What do we teach our kids?

I’ve heard that talking about parenting can fetch you a bunch of caustic feedback, but I’m going to do it anyway.

My son Austin is five. The kid is brilliant. I know that all parents think their kids are smart, but this is no joke.

Austin knows how to do the basics of multiplication and division. His vocabulary rivals mine (“celtic punk” and “pneumatic tube” were probably among the first 100 phrases he learned, no joke). And for some reason, out of the aether, he’s got this fantastic artistic ability. The other day he was copying a detailed illustration out of one of his Transformers books (it was a plane air-dropping Optimus Prime into battle) and was doing it freehand, without tracing, and did a better job than when Robin tries to draw stuff at his request.

This year he’ll go off to kindergarten, and he’s going to be bored as a motherfucker. He got bored with preschool over a year ago, and the fact that he’s the oldest kid in his class isn’t helping. They have to move at the speed of the slowest kids, so as not to leave anyone behind. You get a spectrum of kids with different abilities, but it’s one class with one teacher… and so one size must fit all.

I find myself wondering about this, and other things I’ve never thought about when it comes to school, and education, and development.

All the things I’ve always taken for granted as immutable truths — school starts at five and continues for thirteen years, college follows high school, job follows college — are suddenly coming into question.

All at once, I’m no longer sure that what I learned in school is what I’d most like for my kids to learn.

This is the fault of you online weirdoes.

I’ve met a lot of entrepreneurs in this last year. And entrepreneurs are wackos. They’re not normal; they break the rules; they’re shit out of their minds. You spend enough time around people like that and suddenly it becomes really obvious that:

1. They owe their success not to their knowledge of Greek history or geometry, but to something closer to wily “street smarts” — an understanding of human nature and human motivation.

2. They’ve been able to do what they’ve done not because of their ability to memorize facts and take tests, but because of their willingness to try things that most people won’t try.

3. They achieved not because of any ingrained sense of wanting to be secure and safe, but in spite of it.

I don’t think school is bad, but I don’t think it taught me the most important things that drive me today, either. I think I spent thirteen years learning what the state wanted me to learn, and then another five learning what the previous thirteen years had led me believe the world wanted me to learn.

And then I think I set that aside, recalled a lot of good times (and some bad) from those years, and then, bit by bit, re-learned what I needed to know in order to do what I do today.

I ask myself, what has been the most important stuff I’ve learned? Was it history, math, and science? Was it home ec, or literature, or business management 101?

Or did it come from experience at the School of Hard Knocks?

And so I wonder: What would be the curriculum at Johnny’s Entrepreneurship School?

So let’s think about that. I’d offer:

1. Independence and self-confidence.
A successful entrepreneur has to be able to be able to look at his situation and his surroundings and then do what he thinks he should do in spite of the opinions of others. Nobody around you will take you seriously when you say you want to create an internet shoe empire, so you have to have the nards to do it anyway.

2. Fierce (almost stupid) determination and a willingness to make big mistakes.
Nobody gets everything right the first time. An entrepreneur has to be willing to take a leap of faith with the full knowledge that his venture may fail. Successful people have to be willfully irrational about their ideas, and have to be able to learn the tough lessons that can only be taught through failure.

3. Faith.
In spite of failures, an entrepreneur has be willing to keep going on faith alone. And when faced with blood-chilling obstacles (like financial upsets), he needs the ability to determine if they’re actually worth detouring around, or if they’re what they are a lot of the time: phantom obstacles that don’t really exist.

4. Creativity.
Successful people need to be able to come up with a lot, lot, lot of ideas and possible courses of action. Many of these ideas will and should break existing molds.

5. Optimism.
Some of the successful folks I know have caustic exteriors, but all believe deep down that what they’re doing is right and will all work out in the end. By contrast, I’ve met people who don’t truly believe the glass is half full or that things will eventually turn around. Those people will never make it.

5. Flexibility.
A successful entrepreneur has to be able to be totally packed, dressed, and ready to move in one direction, encounter a new bit of information, and go in the opposite direction instead.

