Adventures in Self-Directed Learning with Blake Boles
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RSS Feed Terri dives into the topic of self-directed learning as Blake Boles shares his notion of consensual schooling, intensive parenting, hard fun, and the importance of peer groups.
Imagine a world where learning isn't confined to desks and textbooks, but instead is an epic adventure where curiosity is your compass, questions are your map, and every discovery is a treasure. What if education felt more like exploring a new land, rather than following a set path? Welcome back to Element is Everything, the podcast where we explore what it means to find your element, that place where interests and talents collide to help us feel great and do great. I'm your host, Terry Novichek, and today we have the privilege of time with Blake Bowles, author of College Without High School, Better Than College, The Art of Self-Directed Learning, and Why Are You Still Sending Your Kids to School? Blake is also an educator and adventurer, and speaking with him is an adventure in itself. Though he personally navigated the conventional public education system just fine, Blake is a passionate advocate for limitless alternatives and learning. To him, the heart of education lies in the ability to say, I am directing my life. In this episode, we'll hear Blake's thoughts on intensive parenting and the powerful influence of peer groups. In part two of our conversation, which will be released in the next episode, Blake is going to dive into the concept of hard fun and the value of stepping into the unknown by trying something new. So, oh my goodness, I'm so excited to talk to you and pick your brain about and get your perspective on so many things. I know you don't know me. I feel like I know you because I've you your name comes up with you know everything I read, and and I really love the work that you do, how you are taking teens out into the real world and just getting them away from state standards, but yet somehow they manage to learn. Um, so I have my list of things that I'd like to talk to you about, but I would like to know first what do you like talking about most? Just knowing where I'm coming from, I I operate two charter schools. We are about uh self-determined learning. One of them's a Montessori, and the other one is a homeschool program. And yes, we're publicly funded, and yes, we do have the state testing, but we really try to make it more about building those social, emotional, executive functioning skills, you know, finding your element. That's how we, I'm sure you're familiar with Sir Ken Robinson's work. Sure.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And one of the challenges that we do have is it used to be really easy when we hired people and we could tell them, forget everything you learned in your credentialing program. You know, because we've got this philosophy around facilitating learning versus teaching. It's getting harder to do.
SPEAKER_01To find adult staff who really understand that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You know, they they can they do great in an interview. They've got all the buzzwords, but then when it comes to putting it into practice, it gets really challenging to hand over learning. And so I'd be happy to talk about that.
SPEAKER_01I think that's a great jumping off point for many different uh many different subjects. Uh I haven't been doing that many in alternative education K through 12 related interviews in recent months, just because my head has been more in this current project, which you might be aware of, this uh the dirtbag rich um book that I'm writing and the associated podcast where I interview people who are adults who are you know post-secondary, l living this kind of life that could be described as pretty unschooly, pretty self-directed.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01And I'm curious who your audience is or your anticipated audience.
SPEAKER_00So when I started this, this is an interest of mine. It is definitely not a talent. Um, I, you know, I'm not a polished podcaster by any means, but my goal was really for it to be our staff and our parents. And what I've found though is now we do have an audience in Germany, Chipping. That's where I am.
SPEAKER_01I'm in Germany at the moment.
SPEAKER_00Just okay. Uh and then uh Mexico and uh New Zealand. So um, and we've actually had some families that have found our schools because they came across the podcast somehow. So I do the key thing to me is that is the self-reflection piece. Um and being self-aware of who you are, what you like, how you feel about things. Um, and so parents have told me that they've really appreciated the perspective of you know what you hear in the self-directed or the self-driven child, you know, by Ned and and Bill. Um, and giving people permission to let it be natural.
SPEAKER_01But would most of the people listening to this already be familiar with like the term unschooling?
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01I'm not assume that. Yes. Okay. Good.
SPEAKER_00But a good here's a good thing though. I always say you ask five people what unschooling is, and you'll get five different answers.
SPEAKER_01Five different answers, yeah. If they're listening to this podcast.
SPEAKER_00But maybe that's a good place to start. Is what's your definition or idea of unschooling?
SPEAKER_01Sure. I think my most compact definition of unschooling is full-time self-directed learning. And that can look many different ways. It can be structured, it can be unstructured, uh, it can be a young person deciding to go to public school for specific reasons. And it can be the complete opposite of what we consider public school or any form of uh conventional private school. A lot of the unschoolers who I've worked with as teenagers uh have dipped in and out of different types of school settings or structured group settings. And a lot of them use uh community college, a lot of them use uh you know these resources that that you look at and you put under the label of school, but it's really more about the the intention behind it and whether someone still believes that they're still free when they they enter into a system of formal education.
