Good Life Project - The Gift of Failure: Jessica Lahey

Episode Date: August 11, 2015

The average person spends an almost obscene amount of time working tirelessly to avoid failure. We're terrified that we'll put everything we have into an endeavor, only to come up short.Failure, we're told, is something to be avoided at all costs. In some parts of life and professional cultures, it's not only frowned upon, it is fiercely punished.So, every day, a little bit at a time, we confine ourselves into a supposedly safer and safer, smaller and smaller box with the hope of avoiding failure. We stop taking risks, go only for the most certain options and, in doing so, we destroy any semblance of life, freedom, discovery and possibility in our lives.It's bad enough when we make these choices for ourselves. But, what happens when we impose our failure-adverse lens on our kids, students or anyone others who might look to us to figure out how to live in the world?We end up not only teaching them to avoid failure, we also erect cages around them. Ostensibly to "protect them from both others and themselves." Sometimes, and on some levels, that may be necessary.But, increasingly, it may do as much if not more harm than good. Because it protects them from outcomes we assume have a high-probability of happening, yet, in truth, have little or no place in reality. And even when they do happen, failure often sets the mandatory elements in motion for growth. When we kill any possibility for failure, we also kill any possibility of confidence, discovery, self-reliance and growth, all critical underpinnings of a life well-lived.Today's guest, Jessica Lahey, knows this cycle well. As a teacher, education advocate and writer, she's been on nearly every side of this dynamic and seen the toll it takes. In January 2013, she wrote a provocative article on the topic that nearly melted the internet. She's now expanded upon her wisdom in her tremendous new book, The Gift of Failure, How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed.Join us, and if you're inclined, share this eye-opening and deeply-informative conversation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die.

Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-nest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. I think being a part of our kids' lives in ways that are about sharing time with them and sharing experiences with them is really, really important. But taking responsibility out of their hands just does our kids a disservice and robs them of a whole bunch of opportunities for them to feel that pride. Moments when your parents aren't involved and you figure something out on your own. Those are the moments of triumph that we tend to take away from them. We spend an almost absurd amount of our lives avoiding failure. We think about how do we protect against it? How do we not feel it? How do we never do things which won't work?

Because we're terrified of the feeling that it gives us in our bodies and our minds. And we're terrified of being judged by those around us for having tried and not succeeded. That alone stifles so much life. But what happens when we impose our lens on failure on kids, when we try to protect them from the very thing that very often is the gateway to confidence, creativity, and an extraordinary life? That's what we're talking about with today's guest, Jessica Leahy, who's written a phenomenal new book called The Gift of Failure. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. This week's episode is brought to you by Camp GLP, which is short for Good Life Project.

We have got an incredible group, more than 300 people coming from all around the world, from the U.S., Asia, Australia, Europe, South Africa. Really just a gorgeous collection, gathering of humanity to learn, to grow, to laugh, to play, have fun, amazing workshops, events, activities. And most importantly, we've got this incredible tribe where you can literally show up and nobody cares who you are, what you've done, how much you're making, what your title is. It's not about posturing and positioning. It's about just being you, being human and interacting around a shared set of fantastic values. So that sounds amazing to you.

If you'd love to be there, we do have a small number of spots left. This all goes down August 27th to August 30th, just about 90 minutes outside of New York City. You can check out all the details at goodlifeproject.com slash camp, or just take a look at the show notes and whatever app you're listening to, and you'll see that you can just click right through to get all the information there in the show notes. Thanks so much, and I hope to see you at camp. So let's dive into why we're hanging out today. And there are a lot of different ways I think we can dive into it.

Why don't we start off with sort of the big public way that this conversation got started, which, tell me if I'm wrong, but at least in my experience was an article that you wrote for the Atlantic in beginning of 2013 ish, right? At the very end of January, 2013. Yeah. Right. So can you take me into what that was about and where it came from, from inside of you? I've been writing about education for a while, specifically, not really education policy, but more the art of teaching the craft craft of teaching, my own experience in the classroom.

In fact, when I got asked to write about education other places, I said, you know, I don't really write about policy. And, you know, that was fine. And a study came out of Australia that talked very specifically about the experience I was having with my students in my classroom. And as all teachers know, you can't write about your own students. You can't write about your students' parents. You can't give quotes from what your students said. That's just not something we can do. The study came out and it had quotes from guidance counselors. And these quotes,

I could have written them. And in fact, when the article, when I, after I wrote the article and it was published, my supervisors, my, the administrators at my school said, no, really, are you sure these aren't quotes from our parents? Because we had this conversation last week in my office. And I said, no, really, these are quotes from the article. So the article came out talking about what happens to kids who are not supported in their autonomy, what happens specifically to kids who are over-parented, and how that impacts their education. From a teacher's perspective, what that looks like in the classroom when a kid who never has to take initiative, never has to deal with the ramifications of their own mistakes, teaching that kid is really hard. And I'd been wanting to talk about that for a long time, but didn't have the opportunity until this article came out. So I published the article, I sent it into the Atlantic,

it was published immediately. And that was a Monday or Tuesday. And by Thursday, I was doing national television for that piece. Right. What was it about it that just triggered such a fierce response? Because it was I mean, then if you look at the comment section, that article, there's like, yeah, nine different raging debates going on, not with you, but with the people that are responding to this. You know, I think the title, I didn't write the title. My editor wrote the title, Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail. And I think the idea of what over-parenting does to kids had been out there for a little while.

I mean, obviously, we had the free-range kids thing. We had all that kind of stuff was out there. But we hadn't really talked about, no one had talked about what it does to kids from an academic perspective, what that does to their education. And since then, it's been great because that, you know, I'm so glad that that conversation started because now it's happening in a lot of different arenas. And so parents think, well, you know, I really want to do what I want to make my kid happy. I want to save my kid.

I want my kid to do well academically. And yet what they're doing to get there is it cross purposes actually with what makes for successful kids academically, intellectually, emotionally speaking. Okay. So let's dive into this because this started as an article in the Atlantic. There was an explosive reaction to it. And this has now grown into, you know, like two, two and a half years later, a book. Right.

