a doctrine in Protestant Christianity that basically says, well, God does not do everything, but it's human beings that do everything.

And human beings are the ones who are responsible to obey and who are responsible to do things and are responsible to respond, et cetera. And so there's this classic arguments between these things, and it's across all of, again, Christianity and philosophy broadly. Now, separately, there's a third guy who wound up weighing in on some of these battles, and he was not a Protestant theologian, but rather a Roman Catholic theologian named Louis de Molina.

And he developed the ideas of what today are referred to as Molinism. And what I consider myself so powerful about the teachings of, or the idea, the philosophy of Molinism is that it unites these two forces in a really powerful way. And here's what Molina, what he taught, what Molinism is.

Molinism is, it says that God has basically three forms of knowledge. So the first form of knowledge is that of necessary truths or natural knowledge. This kind of knowledge is truth that is independent of God's will and is non-contingent. So this is knowledge of facts. The classic example is that all bachelors are unmarried.

The fact that all bachelors are unmarried is not a fact that's based upon God's will. It is simply a non-contingent statement. The second kind of knowledge that God has is that of what is called middle knowledge. And this kind of knowledge is that God knows all things that would happen in any infinite number of choices or decisions.

So God knows what would happen if I leave my house at nine o'clock to drive to work. And God knows what would happen if I were to leave my house at 9.10 and drive to work. All of these, this kinds of knowledge is part of God's knowledge. And then the third kind of knowledge is God's free knowledge.

And this knowledge is knowledge that consists of contingent truths that are dependent upon God's will, the things that he brings about, the things that he does. And in this third knowledge, this free knowledge, we have God specifically controlling the events of mankind. So the classic example here is God created the world.

He caused the world to come into being. And he was the causal agent in that. So here would be an example of why this is so satisfying, at least to me, and perhaps to you also. Think about a specific, think about an example like this. Jesus Christ, when he was crucified by the Roman government, Pontius Pilate, did God cause Pontius Pilate to condemn Jesus Christ to death?

If you read about the trial proceedings of Christ, here was an innocent man who was completely innocent of the crimes of which he was accused. Pilate said he was innocent, and Pilate had the opportunity to free him. So did God cause Pilate to free Christ? Was God a causal agent in that?

Or was Pilate free to not condemn Jesus Christ to death? 'Cause Pilate had full control. Pilate could have said, "No, we're gonna set him free." And under the law at that time, the Jews would not have been able to crucify Christ, because it was Pilate's, it was his authority.

So then would God's plan have been foiled? Because it was predicted from the beginning of mankind, from centuries, we have hundreds and hundreds of predictions about the life of Christ from centuries earlier. And so how would these things have come true if Jesus Christ had not fulfilled them? We know that Christ himself was in a very self-aware manner, specifically fulfilling the predictions made about him.

And the ultimate prediction was that he was going to die and be raised. So how does this work? Well, I find it very satisfying to consider this concept of middle knowledge. And basically, I would defend this idea, that God knows all of the potential outcomes of any particular set of decisions, of what a man would do in any particular set of circumstances.

So God knew that a man named Pontius Pilate, if he were put in this situation, he would freely choose of his own will to condemn Jesus Christ to death. Therefore God's will that his son would die would be brought to fruition. Would be brought to fruition through the free choices of all of the men involved.

Now, let's bring it out of the theological and bring it back to my life, into my children's life. What this means is that God has divinely conspired to create and order all of the circumstances of my life so that I, of my own free choice and free action, will fulfill his will for my life.

That leaves me fully responsible and yet God fully in control, which is the most incredibly freeing psychological place to be. I know that God is divinely conspiring for my success. And what I have to do is I have to do the work. I have to be faithful. I know what God's will is ultimately, but I also know that God has chosen to bring about his will through my active participation.

And whether you apply that at the level of an individual life, or you apply that at the level of a family, or you apply that at the level of a community or of a nation, it's the most powerful thing that you could imagine if you actually believe it, if you genuinely believe it.