SPEAKER_00Wow. So, you know, I made the comment. You asked five people, you get five different definitions. I've never heard that one before. And and I actually agree. I I that's always been my kids were homeschooled. My daughter wanted to go to a real high school. So I guess by your definition, she was still unschooled because she that was her choice.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, a lot of young people they they say, I have to go to school. My parents are making me go to school, society is making me go to school, or I have to, because if I don't get a degree, then I'll become a total failure. Therefore, the whole world is forcing me to go to school. And and this is just a lack of taking responsibility or authorship over your own life. And it's completely pervasive and commonplace. I don't blame anyone for taking that attitude, but this is what makes something like unschooling so precious. It's the opportunity for a young person to say, like, I am actually directing my life and to say that with conviction at an earlier age than most people do, if they ever do that. I think it takes a lot of adults, quite a lot of experience, uh, a lot of time to even get to that point where they're saying, now I am directing my life. And so that's what self-directed means. You could go to a military boot camp and still be self-directed if you're going into it with your eyes wide open, knowing what you're signing up for, and uh, yeah, really embodying this notion of consent.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So do you have any thoughts on how to help that blossom? So let's say you have parents that are saying, you know, you you will go to school. Um, so for us, we have parents that are saying you're going to homeschool, but we're enrolling in this charter school. Like, how could you guide? Is there a compromise? Like, how can you guide a you know, trying to get like, I mean, because kids, it is out of their control. Parents are going to I I disagree. Okay.
SPEAKER_01I think that's a fiction we're all participating in. And kids are economically dependent. Their brains are not fully developed, but if you go down that path, then, you know, people age 26 are not fully competent autonomous individuals yet either. Um, as soon as a parent says you have to go to the school, even if it's a really cool charter school or independent school or homeschool cooperative, you're already past the line of getting buy-in from the young person. There, they are some sort of prisoner of you, their parent, uh, as a dependent. And so it would have to come even earlier in the conversation where um it feels like an option, not a mandatory assignment. And an option means that there are other real options that can be taken. And one of those options includes doing nothing. And I'm saying nothing in air quotes because we we don't ever actually do nothing. Doing nothing today might mean like sitting around your bedroom and scrolling on your phone. Or doing nothing might mean hanging out with your friends and doesn't feel like much is happening. But really, there's a lot of like chit-chat and talking about things going on in the media or the or the news or social gossip. That might be what doing nothing actually looks like. But that needs to be an actual option. And the ability to get bored needs to be an actual option. The ability to feel like you are wasting your life needs to be a genuine option. And often that needs to be an option that is felt and experienced. And then I think that young person has the chance to genuinely say, yes, I would like to go to this charter school because it is better than sitting around and wasting my time, which I now have a visceral feeling of. But they they need to like, to use a maybe a harsh analogy here, they need to feel what rock bottom is like. And a lot of parents are so obsessed about what they perceive to be controlling and directing their children's future so their children don't end up on the street that they never allow them a single moment of actual boredom or disengagement or feeling what rock bottom, and it's not going to be rock bottom for these kids if they come from, you know, a background of basically loving parents who provide resources and security and shelter. Um, they need to feel what that's like. And so there's there's this straw man image of like the helicopter parent or the snowplow parent or the drone parent. There's so many really apt analogies that we could use here in which this person is hovering around and moving all the obstacles out of the way. But I think everyone does this in a way. You don't have to be this extreme uh helicopter parent to believe that by providing security and by ensuring that your child never falls too far or gets too far behind this whole notion of getting behind uh in the classroom or academically or like with relevance to your peer group, as if we're all on some sort of treadmill going the same direction. Sorry if I sound a little bit extreme here, Terry. Like my one of my gateways into the alternative education world was reading about the Sudbury Valley School. And the the author of many of those books, Daniel Greenberg and co-author Mimsey Sadofsky, uh, they were really serious about treating kids like uh adults, or at least like uh with the autonomy of adults. And the philosophy of that school was we are not going to uh try to help you. We are not going to interact uh in a way where we come and save you from uh your boredom or from your own bad choices, unless you are about to burn the school down.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01Right? Unless you are physically, mentally, emotionally harassing someone else, and this needs to stop immediately. And they let kids be bored in that school and they let kids struggle socially and they let all sorts of stuff happen as long as it doesn't cross the line into clear abuse or trauma or you know, destruction of property or breaking of local laws. And that that approach, this sort of like radical, like we give you power and we give you responsibility. And if you want help, please come find us and ask, and then we will do everything in our power to help you. That's somewhere deep inside of me. And it's all uh connected to this idea of what self-directed learning is and is not.