And a powerful book and a provocative book. Thank you. So let's kind of track the exploration of that a little bit. So the fundamental message in the article was? The fundamental message in the article is that in order to have kids who can achieve that sort of state of flow, that love of learning, that being able to think independently, you have to foster intrinsic motivation. And intrinsic motivation happens with autonomy-supportive parenting. And autonomy-supportive parenting is a really important way to raise people who can think for themselves and who can act for themselves.

That's sort of the basic message. And all of that makes for kids who want to learn, kids who don't end up struggling against the academic system as we have it now quite as much. Can you share the – you opened that article with an anecdote. Can you share that? Yeah, the article with an anecdote. Can you share that? Yeah, the article itself, the Atlantic article. Yeah, I had a student a long time ago, long, long time ago. She's grown up and is a very happy adult now. She wrote a paper for me in English class.

And it became really clear very early on that she had not written that article or that essay. The language was not hers. And I asked her mother about it and told her mother that we were going to have to do some disciplinary measures because her daughter had plagiarized. And her mother got very angry with me and said, well, you can't punish her for it because I'm the one who wrote that paper. And granted, her daughter was going through some things at the time. Her mother thought she was doing what she needed to help her daughter mitigate some stress in her life. But her mother was doing all of her schoolwork for her, all of it, from what I can tell from talking to other teachers. So yeah, I don't know what I could have done to discipline the parent for that situation.

I was sort of, my hands were tied. No, my hands were tied in that situation. And like I said, from a parenting perspective, and this was the big thing that happened through writing Gift of Failure is that I realized I can't just blame those parents because I'm one of those parents. I completely understand the impulse to want to help your kid when they're going through a particularly stressful time. And one way you can do that is to take some of the things off their plate, take some of the stressors off their plate. And I sympathized with the mother from that side, but I also have to deal with the fact that this is a kid who now believes that every time things get hard, her mother's going to do her work for her. Yeah. And I think that's, and you know, we're both parents. So, you know, it's funny. I've

asked the question of parents many times, you know, what do you want for your child? And almost invariably the first thing that pops into a parent's head or the first thing they say, at least I want them to be happy. Right. But I've also come to learn that that's actually not true. That the first thing that a parent really wants for their child is for them to be safe. I think actually what's interesting about that question is they do want their kids to be happy. They want their kids to be happy in the short term, though. And I think our focus should be more on long-term happiness.

Long-term happiness is something that is a little bit more under their power, but short-term happiness. And here I also have to add the caveat. I think what they're also talking about is their own happiness, the answer to that question of, was I a good parent today? And being able to check off that box usually means that we did something that day that made our child appreciate us or made our child happy. Whereas maybe if we stop thinking about five minutes from now and start thinking about five years from now, we can still make our kids happy, just not necessarily in every single moment. And then there's also the huge wild card of what exactly, when you use the word

happy, what are you talking about? Which can, you know, social psychologists and positive psychologists have been grappling with this a lot over the last decade or so, and nobody can really agree. Yeah, I think the problem for us right now is that kids really, really want to be useful. And I think we've lost sight of that. And I think they've lost sight of that. Kids were made useless a while ago. And in terms of their everyday utility to run a household and be a part of the family and take care of things that help run a family. So I don't think even kids can articulate what it is that makes them happy, but give a kid a task. Give the kid a problem to solve.

There's an anecdote in the book. My editor, actually, at the New York Times, tells this story about the day a car skidded off the road up at her house, and the adults were freaked out. It really wreaked havoc on the schedule, and it messed up what they wanted to do that day. But the kids were in heaven because they were coming up with levers and sand and cat litter and all kinds of ways to fix this. This was like, oh my gosh, we have a job. Let's fix this. The kids were thrilled. And she says, in retrospect, it was a great day. It completely messed up what they had planned.

But the kids suddenly had this big purpose. And they were able to solve the problem. And they loved it. So I want to dive deeper into how we came to this place. Because you use the phrase that kids these days are largely made to feel useless. Take me back. Has this just always been the case? No.

Is this something that's evolved fairly recently well i mean if you look at the a big chunk of the book was and actually backing up even more writing this book for me has been very much a process of trial and error i mean when you talk about gift of failure that's very much what writing this book has been for me because i've many places along the way number one an early version came out as much too angry at parents. And I had to look at my own motivations on early version. Right after I handed in actually the first draft of this book, I suffered a pretty bad head injury. And I the read this book was supposed to come out in 2014. And my publisher had to postpone until 2015,

because I just wasn't able even to do the edits on the book. And so along the way, the book has evolved with sort of what I've learned as I've gone along. So the book is a very different book than it was when it started out. One of the things I really had to do was look at the history of American parenting and what we used to do and what we do now and sort of that idyllic version of, you know, what you think you want for your kids, that little house on the prairie sort of, you know, traipsing through the woods thing. But American history in parenting has sort of gone hand in hand with child welfare, which has been great, which is fantastic.

You know, we don't want kids working in mills. We don't want kids in sweatshops. But on the other hand, kids used to be a very big part of raising their siblings, of helping with jobs, with making it just so the family could get through each day. And then we took that away from them. And to a great end, child labor law is very, very important. And then the family started to get smaller. And as families started to get smaller, and we started attaching a higher worth to each kid, and they became an investment, and we wanted our kids to do better than we did. We really felt like we needed to invest in their

happiness. We needed to invest in their education. We needed to sort of micromanage every aspect of their lives. And then fast forward to, you know, when I became a parent and had advanced graduate degrees and had children, suddenly the tools I'd learned, I put advanced graduate degrees and had children. Suddenly the tools I'd learned, I put so much money and so much effort into my advanced degrees, learning everything from Excel to how to write a legal brief to all these different things. Those were the tools I had at my disposal when it came to children. And so when you hear about people creating a spreadsheet to chart their child's, you know, poops and peas and what they ate and how their child's, you know, poops and peas and what they

ate and how often they ate, you know, God bless them, because those are the tools they have at their disposal, because that's what they spent used to spend their days doing at work. So, you know, we get so little feedback on our parenting that I think these days, we're just using the tools that we have at our disposal. And those tools are business tools, most often, or whatever we learned at school, and putting a lot of investment into our kids. And I think that's a little bit unfair to our kids, because they can't ever be everything to us. And that's sort of what we want them to be. And it seems like really, it's not just that we're using different tools, and we're tracking and micromanaging on a whole different level,

but also just, there's been a societal shift in the way that we see kids' responsibility within the family and the jobs that they do and don't do and the things that we expect from them as citizens within the family. Right. And look at allowance, for example. I mean, allowance wasn't, number one, it wasn't something that kids got. Number two, a long time ago, it was something, you just participated in the family. And if anything, you worked and gave your money to the family as part of the family unit. That was part of being part of a family union.