6. Problem-solving ability.
Problems are everywhere when you work on your own, and because you’re forging a new path, there’s usually nobody to ask how to solve them. Entrepreneurs need to be able to develop solutions to problems, no matter how varied and wacky those solutions may seem.

7. An enterprising and capitalistic spirit.
All of the successful people I know have something good to offer the world and have the balls to ask people to pay for it.

8. An ability to follow your instincts and live by your wits.
An entrepreneur has to learn to trust his gut, and then keep trusting it on the fly. Many of the things I’ve done — including some of the best things, yielding the best results — have been done on a whim. I do most things for no other reason than that they feel right to do.

I could go on and on. But succinctly, if someone is really good at the above skills, I’d wager that they’d do fairly well as an entrepreneur, or as a trailblazer in any field.

The problem I have is that I don’t know how well schools teach those things.

Enter the ridiculous concept of unschooling

Those wacky online weirdoes I mentioned? A lot of them do what’s called “unschooling.” I thought it was just a clever word and only recently learned from Lee Stranahan what it actually means.

Unschooling is not formally teaching your kids. It’s guiding and supporting them, but letting them find their own path, and largely letting them do what they want to do with their time each day.

I don’t know if I like this idea.

And I don’t know if I don’t like it, either.

It intrigues me, though, and I want to learn more.

It makes me wonder if a kid who had no interest in trigonometry or symbolism in literature could grow up without ever learning those things and be okay.

It makes me wonder if an artistic kid who found ways to get people to pay a pittance for his sketches at a very young age would eventually find a way to turn that ability into a thriving creative business.

And it makes me wonder if you took a kid with a desire to do something outside of the box and put him in school — where he was instructed to sit still, be quiet, and study the lesson of the day so that he could pass a test — if he’d lose that desire to do something outside of the box.

It makes me realize that a traditional education prepares you for a job, and that it seems like so many people want to get out of their jobs and do their own thing.

It makes me wonder if the most important things I ever learned in my life, for my life, were learned in a classroom or outside of one.

If my kids learned the entrepreneurial skill set I outlined above, and then only the book learning they chose to pursue, would that be enough?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, yet they just keep coming to me.

How much conformity is good? I think there’s value in learning how to sit still and be quiet, how to take direction, how to subordinate your id’s desires occasionally to the needs of others. I think there’s value in not always being the leader. But how much is enough? And more importantly, how much is too much?

What it really boils down to is, could I trust the base human instincts of my kids, with guidance from us as parents, to figure things out? Because that’s what it ultimately comes down to: deciding whether or not “what they are inclined to learn” will lead to a good place.

And having faith along the way, I suppose. Lee told me that his kids, who are unschooled, sometimes play video games all day. And that would be hard for me to sit quietly through.

But then he says that they’ll noodle with the Rock Band guitar and decide to pick up the real guitar. They’ll run across something here or there and start reading philosophy. They’ll see how Dad makes a living by working at home and doing what he loves, and become interested in (and inspired by) doing the same.

Ditto the experiences of Pace & Kyeli and their son.

And ditto the mindset of Naomi, who I know is all geeked up over this issue and wondering what to do with her own kid.

Ditto others. And others. And others. Rule-breakers all.

I don’t know where this will lead for our family.

But I do know that I’m not where I am because of what my schooling prepared me for. I’m here because in many ways, I did the opposite.

Your turn. Discuss.

 

Want to be rich and happy, and maybe change the world?

… then you should listen to this half-hour call I did with Tim Brownson, life coach extraordinaire and guy who is unable to start the recording on his own conference call service.

Tim and his co-author John Strelecky wrote a book called How to be Rich and Happy and decided on an ambitious goal and an unusual way of reaching it: They decided that they wanted to get a million copies of the book into people’s hands, and would do so by reverse tithing almost all of the money that came from sales of the book back into producing new copies.