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So you know, you're talking about the different parenting titles in in your last book, uh, Why Are You Still Sending Your Kid to School? I really enjoyed the piece on intense parenting, and you pulled in some of the research. And it made me think of when I was talking to Lenore Scanese, I I asked something along the lines of her perspective on nature versus nurture, and she just laughed. Like, you know, who who has an answer to that? But um, you actually pull in some research on there and there are answers to that, yeah. Yeah, and um, so can you just share a little bit about that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, intensive parenting is the title that sociologists have used for a while now to describe the ubiquitous modern middle, middle, upper class parenting style of uh Americans since the 90s and has since spread globally uh and become this the standard for you know what a caring involved parent does, what a non-neglectful parent does. And it is at the root of these uh labels we use like helicopter parenting or or snowplow parenting. And I think the best way to describe it concisely is that you control the destiny of your child. And if your child succeeds, that's to your credit. And if your child fails, that is to your detriment, because you are like the puppet master. And the research that I pulled in uh into the book to critique or combat this idea of intensive parenting, which is so default, so pervasive, it's actually a very difficult thing to try to pick apart, largely draws from the research of Judith Rich Harris, who was child development specialist at Harvard and for health reasons ended up not being able to finish her degree there, but still wrote psychology intro textbooks and became a sort of independent scholar. This was uh again in the 90s, and she ended up publishing a book that became a massive bestseller called The Nurture Assumption. And what that title means is that between the nature and nurture, we often assume that nurture means parental nurture, and that means active parenting, or the kind of thing that's assumed by intensive parenting. And in fact, the nurture that evidence that she pulled together uh seemed to indicate was much more important was the nurture of the peer group and not parenting. And parenting, in any active sense, was was too easily confounded with the home environment and also with the the nature of uh the genetic inheritance between parent and child. It's too difficult to separate uh, let's say, an entrepreneurial parent and an entrepreneurial child. Is this because of um of genetic reasons like measurable personality traits that are passed from parent to child? Or is this because of an environment, a special entrepreneurship-friendly environment that the parent created for the child? And so she pulls in twin studies and adoption studies, which are ways to separate and isolate nature and nurture factors, and and she presents an incredibly strong case, and one that, to the best of my knowledge, has not yet been seriously refuted uh by anyone else in the field, because it's just uh not that popular to talk about. It's not that popular to say parenting doesn't matter as much as we think it does. And again, parenting means like active, intensive parenting, shaping your child like the puppet master. We're not talking about basic like food, shelter, uh, loving attention, and basic support. Uh and so what this research pointed to was the idea that that both nature and nurture matter. And the the peer group part of nurture is is still very important. And so deciding as a parent uh to which peer groups that your child will have access to is actually a quite important thing. And so maybe this anxious feeling that some parents get when they think about their kid being in in one school or one community and not another one is rooted in something in quite genuine. Um and the idea is that that is going to be super powerful, like the cues that your kid takes from other cues and the culture that they pick up from their peers. Um and so you can take this research and and go many different directions with it. Um the direction that I went with it in the book, Why Are You Still Sending Your Kids to School, is to try to convince parents to relax at least a bit. Because if you are not, in fact, so vitally important to the long-term destiny of your child and their outcomes, then you can just sort of like be nice to them and hang out with them and provide basic support and take them a bit more on their word when they say, like, hey, school really, I really don't like school. I don't like this aspect of the school. Can I do something else? And and just help them get into an environment where they are more engaged, where they really like the peer group that they're with, and uh where they're making this active decision. You know, it's hard for this to be 100% every single day of the year, of course, but this active decision to be like, yes, I really want to go to this place today. And uh and that's pretty much all you can do as a parent. And then you can relax and you can enjoy your own life, and you can just think I'm I happen to have this other person who is genetically related to me living in my house, and we hopefully we like each other instead of thinking uh I'm so vitally important to the the survival uh and the life direction of this person that I can't mess it up and I have to be super worried about it.
SPEAKER_00That's true. Yeah, just have fun with it. Um when I was reading it, I I don't I don't know if this is even a thing you can do, but I was kind of trying to break it down into percentages. And my takeaway was your child is going to be 50% genetics, and then maybe 20% of the parenting, your parenting style, and about 30% of peers.