And now, more often than not, when I talk to parents, they give their kids allowance in exchange for work, which is a nightmare situation as far as I'm concerned. When I go and speak at schools and I talk to them a little bit about how their parents get them to engage in school when they don't want to, I ask the students, I say, I promise I'm not going to tell your parents, and I promise your teachers are not going to be shocked, but I need for you to raise your hands if your parents pay you for grades. The lowest percentage I've ever seen, somewhere around 20%, the highest percentage I've ever seen is going on 70% for kids who are paid for grades. Which means, and now I have to ask the question, thinking about those different groups, because

there is a socioeconomic difference, like a city versus suburb, like what accounts for that? I mean, no matter what it is, that percentage seems a little bit wrong. But that huge gap, like what's, do you have a sense for what that's all about? I have to clarify also, even if it's not money for grades, it's some sort of reward for grades. It's, you know, if you get honors this entire semester, you'll get an iPod. If you make honor roll your entire senior year, we'll get you a car for graduation, that kind of thing. And definitely this is a socioeconomic thing. A lot of the speaking I do is in independent schools, mostly because they're the ones who call me up and say, come speak. Because they're having all of these issues with, you know, sort of what Madeline Levine talks about in Price of Privilege, you know, really stressed out kids who you would think would have no problems, but actually have their own set of problems, you know, and a lot of people don't want to talk about that because it's very way away, you know, whether it's a small amount of money or a large amount of money or a small reward or a car, a lot of kids, more kids than should be, are getting

rewarded in some way for performance. And that makes our affection, our approval contingent on performance. I mean, really what you're saying is, I don't care as much about the learning as I do about the end result. And P.S., my estimation of you rises and falls with those grades. Which is interesting also because what we're fundamentally talking about is the difference between intrinsic versus extrinsic reward for performance. And it's not just about kids. I mean, that follows us, so many of us, all the way through our careers. And, you know, Dan Pink wrote really powerfully about this in Drive.

And even the things that you love to do, and you've written about this also, like you would just do for free because it just lights you up. Once people start paying you for that in some way, you know, and then they stop paying you for it, it's almost like you disarm the intrinsic drive that was there. It's like you turn it off once there's an external reward, and then once you take the external reward, it doesn't always come back. Right. If you look at, you know, Dan's Pink is so great, and Drive is such a fantastic book. If you read the book, the research that he based Drive on by Edward Deasy, something happens when you introduce any extrinsic reward,

any reward that comes from outside, whether for Harry Harlow's monkeys that was a raisin or for kids it's money for grades, something really short-circuits the whole intrinsic motivation. And as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says, you can't achieve this wonderful state of flow that he's so famous for when it's something you're doing for someone else. For me, I get in that state of flow when I'm writing or when I'm cross-country skiing or when I'm running or when I'm just out on a walk. And that's something that's driven by my own need to do those things,

not because, you know, someone else told me to. And my example is always, if you want to see the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and what it does to flow, go watch your kid play Legos, you know, happily for many, many hours at a time, and then walk into the room and say, okay, now let's play according to my rules and see what happens. I mean, the play ends immediately because a kid wants to play according to their rules. Their kid wants to have control over their universe. And when we take that control away from them, and rewards are a form of control. When we take control away from kids, and we take their autonomy away, then we're messing with their intrinsic motivation. Yeah. And I think, you know, part of the scary part of this is that it's not being done from a place of malice. It's not being it's, I mean, we think we're really like, we want

to set our kids up as best as we can to succeed. You know, we want them to grow into vibrant, wholehearted kids and adults. So, you know, we're kind of using the best thing that we think is going to get them there without really realizing that the things we think are going to help them the most may be doing the most harm. Right. The most striking example of this is, if you look at the research of Wendy Grolnick, she's one of, I just adore her work. She's at Clark University in Worcester. And she took a bunch of mother-infant pairs. They all happen to be mothers. That just is the way it worked.

And she brought them to her lab, and she told the mothers very general instructions, be there while your child plays. And then she and her assistants watched the mother-child pair as the child played. And some of the mothers sat there while their child played and their child did their own thing. And the mother just sat there. But some of them got in there and said, no, no, no, put the blue block on the green block, or no, do it this way, and really intervened in the child's play. When it gets really interesting was the next time those parents and those children came to the lab,

she separated the mother-infant pairs, and then she had the babies try to achieve some task. And the children of the mothers who intervened constantly would get frustrated and cry and give up and couldn't finish with tasks. Whereas the children who had mothers who allowed them to play on their own, maybe those children got frustrated, and once they got really frustrated, the parents sort of redirected a little bit. That kind of parenting, autonomy-supportive parenting,

led to kids who were able to complete a task under their own power, and even if they got frustrated, they were able to redirect themselves and finish the task. Now extrapolate that out to chemistry in high school and parents who have been sitting there helping their children do their homework all through school. Kids who have had parents say, no, no, do the math first, not the English, or here, let me help you with the edits on that essay while I sit here and watch you write. Those kids will get frustrated, cry and give up, Maybe not cry, but get frustrated and give up.

Whereas the kids who have learned how to tap into their own resources of redirection and a little bit of resilience and a little bit of, okay, let me give that one more shot under my own steam, those kids are going to be able to complete tasks on their own. That, seeing Wendy Grolnick's research, and then all of her other research sort of building on that one study, it's really clear how important it is to be an autonomy-supportive parent instead of a parent who gets right in there, hovers over what your kid is doing,

and tries to affect every aspect of their work. It's so interesting. And I haven't known the research until I started to get a little more exposure to your work, to be honest. But just instinctively, and I've read a lot of the work of Carol Dweck and people like that around fixed versus growth mindset. And I remember when I first was exposed to Dweck's work, actually, I was like, oh, my God, I'm saying everything wrong.