In this interview, we talk about values, philanthropy, why Tim and John decided on an admittedly sensationalistic title, and how to get what you really want — but suspiciously little about dolphins and/or ratatouille:

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 How to be Rich and Happy: Download (223)

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So how can you help? Well, you can listen to the audio. You can spread the word on your blog, in your newsletter, and on Twitter. And lastly, you can and should buy the book. Remember, nobody is making money on this, if that makes a difference — not me, not Tim, and not John. We just want to make a difference, because it’s a good cause.

I’m relaxing my kung-fu grip

So the point of my “Your Goals Suck” post was supposed to be that you’ve gotta be clear about what you really want when you define success and accomplishment in life, because the default is to define those things in terms of dollars when in fact the dollars may not be necessary.

But instead, I realize I kind of came off wrong, and that it almost looks like I’m advocating creating actual value in life over materialistic things, or some other hippie bullshit.

Okay, so it’s not bullshit. But I don’t want anyone thinking I don’t like me some good materialism now and again. Just because money has been everywhere from some fat tourist’s sweaty pocket to a stripper’s butt crack, that doesn’t mean that I don’t still want to fill a bathtub with it and roll around in ecstasy.

(And furthermore, since that post ended in the suggestion that I’m going to be launching a new product soon, I don’t want some Robin Hood asshole suggesting later on that I’m a hypocrite when I charge for it. YES, I will want your money when I launch that thing. NOM NOM NOM NOM tasty sexy dirty money.)

Look, I think everyone today has money issues. And I don’t mean issues like you can’t make the car payment and that mutant freak circus from Operation Repo is going to come and take your car away, but more like we kind of all have issues around money, like shrink issues, like lay down on the couch with a wad of bills while some guy with a goatee and a notepad says, “Hmm, and how did that make you feel?” issues.

Like, I think these past few years have been rough on all of us, and what we’ve all kind of learned deep inside is that money equals a common means of exchange (nobody lets you pay your electric bill with a goat anymore) and that the more you have, the better, and moreover that if you have some, you’d better grip it tight and be prepared with some kung fu shit if anyone tries to take it from you.

You know, the scarcity mindset.

I’m trying to break this mindset myself, because I do have issues with money. Money tries to control me; it gets all passive-aggressive with me; when something comes up in my marriage, it’s usually because growing up, my money didn’t love me enough. I lived the past few years in a state of chronic panic because I owned real estate investments in Cleveland, where the market dropped so fast that it actually collapsed in on itself and formed a series of interconnected black holes that now provide superior transportation to what is available via the RTA train.

Live like this for a while, with every cent you earn and a few thousand dollars more flying out the window each month, and see what it does to your hoarding tendencies. In theory, I wanted to give money to the Red Cross, but in reality, let’s see them try and pry a buck out of my hands. The local kids’ clubs would be outside the grocery store collecting for this or that and I’d be like, “Dude, get your own.”

Then I started this business that I’m doing today. And over the course of this past year, things have eased up. That hideous phase of my financial life is finally coming to an end, but now it’s like I want to hang on to my dollars for dear life anyway, and never, ever let them out of my sight.

So, to combat this, I did what most wise people do when faced with financial psychological issues. I decided to become a good tipper in restaurants. You know, to practice.

Flash to my thrilling Saturday night.

We live kind of out in the country, with the “kind of” meaning that although we do have neighbors, those neighbors have sheep out in their yard. So when we go to the areas where there are restaurants, the best places are 35 minutes away.

That’s what we did on Saturday. We drove those 35 minutes, to go to Sam’s Club to stock up, and then to go out to eat.

On the way home, the kids were asleep and so I could woo Robin by showing her how I still knew all the words to “Ice Ice Baby” (“girlies on standby waiting just to say Hi… did you stop? No, I just drove by”) but on the way out, the long drive essentially just gave my daughter Sydney a nice long time to play her favorite new car game.

It sounds like this:

She says, “Daddy.”

And you’re in the middle of a sentence, so you ignore her.

And she repeats, a bit more urgently, “Dad-day!”

And so you stop your discussion and you half-turn and say, “Yes?”

And she goes, “Birdie.”