It's one of the most incredible success programs that you could install into a human being. And it lends itself to a strong emotional stability. We'll talk about emotional stability in the next episode. Here I always think of the Greek Stoics and the Stoic philosophy that's very extreme, become quite popular today, even among in the success circles.

But I don't ascribe myself to Stoic philosophy, but I pull out basically the same foundation in Christianity. The idea of Stoicism is accept what comes and focus on how you act through it. And so in Christian theology, here's a trial. Book of James says, "Praise God for the trial.

"Thank you, God, for this trial. "I'm grateful for it. "I know that it's come to do a good work in my life. "I'm glad that it's here. "Now what matters is how do I respond through it? "What do I do in the face of this trial?" Or a blessing, right?

A wonderful something to be excited about. Thank you, God, for this blessing. Now what matters is what do I do? How do I behave? How do I act in the middle of this? And so I know that's a fairly theologically involved argument, but I wanna make this practical and show you how if we can connect these success principles at a very deep level, at a philosophical level, at a deep theological level of conviction, then they become so much more powerful.

And so let's be faithful to identify these things and identify the things that are useful and then help our children to understand them intellectually, to identify and be very clear on the impact of these things, and then to practice them continually throughout their life because virtues and character is practiced.

It's a skill that needs to be developed and it's developed in the beginning in a small way. It's developed in adolescence and in young adulthood in a stronger way, and then ideally it flourishes and blooms as our children come into adulthood. As I wind down this theme, I wanna mention a few practical considerations.

I wish I had a longer list, but I do have some things that I'm, at least I have noticed that I try to encourage and focus on. With each of these success features or success attributes, I think we can take them and then think about the process of child training and ask, how do we incorporate them?

So let me begin with the one that I mentioned, learning to fail, okay? Failure, what does failure mean? Well, I think there's something fundamentally at odds with how we teach in the school system, with the way that we inculcate the idea that failure is bad. And you see this a lot if you look at many thinkers in the modern space.

For example, Peter Diamandis is someone I've followed for years, and he talks a lot about this, and he has a white minor paper that he wrote on education. This was a big point of his that I thought was really well taken, where he talks about the importance of that we know that successful business owners and really anybody understands that failure is a fundamental part.

Failure is not to be avoided, failure is to be embraced. It's how we learn. We could see this when we watch our children learn to walk. What do they do? Well, they fall down. They start with little steps, they stand up, they fall down. They stand up, they fall down.

They stand up, they fall down. Eventually, they take a step and they fall down. They take a step and they fall down, et cetera. And eventually, after falling down lots of times, they learn how to walk. And you can see this at a later stage. If you go to your local skate park and you watch a skater learning a trick on a skateboard, oh, he'll fail and fail and fail and fail and fail.

And eventually, he'll sort of kind of start to get it and then he'll fail and fail and fail and he'll continue on. Well, we understand that it's most basic level that this failure is a necessary part of the system. But then we build this fear of failure into children with the way that we grade them, the way that we do testing, et cetera.

And we say that somehow if you fail a test, then that's gonna wreck you for the rest of time. Or if you fail school, it's gonna wreck you for the rest of time. And some people come out of this, but how many more people would come out of this if we change the system in some way?

So my practical application of this is to eliminate testing as a methodology that has any kind of emotional impact. The reason I'm struggling a little for the words is I used to say that I was completely opposed to testing in an individualized setting, right? 'Cause testing is primarily necessary as a form of communication between a teacher and his students if he's not able to identify where the students are at.

So that's a fundamental problem. A teacher should know where each student is at. And it's only in an industrial setting where the teacher has too many students that he needs to assign a test of here's how much the student understands. And then the testing and the grade system is a form of communication between a parent and a teacher who don't have other good forms of communication.