She's wonderful. Both for myself, I'm sort of wiring my brain the wrong way. But also as a parent, I'm praising all the wrong things in the wrong way, using the wrong language. So I would start to immediately change the way that if my daughter came home and she had done well on a test, you know, like, how wonderful is it that, you know, you worked so hard, you know, so proud of the work rather than the outcome. And that, you know, instilling that everything is actually,

you know, something that's changeable and based on effort. But there was also a moment where I remember she was, you know, she's in her teens now where she was a lot younger and she would come in and say, can you help me do this? Which also is like kid language for can you do this for me? And my answer was some variation of have you really worked at it? Have you given it your absolute best? If you have, yeah, let's sit down.

I'm happy to see how I can help you. But if not, go and take more time with it. It's okay to struggle and sort of figure out. It was so funny because she had a good friend with a little sister who used to tag around with them for years. And one day I overheard her in the room with, like, the younger girls, like three years younger, who had come to my daughter asking for help with something. And I hear her saying to the little girl, well, have you done your best first? Make sure you do your best. And then I'm happy to help you. I'm like, oh my God. So it's really funny to see how even if they reject it and they're not happy when you say things like that, it sinks in and it makes a difference. And I did it largely just

because some of the greatest feelings I can recall from being a kid were when I struggled mightily. And then I figured it out. Nobody else figured it out for me. And it sucked along the way. But I got the win. And that was more awesome. And maybe it was me and a couple of friends. But it wasn't somebody from above with greater knowledge and a parent or coming and saying, and here is the solution.

Because then it's like, oh, cool. Okay, I got there. But you don't own it. And I think that's, you know, and I guess that's a big part of your final message. We take that from our kids. Well, one of the things that I love about Michael Thompson's book, Homesick and Happy, and Michael Thompson is such a mentor to me. I just so admire what he does.

And he goes to talks and he asks the question, think, he asks adults, think about your most triumphant moment as a kid. And he, you know, all the people in the audience kind of get that dreamy look on their face. And then he said, now raise your hands if your parents were there. And he said, almost all of the people, the hands that stay down, because those moments, and for me, there are a few moments that I remember very specifically as these huge breakthrough moments for me in when I felt so good about when I'd done something or figured something out. And my parents were never there. the point that the things that we really are going to, are that are going to strengthen us as people, and the things that we're going to be most proud of are our own accomplishments, not our parents, not anyone else around us. And figuring that out and allowing my kids to have those moments has

been really important. And you said that thing about, you know, helping with homework. The nice thing is now that I've been sort of, you know, not helping for a while, I know that when they say I need help, they mean I need help. They don't mean something else. The messaging is much clearer. I don't know. I've come to be able to trust when they say, no, really, I'm stuck. That means, no, really, I'm stuck. And I still will, you know will try to talk them through it.

But even Carol Dweck messes up. She talks in mindset. She says, sometimes her husband comes to her and says, I did this. And she's like, oh, you're so brilliant. No, no, no, that's not what I meant. I meant, you worked so hard to get to that place. You know, we're not. I know, we're all human.

I mean, we're sort of like along the road together. Exactly. Constantly messing up. We fail as much as the next person. Well, and when I say praise for effort instead of for the end product, we're not going to do that 100% of the time. It's just not the way people work.

I know. And I think, I guess that's part of the risk also, is that when you start on one end of the spectrum, you think you're doing everything right, and then you start to get exposed to your work and Dweck's work and other people are like, oh, my God. I need to go to the – the pendulum has to swing to the absolute opposite end of it. And then we hold ourselves to this thing where I have to be perfect on that side.

I have to reverse everything now. And it's just – I mean, it's like what you're saying. We're humans. You kind of live on a day-to-day basis. The pendulum is constantly swinging back and forth in terms of how we engage with our kids. Well, and one of the other things that I tend to talk about a lot is that being perfect as a parent doesn't mean that your life is completely focused on being perfect as a parent. I mean, when I talk about homework and how to sort of be a little more autonomy supportive

when it comes to homework, one of the first things you have to do is not be right there. You know, I'll go off and do something in the kitchen. I'm within earshot. If he says I'm stuck, I'll, you know, say, let me help you with that. But I'm off doing my own thing. And I think some kids have gotten to the point and some parents have let their kids see them focusing everything on a child's performance. And I think it's really important for kids to see that we have our own lives, and we

have our own goals, and we have our own truths and our own struggles, and that there's stuff to do besides them. And that's the other big issue is being honest with our kids. I think we also tend to protect our children from our struggles. And yet talking to our children about our struggles is one of the most important things we do because we role model for them this process of setting, you know, making a goal, trying to work towards that goal, missing, messing up humongously. And we don't tend to talk about those mess-ups with our kids. You know, if we come home from work a little upset and our kid says, what's wrong? We don't get into

a discussion of, well, look, this guy double-crossed me at work today and he took credit for something I did and this is how he dealt with it because we don't want to burden our children with that. But that's role modeling resilience. That's role modeling how we deal with our own struggles. And that's really important. Yeah, no, I so agree. Yeah, I'm a writer like you. And I'm on the third version of the manuscript for my next book right now. Things that never seem to happen, you know, that write the first way. And I was sort of explaining to my daughter the other day who was struggling with some writing.

And so I was like, this is hard. Writing is hard. The best writers in the world have been doing it their whole lives. Most of them will still tell you, this is hard. And there are many, many, many. And I was like, look, I'm on my, like, I've had my editors now tell me, you've got to essentially start over three times now for the book. And it's not because I'm doing something wrong. It's because this is the nature of the process, you know, and it's just hard work. My kids saw that too, with this book, as a journalist, I'm used to, you know, 800 to 1500 words, maybe 2200 on the outside, if it's a longer piece. And thinking from an organizational perspective about

100,000 words is a very different job. And my editor's been great. And I share an editor with Ron Lieber, who just wrote The Opposite of Spoiled, and he and I both write for The Times. And so, you know, she said, this is a common thing for journalists. Don't worry. It doesn't mean you stink. It means that it's hard to think in different terms than you're used to thinking. And, you know, this light bulb went on and I was like, okay, I'm not a terrible person. I don't need to throw in the towel. This is actually something that other people have experienced and it will, I'll work it through.

And, you know, that was a really important lesson for me too. And I talked about that with my kids. My younger son really wants to be a writer. And he was working outside. It's beautiful outside. So we had a table set up outside. And we were writing together, actually. And I had to write this piece that I thought was going to be a slam dunk.