So you tell her how that’s the most amazing thing ever and resume your adult conversation. As many as ten seconds will pass and then again she’s interrupting you urgently, like, “Dad-day. Dad-DAY!”

So you ignore her a bit, because this is like the tenth time already.

“DAD-DAY.”

So maybe you go like, “Quiet.”

“Dad-DAY!”

“Sydney, knock it off.”

“DAD-DAY! DAD-DAAAAY!”

“What? What is it? What could you possibly want?”

And she returns to her normal voice and says, “Car.”

It goes on like that for like a half hour, and then we get out and buy a bunch of stuff at Sam’s Club, and when we’re done, when we’re leaving and getting really hungry, it sucks because the Girl Scouts aren’t selling cookies yet at the exit, and that’s not cool because I want to buy some of those damn cookies already and I’m HUNGRY, and all of this despite the fact that I pre-ordered 13 boxes through my gym (and don’t even get me started on the notion that this happened at my fucking gym) and Sydney is still like “DAD-DAY!” every two seconds and Austin keeps hopping off of the shopping cart so that I run into his foot and then we try to go to this hibachi place but it’s full out the door and we end up at Ruby Tuesday and I just want some damn food already and to sit down and relax a bit, and we’d promised Austin ice cream earlier (to coerce him into skipping a sledding run we didn’t have time for) and I decide I want an ice cream sundae too at the end, because I’m tired and because the Girl Scouts are entirely too slow on delivery.

But the waiter tells me that the sundae bar is $3 for all-you-can eat, and I’m like, “I just want like one little sundae.” See, I’m getting my winter fat on, and honestly, all I need is all-you-can-eat. Plus, I’m having disproportionate concern over that $3 because, you know, every cent is vital to my family’s continued existence on the planet.

So the kid, this waiter who’s already been really attentive and generally cool and in really positive spirits despite handling a table of like a billion behind me, he says kind of on the sly that he can bring me a single-serving sundae for like $1.19 if he rings it up as the kids’ version.

For some reason, this offer is super-awesome to me. Because I’m tired and because $1.79 is apparently some huge amount of money.

I eat, I enjoy. It’s winter; give me a break.

Five minutes later, the check comes and our total is $40.14 and I mentally calculate, okay, maybe I put down five bucks for the tip.

But then I think, “Dude, this kid did right by you. And you’re not throwing money down the investment black hole anymore.” And frankly, I have this notion that being awesome and not bitching about life should be rewarded, and maybe it’s time to pay attention to that idea myself, for a change.

So I put down $50 and told him I didn’t need change.

Okay, stop here for a second, because this may sound like I think I’m some great philanthropist or martyr or something because I’m giving a few more bucks on a tip. I don’t. But… wow… paying extra for something? You get down to a tip, where it’s up to my discretion, and I give more than I have to? Wow, that’s foreign. That’s a mindbender. You get in this mindset where you pay what you’re asked, and if you aren’t asked, you don’t pay.

Remember the Red Cross and the kids outside the supermarket? They were trying to get me Lucky Charms. That wasn’t cool.

But now I think that a natural part of growth is to start circulating some goodness where you can, even if it’s in small ways like leaving a few extra bucks on a tip or tossing something in the coffee can the kids have outside of your supermarket. Like when that thing comes in the mail for St. Jude Children’s Hospital, maybe you finally write them a check. Maybe you try to remind yourself that you don’t need to hold each dollar in a death grip, so that your brain figures out that you truly believe more will come.

You know, the scarcity mindset. Like, this is how you fight it.

And a few minutes later, after the waiter kid has presumably run our check, he comes back and kind of in a low voice thanks me again, like seriously and earnestly this time. Like you get the impression that not many people tip more than 10-15%.

And I’ll admit it; that felt good. It wasn’t much, but it did feel nice to reward this hard-working kid who was pleasant and friendly and good at his job, and probably kind of needing every dollar that he makes.

I really do love the idea of charity. You read shit like this (last subhead near the bottom) and you think how awesome it would be to do. I know Naomi felt really good after that, like it did her good to do it as much as it helped the kids who’d attend the school she was going to build.

