SelfAdoration.com

Q: How do you tell a good leader from a poor one?A: Practice!Image by: Andrew Kitzmiller

The game itself could not be simpler, but the ideas it repeatedly teaches are central to the ThriversEd curriculum.

You play like this:

1. As the self-proclaimed Dutch Uncle, you assert your dominance over a previously unclaimed social space – such as an empty table in a lounge area or a vacant corner of a kitchen counter at a party – by laying down your game token: A small medallion, one side white, one side black. While your token is visible, you have declared that space to be your temporary dominion, with you as its Dutch Uncle.

2. Your objective? A well-managed Sociability. In a lounge or at a party, your goal might simply be chatting – or it might be very serious conversation. In ThriversEd, virtually everything is a Dutch Uncle Game – including the management of the day-to-day thriving. The point is that the social contact will have some agenda, and advancing that goal by the management of the space and the people is the Dutch Uncle’s job.

3. Wide open agenda, just having fun? The white side of the token is up: Come join us! Tightly-focused agenda, aimed at getting something accomplished? The black side of the token is showing to put other people on notice: You can join us if there is space, but if your contributions are not productive, the Dutch Uncle is obliged to insist that you depart – in the nicest possible way.

That’s it. The Dutch Uncle sets the agenda – something specific or just about anything – and he controls the space by his immigration and expulsion policies. Any other rules – including turning the medallion over mid-game – are his to set, with the understanding that his immigrants can emigrate at will. A Dutch Uncle is the boss of that space, yes, but new Dutch Uncles will (more…)

I wrote that caption – and then… I had an idea…

If #BlackLivesMatter, why has no one made an animated TV series out of the life and times of Frederick Douglass? When the #ThriversEd content empire is big enough, we’ll do this – and do it right.

And that, all of it, is exactly right: There should be all kinds of media about Frederick Douglass, where now there is little beyond research tomes, and ThriversEd – me, we, us – is the right way to get that job done. I don’t want to show Douglass to black children, though that is hugely worthwhile, but to all children – and all adults, for that matter. And what I want to show is how a determined oak grows out from under a slab of broken sidewalk.

That’s a whole genre of kid-lit that doesn’t much exist any longer, the inspirational biography. As discussed, I’m not interested in promoting a one-size-fits-none ‘ideal man,’ but I love the idea of regular consistent portrayals of inspirational role models. And I love them every which way – as books, as TV or cinema, as interactive fiction (that’s video games to you) – you name the medium and I want to be there.

This is not work I can do – much too C for a D like me – but it’s work I can manage – arguably better than anyone, taking account that no one is doing anything like this now. And last night, I worked out a praxis to get the best cinematic experience out of the best literary experience, but all that’s just details – the production flow, as it were.

The big news is here: I have a project to commission for a writer-for-hire: A kid-lit biography of Frederick Douglass.

If you can do this, I’ll edit it, publish it and promote it – ultimately, ideally, into a TV series or a film and beyond.

You’re not that writer? I know I’m not, either. But you can still help to make this possible. How? Cultivate thriving.

Bad news, kids. If there is only one The One – it ain’t you.Photo by: Tommy Wong

This is not so. What you’re actually doing is eliminating all the rejects, ultimately selecting the home that is least objectionable to you. You’re questing not for Prince Charming but for Prince Adequate or Prince Acceptable.

Same for an Olympic swim team or a job search: You can only live in one house, hire one CFO or add one anchor leg to your relay team. So you shop, you compare, you filter, you sift, you sort and ultimately you settle, hoping that you have not made a costly error.

If you did that with your dairy farm, in short order your ‘herd’ would consist of one prize heifer and nothing else.

That’s the essence of Flowerboxing – the quest for The One – and it illuminates the error of elitism in education: There are seven billion of us, and we’re ALL perfect. Neglecting the cultivation of the overwhelming majority of children in order to shop obsessively for only the most-thoroughly-indoctrinated specimens is to ladle repeated tragedy upon perpetual catastrophe.