I thought it was going to be so easy. It was about stuff I talk about all the time. And I don't know what it is. But if you go into something thinking it's going to be a slam dunk, forget it. It's a wreck. Oh, I know that so well. I rewrote that piece like five times. And I asked for a one-day extension.

I said, look, something about this is just thwarting me. And I talked about it with him. And he said, well, why don't you just write it? And I said, I don't know. Sometimes you just can't just write it. And you've got to write a whole bunch of junk. And I joked with my editor. I said, you know, something that should have taken me a couple of hours took me four days

and a couple of hours, but those four days were regurgitating and unloading all of the junk to get to the few promising bits. And I, you know, as a writer, I try to remember that's an important part of the process. And as a mom, I try to remind my kids that, you know, yeah, you screwed that up the first five times, but you learn something each of those times that you're going to apply in that final version. Yeah. And it's like you said, sometimes you need to actually get through, you need to get all that stuff because it's the process of moving through all the stuff that you discard that actually unlocks the stuff that you're going to keep. And it's so hard to throw

away whole chapters. I mean, I'm throwing away like entire books. Well, and when my editor said, no, let's get rid of these four chapters because they just don't have a place here. And I want to hold on to them like, but do you know how long it took me to research? I mean, the book itself was also interesting to me. Luckily, I love to research. I love to research. So I found out through writing this book that one book really equals about 265.

I think there's something like 265 books in the bibliography. But that process was the learning. So ideally, you need like three years to do all the reading and then maybe get into the book. But, you know, doing it all at the same time is quite a process. Yeah, well, I mean, that's right. Gretchen Rubin and Susan Cain are friends of mine. And Susan Cain, when she was working on Quiet, I'm trying to remember,

I think she told me she was actually working on it, doing mostly research for the better part of five years. Right. And so people just see, well, she wrote like her opening shot book comes out and just explodes and becomes this massive thing. It's like she devoted years and years and years

into just the research before she even started writing. And she's still learning. I mean, she's launching Quiet Revolution right now. And that's a whole nother learning process for her. And the nice thing about people like Susan and Gretchen is that they love the learning. I mean, that's and that's and it's all just for the sake of the learning, which is really fun to watch. No, and I'm in that boat also, every time I take a strengths test, I don't know about you, but love of learning or curiosity is always number one or two. Well, that's why I became a teacher. I mean, for me, every single day I leave school with a little sheet of paper attached to the

front of my plan book, which is questions to answer for next time. And one of the important things I've found is when you tell a student you're going to find the answer to the question for them or send them off to find the answer to the question, you have to come back around to it. You have to show that, you know, that there's that closure on that promise. And so, you know, every single day when I would go home from school, there was a research session. I mean, I had to find out where a word came from or, you know, wait a second, how did that and that come together in history to make that? And, you know, there's second, how did that and that come together in history to make that? You know, there's always this process.

And so as a teacher, I mean, that's my job. That's the most amazing thing to me. I love that process. I can't imagine not teaching in some way, shape, or form. Yeah. A certain friend of mine, probably, I think this was actually before I'd written the first book, Karen Sammonson, who'd been like a longtime author in the personal growth world. And I was like, why don't you do what you do? Because she's massively prolific.

And she's like, I figured out a way to get people to pay me to just spend all day learning something that I would have paid to learn on my own. She's like, what better job is there? Well, that's the reason that the best teachers change things up constantly, because it's the teachers. I remember in law school, I had one teacher and I really loved him, nothing against him, but he came into class with a binder that you could tell he'd been using since about 1968. I had plenty also. Yeah, exactly. And the class went according to that tried and true lesson. And you could kind of tell. So for me, there was always a cyclical nature to what I taught. There was always a retrying something else.

And my husband is a teacher too. And in fact, he just got some of his evaluations back yesterday. And he was reading them and he said, what's so great about these is not that they're all great, but that the criticisms of my teaching or my class or the structure, I get it. I know what they mean, and they're right. And so that's what I'll fix for next time. And the great thing about these evaluations also

is that they're now saying these things that didn't used to be great are now great. And so the teaching is just a constant process of trying to become better and learn more and just soak up more. Yeah. I love that. It also kind of is circling me back to a part of the conversation, though, that I want to touch on. Because that quest can also sometimes within us convert to perfectionism, which I think then also, like, it harms us in a lot of different

ways. But then it sets us on a course of trying to also set that expectation for kids. And that's something that you explore a little bit, maybe not so much like, you know, using that language, but talk to me about the idea. I've also, I've written a couple of articles now on perfectionism, just wrote one, the one that was killing me actually the other day was about perfectionism. And I wrote one for it. How appropriate also. I actually wrote one for the New York Times in my column about how to help kids who have a real perfectionist tendency worry more and do less. Because what I found in my classroom, I tell the story about this boy who was taking a test. And I walked over to him,

and he had completely frozen up. He was on question two. And I said, it's okay, don't just move on to question three, you can come back around to it. And he looked up to me with these eyes. And he said, I can't. He was just stuck. If he couldn't answer question two perfectly, if he couldn't answer question two at all, which happened to be the case, he could not move on to question three. He just couldn't do it. I've also had students completely unable to engage in free writing, which is something that I think can be really helpful if you don't know how to move forward. Just keep the pen to the back and fix, or they just can't unhinge that thing in their brain that allows them to sort of do a stream of consciousness writing

without worrying about every single word that goes on the page. And that's really concerning to me because that's the biggest hurdle I as a teacher see to learning. If you can't quiet that inner editor, that's something I talk about a lot in class. If you can't quiet that, then you can't possibly move forward and learn new stuff and figure out how to fix what's wrong with what you're doing. Perfectionism, I'm seeing it more and more in school. I'm also seeing it edge over into the clinical, into the OCD sort of realm more often. And so I

had a great conversation with a doctor who specifically studies this. And he said, you know, part of what you have to do with kids who are perfectionist, even if they don't spill on over into the OCD territory is exposure therapy, you've got to just let them screw it up over and over and or actually push them to screw it up over and over and over again so that screwing it up becomes less scary. Because parents come to me and they say, I really would love to help my kid fail more often, but my kid is so petrified of failing that she won't even try. But where does that come from? If it's not coming from the parent, or is it coming from the parent, but they don't realize that they're creating that dynamic? I think when, think about, this is a great way of explaining it,

and it's not my example. It comes from a book. It comes from a woman named Vicki Hoefel, and she wrote a book called Duct Tape Parenting. And she said, think about the way you react when your kid comes home with a test that has an A on it, and they come to the door, and they're all excited, and they say, look, look at this, look at this.