I’ve heard it said that there’s no such thing as a selfless good deed, because people who do good deeds are ultimately doing them to make themselves feel better, to feel noble, or to alleviate their own uncomfortable feelings about seeing the suffering of others. But I don’t see it that way. That’s too nihilistic. I keep talking about win/win thinking, and this is just one more example of win/win. The recipients of charity win. The giver wins. Everyone is happy.

There’s not really a lesson to this story. I was stingy as all hell for a long time, and I wasn’t going out of my way to over-tip even when the waiter or waitress was really awesome. I wasn’t giving to anyone, so I’m not exactly casting a moral imperative as I write this now.

But if you’re hanging on to each buck, consider that maybe there’s a possibility that you don’t really need to be doing so. Maybe you’re not in the dire straits you think you’re in, deep down.

If that’s the case, then tossing a ten or a twenty into the can when the Salvation Army is out collecting might just do you a world of good.

Something to think about.

 

Your goals suck

I’ll bet almost anything that you define success incorrectly.

Don’t worry. It’s not your fault. Today, here and now, in our world of internet and TV and McDonald’s and the Jonas Brothers and that Cling Wrap shit, it’s hard to figure out when you have it right because everyone is always shouting at you about how you have it wrong. This isn’t a conspiracy; it’s human nature. And it’s marketing. I mean, look at me: I’m telling you that you have it wrong too. You big fuck-up.

But here’s the thing: I can almost guarantee you that what you think would make you successful or happy or complete or rich or whatever isn’t what you really want. I’ll bet you’re shooting for the wrong goal.

Let me step back a bit.

I was talking to Lee Stranahan the other day (I did an interview with Lee for a series that includes Seth Godin – check it out!), and Lee has this thing about UN. Not the United Nation, but UN as in the prefix, as in “not” or “different.” As in UN-marketing and UN-schooling. And also as in UN-assisted birth, which he and his wife are into but which he’s not going to convince my wife about, ever.

And Lee and I, we share a lot of the same beliefs about freedom and about what you could, I guess, call UN-jobbing, or getting people out of the 9-5 pressure cooker and into something they love. Lee wanted to partner up on something where we’d create a program to get people out of their jobs and into their own thing in six or twelve months or whatever, but I resisted.

Because I’m like, “People are going to fuck it up. And then they’ll quit their jobs on some half-assed dream and then they’ll lose their house and be all miserable.”

See, I have this whole thing where I try to tell the truth about how — let’s be honest — not everyone is going to make a go of their big dream. A lot of people are going to fail. A lot of people are going to fail repeatedly, in fact. So to promise to get them out of a job in a certain period of time is going to be an issue for me.

But then it dawned on me: This unjobbing thing isn’t really about getting people out of their jobs, or about teaching them how to start a business that makes X dollars per month so that they can replace their income. It’s about getting them into the life they want. We sort of assume that the way to get there is to find a new source of money, then quit the job, then keep on truckin’ to Shangri-La. But there are other routes to meet a goal, and other ways to define success.

For instance.

I’ll bet you think you want money. But really… do you? Do you want green slips of paper with photos of dead presidents on them the way you’d want an original Monet if you were a collector of impressionistic art? If you got a million dollars, would you make a special box for it so that you could display it? Would you iron that cash so that it looked its best, and admire it constantly?

Or would you spend it?

I know what you’re thinking, you bastard. You’d spend it. After slaving away for that million dollars — after all the blood and sweat and tears and striving for it daily as if your life depended on it — you’d just piss it away in exchange for other stuff. You finally got your million, and now you’re letting it go again.

So yeah, you didn’t really want the million. Too bad you sacrificed so much to get it.

Nobody wants money. Money sucks. People use the bathroom and don’t wash their hands and then pick their nose and then the cat barfs on the rug and some cat barf gets on their thumb and then they sow manure into their garden and then they grab a twenty out of their pocket and hand it to you.