SPEAKER_01Is that how you would it's it's hard to put numbers on this, and it's hard to even be clear about what those numbers mean. And uh a lot of this is like population or group level um traits that we're talking about. And so I I don't want to to offer it any more, anything more specific than uh than the idea that there's nature and there's nurture. Uh both are important, but the nurture part is probably uh much more peer group derived than parenting uh derived. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Right. Yeah. Um I really love the statement, be neither a servant nor a tyrant. Yeah, and I I can think of uh, you know, parents in in my own life that I've come across and thought, oh yeah, that that would be that one, and that would be that one. And um, so I I guess, you know, you just you'd be kind and you'd be firm, but don't go to the extreme. Um how do you feel about the I mean what I'm understanding you saying is is kind of follow the child, you know, the Montessori idea. What does that look like in a in a home with multiple children that going in different directions?
SPEAKER_01Imagine it's complicated. I am not a parent myself. And so my hat is off to all those performing the juggling act. You know, I want to live in a world where there are lots of different uh school and not school options in in every, in every corner, in every geography. And to be in California, I think is a pretty good place to have lots of different opportunities at your fingertips, depending on where you are in California. I grew up between the Bay Area and Bakersfield. And I know that when I was in middle school and high school in Bakersfield, um there probably weren't that many options, alternative schools, charter schools, micro schools, homeschool co-ops. Um I imagine that if there was a homeschool option for me, it was probably religious. And that's probably not something that would have um fit with me at that age. And uh I am glad that there was community college. Um, or I probably could have enrolled at Cal State University, Bakersfield, uh, as a some sort of, you know, high school dual enrollment um student if I wanted to. But I ended up just staying in high school because that's all I knew. That was all that was on the radar. And so for families with many kids who have different needs, different desires, and and I've seen this working with unschoolers and self-directed learners. You know, one year they really want to be social and they want to be around a bunch of other kids. The next year, they're like, actually, I kind of want to do my own thing and not be required to be anywhere at any time. And so then they may come back into like a homeschool uh environment. And then another year they want to see what normal school is like for everyone, for everyone else, and to see if they can can participate in that game, in that world. And so it's this flowing in and out of different opportunities to the extent that opportunities exist. And that's a bit of a game, a logistical game, maybe a logistical nightmare for parents to uh to play and to deal with. And so to the extent that it's it's easy and seamless to flow in and out of these different uh worlds, these different microcosms, I think that that makes the life of uh a parent with multiple children, with multiple different personalities and needs um easier. And it's less necessary to just tell everyone, no, you're all going to this one school, because that is that's the only option, and that's the only way that this family can function. I know that that that is a reality for many families. That that's just the way it needs to be. Um, but when there are more options and it's easy to flow in and out of these options, um, I think that makes life a little bit better for everyone. And I've been living in Europe for a while. I've talked with people in lots of different parts of the world about what self-directed learning looks like and what the options are like there. And I'm pleased to say that the US continues to be pretty much the best country that's out there for having lots of different options in the K through 12 uh realm. So yeah.
SPEAKER_00So you you've worked with a lot of teenagers and you just commented about, you know, that going through that phase where you maybe just want to be alone. Um have have have you ever seen or heard of that spiraling into a bad direction?
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00And uh, you know, hindsight, does does that give you any insight as far as when and how to intervene?
SPEAKER_01I think it's important to have a reasonable standard when talking about these kinds of situations and to ask families whose kids are in normal public school who don't experience these other options, what are the challenges or the mental health crises or the phone addictions or the cyberbullying? What what are the things that these other kids are are going through and experiencing? And this is not to normalize or justify any of this, but I feel like in this alternative education space, a lot of us tend to think of it as this little utopia where nothing should go wrong, where no one should ever get depressed, where no one should ever be uh, you know, feel socially anxious because now they've found the promised land. And it's like, no, there is no promised land. No, we're just doing our best to provide something that matches the needs of this young person at this moment in their life. And so have I seen unschoolers who end up spending way too much time in front of screens at home, not sleeping normally or going outside very much or interacting face to face and making friends and suffering because of that? Yeah, certainly. Do I think that the peer-to-peer social environments that tend to crop up in homeschool groups or in uh small private alternative schools or self-directed learning centers tend to be a lot healthier, a lot more uh equality-oriented and uh more inclusive than the typical very large public school or very large conventional private school? Yes, absolutely. Do I have some sort of trick for getting a teen who is kind of stuck in a in a rut to magically uh snap their fingers and go and participate in the world and sleep and eat well and be perfectly mentally healthy? No. No, no one does. Uh, are there times that a parent should intervene more forcefully for the long-term good of their child? Yes. Absolutely. Uh I love getting into these sort of thought experiments with my friends in the self-directed education space who really are pressing for like youth rights and full respect and autonomy for young people and don't tell anyone what to do. And I'm like, yeah, this is all true, until the point where they start selling drugs out of your garage, right? Right. Yeah. They're like, oh, well, uh, you can't really use such an extreme. I'm like, yes, we can use an extreme example like that, because like extreme stuff does happen. Or if someone is holed up in their room and self-harming, say, yes, you actually can and you should intervene at that point. And teens can go into very dark places. Teens uh can, you know, we don't we don't want to to let something get to that, to that point where you're actually fearing for, you know, for their their lives, for their the safety of of life and and limb.