And you come up to them, and you say, that's so great. You're at this. And you come up to them and you say, that's so great. You're so wonderful. And you stick it on the refrigerator. And then they come home with a C or a D or an F. And they show it to you and their head is hanging and they're just waiting for you to respond. And you don't. You're silent.

Or you say, what went wrong? The message is very clear. We don't mean to say my approval is based on your performance, but that's what we're saying. And so Vicki talks about the need to make your response to an A and your response to a C, D, or F the same, which sounds impossible, but it actually really works, which is the kid comes through the door, shows you whatever it is,

and you say, huh, what did you do to get there? What went well? What didn't go well? You know, what might you try next time? What do you think about that A, worked for you? Do you think the material was, you know, easier? Did you try a new study thing like flashcards, for example, that tended to work really well? Or what went wrong so that you missed that section? Did you not know the material? Did you not understand the material? Having that conversation about the process as opposed to the product will help kids understand that the process, the efforts, all that Carol Dweck stuff, all that growth mindset stuff, really sort of, instead of saying it, shows them that that's what we really value.

And then don't stick those A's and those report cards on the refrigerator. Put other things on the refrigerator. And I talk about what's on my refrigerator in the book, and it's not report cards and it's not A's on tests. It's like not indications of the success stories. It's sort of like an indication of life. It's actually what's on our refrigerator. And I talk about this in the chapter on goals are either our goals that we set or checklists. My little, my younger son is a big fan of

checklists. He's his big thing is what's been great for the past couple of years is we're not involved in his morning routine at all. Like the alarm goes off, he does it all himself. He gets out to the bus on time and it's because of the checklist that he has created either by himself or because he screwed stuff up and had to talk to his teacher about how to do it right next time. Right. So let's talk about that a little bit, too, because there is funny. I remember having a conversation with somebody who was actually on a prior episode of Good Life Project where it was a mom. Amazingly well-intended, does astonishing good in the world in building something extraordinary, who also shared that she felt that her job,

no matter how involved she was in her professional life or her service life, was to be there and get her kids ready for school in the morning and make them a home-cooked breakfast. Yeah, I disagree. Yeah, so take me into this. Well, I don't disagree with I want to be there, I want to feed my kids home-cooked breakfast. Yeah, I disagree. Yeah, so take me into this. Well, I don't disagree with, I want to be there. I want to feed my kids home-cooked food because, frankly, as a cook and

as someone who doesn't buy a lot of prepackaged stuff just because I like to cook, totally with her on that one. But I think the idea of making our kids food for them and we're just taking so much away from them. My son is really proud of the fact that he gets himself out of the house every morning by himself. And honestly, part of that came out of, I mentioned I had a head injury during the writing of this book, and I required a lot more sleep. And I couldn't get up with him in the morning. And my husband leaves really, really early sometimes. And so our routine started with you see if you can do it yourself. And if you can't, our neighbor drives her kid to school and she can take you as well.

He didn't want to go in the neighbor's car. So it became, you know, sort of his work to get out on time. And through trial and error and lots of error, he got there. But I just, I think being a part of our kids' lives in ways that are about sharing time with them and sharing experiences with them is really, really important. But taking responsibility out of their hands just does our kids a disservice and robs them of a whole bunch of opportunities for them to feel that pride that I was talking about with the Michael Thompson thing, that those moments when your parents aren't involved and you figure something out on your own, those are the moments of triumph that we tend to take away from them.

And, you know, sure, they're emblematic moments, like not making lunch for your kids. I just don't think I get why some parents do it, and I have friends that do it, and they do it for very specific reasons, and I don't lose respect for them out of that. I just think in my family, that happens to be one area that my son who happens to like to cook now is particularly proud of. So, you know, my kids may be different from other kids, but, you know, that's how things work in our house. Yeah. And I think it's not even about like,

are you cooking the home cooked breakfast? It's just about, you know, at least my reading of what was going on in that conversation and your lens on it is really it's looking for those opportunities throughout the day where you can kind of take a step back and just have moments for a kid to stand in their own ability to figure things out and to potentially struggle and screw up a bunch of times but then figure it out and then feel like, yeah, I feel good. And reading through the code of when she was talking about being up with her kids in the morning and making them home-cooked breakfast,

I don't disagree with her on that. I think what she's saying is code for I want to be with my kids and have time to talk with them and nourish them. And nourishing kids is something that has become more difficult just because of all the junk that's out there on the market that it's easy to feed kids. And I completely 100% agree with that. I mean, my kids are really kind of spoiled when it comes to food and wholesome food and all that kind of stuff. But I think nourishing kids can happen a lot of different ways. And nourishing kids doesn't necessarily have to be making them happy every second of the

day or, you know, doing for. I think nourishing is a broader, more metaphorical term. Yeah. And I wonder also whether it's really everything comes back to our needs in the end, right? Yeah, like I said, we want to be able to check off that box. Right. You know, like we're a good parent. We were there for them emotionally and physically, present and spiritually.

And also, you know, probably as they get older and become more independent and spend less time with us, we're probably looking for ways to stay involved. And if that means doing things that they're fully capable of doing, but it gives us these extra moments of, oh yeah, I still feel needed. I still feel involved in some way. So it's like our stuff. Yeah. My 16 year old doesn't really need me for much anymore. And so I really gravitate towards those things that he does need me for. And more and more that's advice and just being there to listen to him when he wants to talk. And the funny thing, as you know, about teenagers is that we can't force those moments when they want to talk. When they want to talk just happens when

they want to talk. And so being there is a very big part of that. But yeah, the needs change over time. And would I love to be able to snuggle with my kids on the couch while watching a movie? Well, yeah, sure. And I have to say I snuck a snuggle last night at dinner with my younger son, and I was shocked he let me have it. So I'll take it where I can get it. But, you know, the needing thing tends to be a little more hands-off as you get older. And that's hard. I miss that.