If you’re shooting for money, stop it. Look at the real goal. Maybe it’s getting out of your job. Maybe that takes money and maybe it doesn’t, but at least be clear what you’re really after.

It’s like in the movie Office Space. Lawrence asks Peter what he’d do if he had a million dollars, and Peter tells him he’d do nothing. He’d just lie around all day and do nothing. And Lawrence says, “Hell, you don’t need a million dollars to do nothin, man. Look at my cousin. He’s broke, don’t do shit.”

See, Peter hates his job. He wants out, but thinks he needs a million dollars to do it, to sit around and not go to work and do nothing. But doing nothing is our default. It takes work and initiative to do something, but nothing happens automatically.

Tony Robbins tells this story about going to Fiji, and seeing Americans arrive on the island in awe, and they’ll say things like, “I want to live here. I’m going to work really hard to accelerate my retirement and make enough money that I can come back here and buy some land and live in Fiji year-round.” And the Fijians just look at them like, “Dude, why would you do that? Why not just drop your old life and stay here right now?”

We don’t even know what success, or happiness, or our ideal really is. We think it’s something outside of ourselves, and that if we want to be successful, we need to get what the “successful people” out there have.

Maybe you look at Brian Clark of Copyblogger and you think you’d like your blog to be as big as his. Really? Why? Maybe what you actually mean is that you want his lifestyle, but of course that’s a joke because I doubt you know him and have any idea what his lifestyle actually is like. Maybe he lives under a bridge. That may be the case, too, based on what Sonia says*, like, “Oh, Brian lives under a bridge with some hobos.”

I think Lee, who I mentioned earlier, is pretty damn successful. He writes for the Huffington Post. He conducted an interview with director Kevin Smith that Smith says is the best interview he’s ever given. He knows this long list of celebrities that he’s too humble to name-drop unless you weasel it out of him. He made a movie. Every day, he works at home, working with film and video, with his kids and wife around him, because they home school.

But Kevin Smith isn’t impressive to everyone. As pleased as Lee is to have that “success,” other people wouldn’t care about it. I met Blake Schwarzenbach from Jawbreaker once and exchanged a few emails with James Brogan of Samiam. You probably don’t care, but those are successes to me.

Success and happiness are relative. You can’t chase role models because their values are different from yours, and what is vital to you is meaningless to others. If you refuse to give yourself credit for achieving things that matter to you and won’t feel successful until you achieve things that matter to other people, you’re going to be one confused and unhappy motherfucker.

Me, I think I’m really successful. It’s not because I’ve started making a great income lately, because honestly, most of that went down the toilet thanks to my really terrible real estate investments. It’s because of what that income is starting to afford me, which is freedom from those hideous investments and peace of mind. And it’s because I have this great family, and because we’re all healthy, and because I do stuff I like every day.

But… dude. I could have gotten the exact same results — the same criteria by which I’m currently defining success — by moving to a small town in Nepal. If I picked up with my family and moved there with virtually no money and left everything here behind to rot, I’d have peace of mind. I’d have a great, healthy family. I could find something to do all day that I’d enjoy.

If that sounds like a ridiculous scenario, look at Baker from Man vs. Debt. He didn’t move to a hut in Nepal, but his family sold almost everything and travels the world. You’d think you need millions to do that, but that’s only the case if you’re holding on to a mortgage and attachments back at your home base. You can earn and earn and save and save with the hopes of one day traveling the world, or you can set your priorities straight and do it now.

So I was talking to Lee, and we’re discussing how ideas — especially big ideas — are like Stephen King’s definition of stories as things that already exist and need only to be unearthed. And it kind of occurs to us is that in our discussions, we’re beginning to unearth something very cool, that feels new and exciting to both of us. And maybe, what we should be working toward is a way to show people how to get what they really want, not how to do something objective and externally verifiable like quitting a job or making X per month.

That, I can do. That, WE can do. From where you are now. With the resources you have, the people you know, the situation you’re in, the connections you have. It’s a thing that’s just starting to be unearthed, but holy shit is it cool from what I can see already.

* May be a total libelous fabrication

 

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