Teach them to fail
Warning: This May Be The Most Important Article I’ve Ever Written
What are your life goals and priorities, and how do you pass those on to your children?
Let me start with a very old story, which I first heard from my dad, that illustrates this point.
There was a very big conference for CEOs in NYC and the keynote speaker was an old Italian Professor, who was rather short, so when standing behind the podium he actually had to stretch up a bit to be seen.
The professor started his keynote by putting a glass jar on the podium and asked the audience if the jar was full, and the audience said no. Then he reached out underneath the podium to get a basket full of baseballs and pour them into the jar, about three or four of them fit into the glass jar, and the rest rolled over on the floor.
He asked again whether the jar was full, and people from the audience shouted yes! Without saying a word, the little Italian guy reached beneath the podium and got a box full of m&ms, poured them into the jar until there was no more room for them in the jar, and asked again if the jar was full, now having seen the trick the audience was a bit slower to response, some said yes and some said not yet.
The Metaphor
The Professor continued and got a bucket of sand and poured that into the jar and finally opened a bottle of water and poured them as well.
Now it was obvious that the jar was full. At this point, the professor asked, “So, what does it mean?”
The room became silent for a bit, until one of the CEOs shouted, “No matter how busy our schedule is – we can always fit one more thing into it.”
The Italian professor was looking at the CEO and pointing his finger at him for a short while and then said “No! The jar is your life, the baseballs are the most important things in your life, the m&ms are everything that adds color, taste, and joy to your life, the sand and the water is everything else that keeps you busy and occupy time and attention in your life. If you follow this order and start with the main things, everything will fit, but if you start with something else the baseballs – the main things will not fit. Now go figure out what the main things in your life are, and make sure you take care of them first
Encourage Failure
For me, the most important things are my life purpose (my ikigai of creating value), my children, my wife, and my friends, and the good news is that those are all in place to my satisfactory level – so I’m happy.
But when I say, ‘my children’, what does it really mean?
At the end of the day, our only wish for our children is to be happy.
Now this is complex because we don’t know what’s happiness for them, but let me suggest something here, if they can figure out their baseballs – their main things, it will make them happy.
For that, we need to take two main actions and avoid one, from early childhood until forever. If you can do that, you’ve dramatically increased the likelihood of helping them to become happier.
The first one is obvious – empowerment and support.
The second is everything but obvious – teach them to fail. Encourage them to fail, and try again, because when they fail and get up – they get up stronger, with the knowledge that if they fail, they can get up.
There is so much more to it, when you teach them to fail, you empower them to get out of their comfort zone and hopefully discover what makes them happy.
Now comes the third element, which is the hardest – what to avoid, which is judgment, criticism, and complaints. These will also dramatically improve any relationship that you have (with friends, at work, and by an order of magnitude with your spouse).
So, when your child comes up with an idea, even a crazy one, your response could be, “Ok, and why do you want to do it this way?” And after hearing a reason, say – “why don’t you give it a try” and if they fail, no judgement, perhaps understanding what we have learned. It could be something like, what have we learned? And then do you want to give it another try? Or do you want to change something and give it another try?
This is how you combine all three, empowerment (they can try their own), encouragement to fail (try something with a high likelihood of failing), and no judgment – just more of the first two (the secret sauce).
When I was a child, I would come to my dad with a crazy idea, and this is exactly what he said – why don’t you give it a try… even though he might have known it would never work. Afterward was “What have We learned?” when all of a sudden, he became part of the journey which empowers and avoids criticism.
If I would come up with a question, while in most cases he would answer, in many other cases he would say – can you find the answer yourself? Don’t forget there was no Google back then. If the answer was no, he would rather give me the answer and teach me how to find it.
When my 30-year-old son was at high school and just before his final Math exams, I asked him what’s his plan and he said, getting an A. I told him that if he wanted, he could get an A+, and he said, “Yes, I know, but for an A+ I need to study for the whole week, and for a straight A, I can enjoy myself for the whole week.” And I was thinking, “He got it!”
The added value – entrepreneurs are those who their passion is much higher than their fear of failure plus the alternative cost. If you teach your children to fail, their fear of failure is going to be low, their likelihood of becoming entrepreneurs will be higher, and it is more likely they will find what makes them happy.