Yeah. be a little more hands-off as you get older. And that's hard. I miss that. Yeah. I want to make sure we also talk about one other thing. Sure. Because I'm sure it's going to be in some people's minds as they listen to the conversation. We talk about creating scenarios where we allow our kids to avoid failure. And when it comes to academics, my sense is that one of the responses, and you speak to this to a certain extent as well, is, but this is going to go on their permanent record.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. I think it's also one of the reasons I focus on middle school, mostly because my heart lies in middle school. I adore teaching middle school kids. I think it's an incredible opportunity. Middle school is a setup for kids. It's a time when their ability, their executive function skills don't match what we ask them to do. And middle school teachers are sort of specially equipped to deal with the many, many, many failures that happen throughout the day. So that said, it's not too late to start in high school as well. And it's obviously getting off on the right foot in elementary school works great too. But yes, it does go on their permanent record. But I was talking to a guidance counselor a couple of years ago, and she said, how do I help the parents understand that sometimes the consequences of the kids' actions are so much more important than they understand? She was speaking specifically about a high school student who had plagiarized a paper. This high school student wanted to be a scientist. And they were going to give him an F

on the paper, they were not going to throw him out or anything, they were giving him an F on a paper. And she said, How do I help the parents understand that this F should stand because the parents were fighting it? And I said, Well, you said this kid wants to be a scientist. Let's go out 10 or 15 years once he's finished his PhD. And let's imagine that he plagiarizes part of a paper in 10 or 15 years. That's his career right there. It's over. His career is over if he plagiarizes a paper. His credibility is gone. And it's not just an F on a paper. It's an entire career. And when is he going to learn that? I mean, it would be nice to say, oh, he'll learn it somewhere along the road. But when you're given this opportunity to give a direct correction to a specific error,

why on earth would you want to fight that? I get that it's an F, and I get that the stakes are high. But the stakes are high for what? The stakes are high for us to teach kids that what's most important is the A, not the learning that you can't plagiarize other people's words. And yeah, as a writer also, you know, the specific example of plagiarism came up in my class once. And I said, you know, you guys are watching me write this book. Let's imagine for a moment. And actually, we didn't have to imagine because when Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail came out, a reporter in Utah stole the article, published it in full. I think he changed a couple sentences under his own name. Yeah. The editor in chief of

this paper was horrified. The guy was, I don't know if he was fired, but either way, it didn't end well for him. And my students were livid, livid. And I said, okay, well, let's talk about this. What if this was a paper you were writing, and you took a few of, you know, someone, some scientist's words over here and put them in your paper? How is that any different from this reporter stealing my work? And they said, oh, you know, and I guess that isn't any different. Talking about this constantly is such an important thing we do with our kids. And resisting kids feeling the consequences of that plagiarism or that cheating off another student or whatever that is, is us cheating them again. Saving them from that is not doing them any favors and it's certainly not teaching them anything. Yeah. And I guess it really circles back to when you zoom the lens out, how we define success for our children. And a lot of people, I guess, you know, the first huge metric is what college are they going to get into? Because they feel that's the setup for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And, you know, competition for college is now so fierce and

like every grade matters. And that's the impetus. So we think, well, yeah, the A, maybe the A is more important than learning because they can learn at some point. They can learn in a non, maybe they can learn the same lesson outside of school somewhere where it won't be on their permanent record, but they'll still learn the lesson. But the grade really matters. Where are they going to learn these things? And I'm not arguing that cost, but I can see that argument so clearly. And I think it really does come from, well, if your definition of success is if the first huge benchmark is the college that your child gets into, then you reverse engineer everything that has to happen. And if it's all about the A rather than how is my child learning?

How are they learning to relate to themselves in the world. So I wish some of these parents had access to some of the discussions I've had with college professors who are just fed up. They are so tired of kids who don't, A, know how to talk to a professor. They'll text their professor with shorthand or go and demand things. Parents will call professors. There was one example of a, I talked to one professor about a parent calling them to deal with some administrative detail. And the professor said, well, you know, I'm happy to talk with your kid about this. And they said, well, my kid's on vacation, you know, you know, my kid's off doing something else. And the nice

thing about talking to these college professors is I see the dire, I see how dire it is once they get to the college of their choice, if they've been so fortunate to get there. But then let's back that up for a second. I wrote an article just recently for Your Teen Magazine about college. And I was at a track meeting with my son because the coaches said we had to be there. I don't generally go to those things because that's his thing. at a track meet, a track meeting with my son, because the coaches said we had to be there. I don't generally go to those things, because that's his thing. And it was the night before early acceptance was about notifications were about to come out. And a couple of the kids there had applied early to a couple of Ivy League schools. And the pressure was really high. And

some of these kids were former students of mine. So I knew the parents. And my son was just sort of quietly sitting there watching and listening to the conversations as they unfolded. And we walked out the door after the meeting, and he turned to me just very quietly and said, please don't do that to me. That was the first thing he said to me when we left earshot of those other people was, please don't do that to me. This was when he was a freshman in high school. And I said, I promise you, I will not do that to you. And so I actually have a friend who has made the same promise to her kids. And we've promised to smack each other across the face if we if we go back on our word.

Yeah, you wonder also, you know, there's data about sort of the long-term outcomes for kids based on what college they've gone to. And 20 years down the road, it's almost like if your kid's going to live a good life, down the road, it doesn't matter a whole lot from at least the data that I've seen in terms of have they gone to a top-ten school. But I think, again, it is just about we're hanging out in New York City right now also, which is from, you know, getting your kid into the right school, probably ground zero in terms of just the fierceness of the competition, not just among the kids, but the parents as bragging rights. And it's certainly not my banter, my wife's bent. You know, we want to grow just a good, wholehearted kid who's likable and knows how to love and has a feel for maybe what her thing is in the world.

But we're surrounded in this city by a universe of profoundly different values. And I think I would probably say that there's a good chance that you're an outlier to have those values. And I think you're, I would probably say that there's a good chance that you're an outlier. Let's change the conversation over from if you look at what has worked for people who have succeeded, it's not necessarily their education. And but believe me, the contacts that you make make a huge difference, like who you know definitely makes a difference. But the ability to self-advocate, the ability to say, I'm going to try this, even though I may not be 100% ready for this at this exact second, I'm going to give it a shot. And because Gift of Failure is a very personal story for me, I have no problem going out there and saying, look, I frankly, right now, I have to pinch myself.