SPEAKER_00Uh another way that I have seen this idea of, you know, unschooling, just let them go, uh, is it can also kind of create this almost like a narcissism kind of thing, like it's all me and I don't have to think about anybody else.
SPEAKER_01And um Are you talking about the parent or the child?
SPEAKER_00Uh just that parenting idea or you know, the adults and the unschooling of just let the kids do what they want to do. You know, so you're pointing out obviously there's limits in that direction as far as their safety. But I would say that there's also um it's the world is not all about them, and you don't want them to get that feeling either. Like, I don't have to do anything I don't want to do, and I don't have to be nice to other people, or um consider other people's perspective, or compromise, you know, learn to compromise those skills. Yes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. This this is where you get into that interesting crossover between kind of what we might call like traditional or like 1970s and before uh parenting styles that some might label neglectful in the modern age, uh, but also parenting styles that put a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of the young people to like take care of their own needs. Um, I think there's there's kind of this interesting circle where old school parenting styles, parts of them become relevant again once we've seen, and once we've seen how far the pendulum can swing towards centering a young person's needs and insulating them from the world and the demands that the world makes of us to an extreme way. Just to give you a brief concrete example here. So I take teenagers on these international trips and retreats, and I provide accommodation for them. And we always provide two meals a day, breakfast and dinner, and lunch, they need to uh provide for themselves. And so that might mean if we're on a traveling program, that might mean finding someplace to buy lunch or getting together with some other participants on the trip to go to a grocery store and save money and make like a picnic lunch. And sometimes they fail at doing this. They they're too busy doing something else, they just don't eat, they uh they don't want to spend the money on the food. And then it's like 5 p.m. and dinner is not going to be ready till 6:30. And they show up kind of hangry and starving and kind of upset. And I'm like, hey, did you feed yourself? And I said, this was part of the deal. I need you to like show up, not completely crazy and famished, and uh to like take care of your basic need for food and drinking water uh throughout the day and still be a functional member of this small traveling group that we have. And that's something I completely stand by. And I'm not going to go, you know, send them a text message at at 1230 and be like, hey, did you eat lunch today? You're 15 years old. You are capable of getting a sandwich. Like, you can do this, and don't show up here hungry and upset at me because of this. And I'll I'll stare them down and I'll say that no, you're capable of doing this. You can go tomorrow. Do better, be better.
SPEAKER_00And do they?
SPEAKER_01And do they? They often do, not always.
SPEAKER_00Um, you talk about hard fun. I love that term. Tell me what that means.
SPEAKER_01Uh I don't remember the name, the author or the researcher who uh coined that, but um grateful to steal it from them. And the idea is if you look at learning through this lens of uh like games or game theory, we uh we don't actually want to play easy games uh that are too easy to win. For example, if you want to play the game of golf, you know, there's a reason that we put the sand pits and the water in there. And it's not just some little putting range where all the holes are separated by five inches from each other. Um we add these obstacles because the obstacles and the constraints are what make the game fun and interesting and hard. And and just to bring it back to the a real life example, these um these trips, I believe, are really good examples of hard fun, which is hey, we're gonna go travel, but we're not gonna go do it in this way where we're just consuming uh food and experiences and taking selfies in front of things, in front of things and getting some bus to pick us up directly from our accommodation and take us to the next place. And you never have to experience the the friction of uh public transport or the literal friction of your backpack rubbing on the crease by your shoulder because you've been carrying it for a mile and a half and it's a hot day. And and like the what makes travel fun is when it gets kind of hard and you have to solve some problems and you have to navigate through unfamiliar terrain. And when travel is too packaged and soft and easy and everything's taken care of for you, all three meals a day, someone checks in with you at 12.30 to make sure you've eaten lunch, then then something's uh missing. The game is too easy. And we just don't like like video games are no fun if they're too easy to solve, if they're too easy to beat. Ask any gamer that. What makes a game fun is when it's like really complex and interesting. Uh you ever play video games, Terry? Computer games?