So these are not fundamentally important to the learning of the child or to the educational model of the child. Now, so I used to be completely opposed to testing. Then I started digging into some of the ways to learn, neuroscience ideas on ways to learn. And I become convinced that testing is actually an important mode of learning, an important way to learning.

One way that people who are skilled at learning do is they just sit down and test themselves. A very popular method is called free recall. You sit down, you read something, and then you close your book or you turn off the lecture, and then you pull out a piece of paper and you write down everything that you remember.

It's a test. And the actual testing process causes your brain to pay attention to what you know and to know it at a deeper level. So I have changed myself, my previous dismissiveness of testing. And I'm mostly focused on how can we incorporate testing as a method of learning rather than as a method of judgment, so to speak, or a method of stratification of students, et cetera.

So back to the learning to fail. Let's take out the fear of failure. And so, for example, what I do when I test my children in our homeschool is we do a modified form of free recall. We do narration. So I say, "Tell me everything that you know about President Grant." We're doing basically around Civil War time right now.

"Tell me everything you know about Theodore Roosevelt." And the focus is on what you know, not on what you don't know. The focus is on having a chance to talk about all the things that you can say about a person rather than getting certain questions wrong because I couldn't figure out how to do the question.

And so I see this as a healthy thing. And then in terms of failure, I think it's very important that we articulate, anytime there is failure, we articulate it from the perspective of what are the lessons. So you decided to start a business idea and you were gonna sell bread.

Okay, well, what did people buy and what didn't people buy? Or you decided you were gonna go and try this new activity and you fail, what did you learn? We need to take away the emotional stigma from failure in every way, and we need to encourage failure as a learning process.

And that's something that we as parents can facilitate. And I think we can do a much better job of that and the educational model of our children. It'd be, think about this, if you had the chance to hire somebody to work for you and you had the choice of two candidates, candidate A went and performed brilliantly in one specific field.

Let's say that, it doesn't matter, I don't need to give more specificity. Candidate A performed brilliantly in one specific field, got straight 100s on all of the exams, did beautifully well on one field, but that candidate chose not to pursue other fields or to study other classes because that candidate didn't wanna mess up his GPA.

And candidate two, on the other hand, comes in and candidate two got Bs in field A instead of straight As like candidate A had. So candidate B got Bs, but candidate B went to some classes in this subject and in that subject, et cetera, and he got a D on his classes in French history, but he really enjoyed them.

He just didn't do very well, but he really enjoyed and he went to that and then he went into some welding classes and he got mediocre marks there and he completely failed out of art class because he was a terrible artist, but he loved looking at pictures. Which of those candidates is more attractive to you?

The broader level of experience is what we want. It's not the grade that counts, it's the experience. Again, I think the best example is we think about how famously Steve Jobs' calligraphy class that he took informed his aesthetic sensibilities for the rest of his life. He didn't need the calligraphy class for a GPA, he just went and took it, but yet it taught him something.

And so this is how I view learning. It's better to have 20% knowledge of something and have that than 0% because you didn't wanna not get a perfect grade. Remember when I spoke to you about language learning? Language learning is one of those cool things where just a little bit of knowledge is better than nothing.

If you have 100 words in a foreign language, you're way better off than if you had zero words. Now, of course, you'll be better when you have 500 words, but the 100 words counts. And so we shouldn't, our systems should not be structured upon kind of pulling back, but rather on building up.

There's another way we could focus on the same concept has to do with do we start at 100 and get marks wrong, 100%, or do we start at zero and build up? And so any way we can figure out how in our children's lives to focus on the fact that we're starting from zero and building up, I think is a more powerful move.

If you think of a video game, a video game, the gamer goes through it and the gamer fails a level, but that doesn't mean that the gamer gets detracted from 100%, it just means that the gamer failed that level. So the gamer goes back and does the level again and does the level again and eventually passes the level.