I'm living my dream. I get to be a writer. I've written a column for the New York Times for the past two years. I write for The Atlantic. I get to teach. I get to live where I want. I went to University of Massachusetts and the University of North Carolina. I don't have any student debt because I went to state college, both way, you know, going through there. My parents, you know, I applied to some really

high powered schools and my parents supported me in my decision to go to my state college. My parents said, look, you haven't even checked out your safety school. Let's go for a drive. And we did. And I fell in love. I fell in love with my small major at this state school. And so I know for a fact that you can go to a state school and a state school and you can, as long as you're the kind of person who can get what they need out of a school and a system and you can self-advocate. So when we steal the ability to self-advocate from our students, from our kids, we're hobbling them.

We may be able to send them to Harvard, but if they can't self-advocate once they're there, why on earth have you sent them to Harvard? I mean, the self-advocacy thing, I think, is the piece of the puzzle that's missing from all of this and is way more important than where you go to school. The ability to demand what you need from the world in a way that gets you what you need and helps other people feel good about their decisions to help you is way more important than where you go to school. So talk to me about the relationship between allowing failure and cultivating the skill of self-advocacy?

One of the stories I tell in the book was my son, one day after, one of my kids has issues with organization. And this has been a process, and I've written about it publicly, and he's okay with that. And it's been a real journey. And after sort of getting some of the work done, he left it on the coffee table in the dining room or on the dining room table. I can't remember. I think it was the coffee table. And I was going to school later that day anyway, and I could have taken it so easily. And it was a real struggle for me not to take it. And it's a longer story that I won't tell right now, but it's in the book. And when he came home that day after me struggling all day long not to take that stupid homework over to school for him, I said, so how'd school go?

And he said, it was great. And I said, well, what about that homework that you left at home? And he said, oh, I had to stay in from recess, but my teacher and I talked, and we figured out a way for me to not forget it tomorrow, which was the genesis, actually, of his morning checklist. Remember to put the homework in the backpack kind of thing. And that conversation never would have happened if I had taken that homework over to school with him for him. So that consequence of his mistake, that consequence of failing to put the homework in the backpack, the way we talked about for three weeks straight, led to something really positive for him. Was his grade as good that semester? Probably not. I mean, if he, I don't know, you know, every little bit of the struggle is positive in some ways and negative in some ways.

And, you know, does he have the grades he would have if I wasn't reminding him every single day or helping him or taking stuff over? No. His grades would be better if I was saving him on a daily basis. That's absolutely right. But he wouldn't be the person he is. Yeah. I mean, it's almost you're choosing between better grades or better life. Well, he's learning systems. He's learning resourcefulness.

He's learning. He stinks at organization. So either I can perpetuate that by continuing to save him, or he can figure out systems that will help him do an end run around his shortcomings in his executive function. So I'd much rather him learn the end runs than save him. Although it makes me feel really good when I save him. And I talk about this in the book, too. Saving our kids is a really quick way to check that box off for the day if I was a good parent today. But in the end, think about if I had taken that homework, it would have made me feel great.

And I'm not sure he would have cared that much. But it would have made me feel great. But that's not my job. My job is to raise kids who are resourceful and can self-advocate and can figure out their end run around their problems, around their issues. Everyone's got their thing. Whether we learn how to deal with it or not, though, that is the greatest predictor of whether or not we're going to make it in the end. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm having this conversation and reading your book against the backdrop of David Brooks' new book, also The Road to Character, which is sort of the most extreme version of what you're talking about.

Because he talks about historically how there was just this fierce, fierce, fierce commitment to self-reliance. And it was all about asceticism and just sacrifice. That was the road to character. And some of the examples that he's talked about are really extreme, essentially giving up your entire life in the name of, but that was the prevailing ethic. So there's that extreme, and then there's just on an everyday basis, I'm going to, sometimes I'm going to choose to jump in, but then other times I'm going to choose to just step back. I have friends who have kids that need constantly.

You know, Mommy, what do you think of this? Mommy, help me with that. Mommy, what do you think of this picture? And their kids, I'm thinking of one in particular, just doesn't seem to have any kind of internal locus of, did what I just do have value to me? Because her mom is always giving her, or her dad, but usually it's her mom,

is giving her feedback on the picture or the poem or the whatever. And so every time that kid shoves that picture in her mom's face and say, Mommy, Mommy, how's this? I'm just, I mean, what I would love for her to say is, what do you think of that? Because that's what matters. When we're not

there, don't we want them to know to have some kind of judgment about whether what they did is of value? Because we're not going to be the ones judging them in the end. We're not going to be the ones setting the bar for them in the end. It's going to be the rest of the world. So we can continue to pretend that we can parent them and be their sun and their moon and their stars for the rest of their lives. But how sad that's going to be for them when they figure out that's not true. So the name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer that term out to you, what does it mean? For me, it really means knowing what you want and enjoying getting there. And knowing what I want, that's taken a lot of figuring out. I've done my road to here, my road to what I consider to be just a life that's so good that I can't believe

I get to live it, has been so crazy. I've done so many different things that if you look at them all, they have a thread, but at the time they didn't really feel like they were going to lead up to any one thing. They just sort of felt like a little of this and a little of that. They have led to this most wonderful place I'm in right now. But each one of those things was because I wanted to do it. Each one of those things offered a learning experience. Each one of those things was something different, something I've never done before. And for me, that was the process, not about, and I guess it all comes down to what you value, the end result or the process. And for me, enjoying the process has been the best part and the most important part

of finding this amazing, fantastic life that I get to live right now, enjoying the process. Because I'm the one who has to sit down every day and try to hammer out that essay or, you know, whatever it is I'm doing that day. I'm the one now who gets to decide what I do each day. That, I mean, having that control over what I produce, that's amazing to me. That's a good life. Indeed. Thank you. Thank you.

Thanks so much for joining in this week's conversation. Thank you. if that is right and you feel like sharing then by all means go ahead we love when you share these conversations and get the word out and if you wouldn't mind i would so appreciate if you would just take a few seconds jump onto itunes or use your app and just give us a quick rating or review when you do that it helps get the word out helps let more people know about the conversations we're hosting here and it gives us all the ability to spread the word and make a bigger difference in more people's lives. As always, thank you so much for your kindness, your wisdom, and your attention. Wishing you a fantastic rest of the week. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Thank you. I'm going to go to bed. that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not.

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