SPEAKER_00I have um done it only to try to be that good sport of a parent because nice and a grandparent. Um, so it's not something I'm drawn to, but I have done it for my son and my grandson. Uh, but I loved hearing about your experience as a gamer. And uh just because you know, video games are getting a really bad rap right now. That's just one of the scapegoats of, you know, the downfall of society. They were getting a bad rap when I was a kid in the 90s. Like, okay. Well, yeah, that's true. Yeah. So um, and my my view on it is it's just like anything, you know, even a good thing in excess can be bad, you know. Sure. I really appreciated what you had said about the benefits of gaming.
SPEAKER_01I I think, you know, I I pretty much stopped doing video games and computer games when I got to college. I found other things that were more interesting, you know, real life socializing, adventures, that kind of stuff. And so I don't stand up for them in the sense of like they're valuable to everyone all the time. But I think that we really do kids a disservice when we look at the electronic games that they play and say that's a waste of time. I think it's pretty intellectually lazy to do that and to not try to understand why this game that they're playing feels so much more interesting and deserving of their attention than the so-called real world. And oftentimes, the so-called real world that we are forcing kids to participate in is this like horrible bureaucratic nightmare that we call school. And you're just sitting around waiting for something to happen, and then you're forced to get up and the, you know, John Taylor Gatto, who was my real gateway into this world, he said a buzzer rings, and you're forced to get up from writing poetry and go somewhere else and sit down and learn how to do math, and 45 minutes later, another buzzer rings. And it's just inane. And of course, um being able to retreat into your own little world where stuff kind of makes sense and you can play this game that's very interesting and challenging and engaging, that there's a very good reason why that is uh a delicious alternative to what we have presented to uh to kids on average. And there's a lot to be learned from how games work and how they're designed. And just to give a specific example, this is a pretty old game at this point. But if there's any parents out there who want to just experience what hard fun is like, I recommend go download the game Portal.
SPEAKER_00This came out P-O-R-T-A-L.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, Portal. It came out like 15 years ago or something. But you just get dropped into this world. It's it's in the in the mode of a first-person shooter game. And so you're you're you are a character, you're looking at the world, the mouse controls um, you know, where you're looking, and it gives you no explicit instructions whatsoever. You just sort of wake up in this world and you have this weapon, which is not actually a weapon, but it creates a portal. And you shoot one direction, and that's the in portal, and then you shoot a second time and it's the out portal. And you need to navigate through this world, it's kind of like an escape room by creating different portals that allow you to get places that seemed impossible. And it's just like a fascinating intellectual uh adventure. And it's and it doesn't tell you what to do, it doesn't patronize you. It doesn't walk you through step by step. It's hard fun. And so that's the kind of thing that I think we can learn from, whether you're trying to design a school or you're trying to like take some teenagers on a trip, uh, or you're just like wondering like, why does my kid think that what's happening on this screen is so much more interesting than what's what I think should be interesting. It's like, don't just assume that screens are evil, that social media is the devil, that video games are polluting our kids' brains. It's like, no, go in and try to understand the core needs that are being met there. It could be needs for socialization and social comparison. It could be needs to like actually be intellectually challenged instead of being bored all the time.
SPEAKER_00How often do we tell our children, our colleagues, our friends, even ourselves, those simple yet powerful words? You are capable. There's an adage that goes something along the lines of wisdom comes from experience and experience comes from bad decisions. Even if you go back to one of our early episodes titled, If I only had a brain, and you learn how to align your three brains for better decision making, you still stand the chance of making a decision you later regret. But what if that decision ends up being the best thing you ever did? What if it tips your life in a direction far beyond your dream? What if it becomes an adventure? Your challenge for this episode is to identify something you've thought you'd like to do but hesitated because of some imagined incapacity. Maybe you felt you would never find the time, you don't have the skill, or simply you just could never gather the courage. Find a peer group. If you don't have one in your current social or professional circle, find one or even start one on meetup.com and let the adventure begin. Because it is when we step beyond our comfort zone that life brings new wonder and surprise. And who knows, your new adventure may just be your element.