And it doesn't matter how many times the gamer approaches the level, what matters is how the, that is that they eventually pass it. And so in all learning endeavors, I think this is a more useful principle that we should incorporate into the approach. It doesn't matter how many times you fail a level, what matters is that eventually you pass the level and that you keep going through.

This is a core component of learning to fail. This is a core component of that growth mindset. This is a core component of developing persistence and grit so that we press through. Another practical technique that we can use is to praise those attributes, those character qualities that we want to see grow and do it in a way that continues to lead to growth.

I think, I forget where to, I read this somewhere, it could have been Dweck's book, I'm not sure, I haven't read that book in years, but there's a big difference between praising a child for being smart versus praising a child for working really hard and developing his intelligence or expressing his intelligence, et cetera.

If you praise a child for being smart, then that can cause the child to say, well, yes, I'm smart, which may be a good thing, but to see then that any evidence that indicates that somehow he might not be smart 'cause he got a question wrong on the test or wasn't at the top score, et cetera, to harm his self-image.

On the other hand, if you praise a child for his hard work, all the child needs to do to achieve that level of success is work hard, and that's an internal metric. So I know I worked hard, I'm satisfied. Doesn't matter whether I'm number one in the class or number 10, what matters is that I did the best that I could, that I worked really hard.

Now, the other side is I think it's also useful to praise those attributes that are fundamental. I have an example that I'm personally passionate about is I think that girls should be repeatedly affirmed in their physical beauty without trying to go to an external metric of what is it that defines beauty.

There may be an external standard of symmetry being the perfect definition of beauty, but at its core, one of the things I've noticed over the years is quite simply that it's very hard to find a girl who is not beautiful in any way, and what makes a huge difference in the beauty of a woman is her level of confidence in herself and in who she is.

I want to praise continually the beauty that comes from within, character qualities, empathy, kindness, compassion, all of the virtues that a woman can embody, but at its core, a woman who is confident, who is confident in who she is, who's been told all her life by her father that she is beautiful, she becomes beautiful as a self-fulfilling prophecy because she is a human creature, she is a woman, and if she's not told that she's beautiful, then she may doubt her beauty, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where am I beautiful enough, et cetera.

And so that's just something I personally care a lot about, but there are many other attributes as well. And so the role, and I gotta cut off here 'cause I don't wanna steal my thunder from the next episode, but recognize that there is always the virtues that a person has are always present in some quality.

None of us would go to another human being and say, there is nothing beautiful about you. You take the most disfigured human being, somebody who's been horrifically burned, horrifically scarred, et cetera, and by all objective metrics, that person is ugly as anything. And yet even in that, you'll look and behold that person and based upon the inward beauty of character, or even just the fact that this is a living soul, someone who has endured incredible adversity and pain, that is a beautiful person.

And so virtually all of these things, they're not objectively true or not. The things that make a person ugly are all virtues or characters. A person can be incredibly handsome, and yet if he's crass, right, or if she's really just obnoxious and dismissive of other people's and cuts people down, et cetera, no matter the level of physical beauty, that's an ugly person because the ugliness is expressed from within and no one wants to be around someone like that.

And so my point is to say that don't think that these things are, that you either are or aren't. Life doesn't work that way. We all are in a measure, but I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm gonna cut myself off there, pick that up in a future episode. Recognize that as you think about cultivating and investing into the spirit of your child, one component of which you want to pay careful attention is to instill in your children an ideology, a philosophy of success.

There are certain philosophies, ideas that are useful and that are much more likely to lead to your child being confident and successful in life. And if you can successfully install those ideologies, the child will see them and take them on as his own in the fullness of time. On the other hand, though you do everything else we've talked about, if you surround that child with ideologies that lead to failure, that can be enough to harm the future prospects of your children.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope that these thoughts have been useful to you and I look forward to speaking with you again soon. - The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new. Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey or spicy turkey tacos, your go-to shrimp cocktail, or your first Cajun risotto, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace your traditions.

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