Because the C/I model of education is so thoroughly broken, the ‘elite’ it selects is composed of very broken people – Ci/INTJs who have been worked so brutally hard that they have drastically diminished reserves of human compassion. But any other ‘elite’ model would also fail. Why? Because there is no elite, there are just individual people who are better or worse at particular things – and who step up or run away at unpredictable intervals.

The idea of the ‘ideal man’ – whether that’s Jesus, Mohammed or Howard Roark – frustrates more ideals than it inspires. Whatever their virtues or faults, each of those guys was a rare bird. Holding them up as role models might (or might not) be a good idea. Representing them as perfect-performance models is absurd, insane and enormously destructive.

Why? For the same (more…)

If #BlackLivesMatter, why has no one made an animated TV series out of the life and times of Frederick Douglass? When the #ThriversEd content empire is big enough, we’ll do this – and do it right.

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

We talked about why this is so yesterday.

Today, I launched a Patreon campaign in support of the ThriversEd idea.

What am I up to? I’m redeeming Western Civilization, just like I’ve said all along.

In the past days(, weeks(, months(, years(, decades)))), I finally worked out how to do it – The Frederick Douglass way: Start strong, stay strong.

Why a Patreon campaign? Time and efficiency. I’m working out how to build an infinitely-scalable Dutch Uncle – and I want to make him scale.

You do, too, though you may not know that yet. So far as I know, there are zero other ideas out there for turning our ship-of-fools around. Easy to see why everything else fails: We’ve all been talking to the wrong people – grown-ups.

But where adults rarely change their habits, Toddlers soak up what you teach them. Strong Toddlers will become strong children, strong tweens, teens and adults.

Broken people breed broken people. To stop this cycle of pain, we have to stop breaking children. That’s what ThriversEd aims to do – to give each child we embrace a better shot at growing up whole and happy by teaching him how thrive for himself.

Do you want to make a difference? Support ThriversEd – and get your friends to pitch in, too.

Big things are made of little things. Sharing big ideas with little people will yield big results in time.

Everything is new to a child? You bet. Better still, first impressions are lasting. It’s daft to teach bad habits-of-mind to kids by negligent default, but it is very wise to teach them how to thrive instead.Photo by: Chad Hutto

Here is what I hear in those words: To an Infant/Baby/Toddler/Child, every new thing is all-the-way new – and, accordingly, all-the-way everything. For a while, at least, the new person/place/thing/event/experience has no companions with which to compare it. It is sui generis, ne plus ultra – unique, irreducible and plausibly mesmerizing.

That matters to me, because stuff like that sticks with you. Call it imprinting, call it influence or simply call it a big show on a small stage, first impressions are lasting – and aboriginal impressions can last a lifetime.

Accordingly: If Toddlers and Children learn to go at things the ThriversEd way, they’ll never approach anything any other way, for the rest of their lives.

Simply getting there first does most of the heavy lifting, but we’re getting there first with a strategy, a plan and an ever-growing sheaf of tactics – all aimed at getting children to lead themselves along the D/S DISC axis, instead of being led, with catastrophically-diminishing success over time, toward the C/I alignment.

The “why” of C/I? Was Marx that prescient, that obstinate or did he just get lucky? That’s a question for another day. It remains that C/I education is exactly ass-backwards – completely opposed to everything that has worked in the past and that should work now – but it is remarkably successful at producing lifelong human misery for everyone afflicted by it.

ThriversEd comes at everything the other way – starting simply by impressing the verb “to thrive” on young minds again and again. A mastery of that one idea might be enough for a child to be able to undertake his own upbringing, but there is lots more we can do.

I talked about The Marshmallow Challenge last night, and (more…)

What do you plan to do when you win The Marshmallow Challenge?Photo by: Jim, the Photographer

Two or more kids compete, head-to-head, sitting across a table from each other, each being stared down by his own treat, to see who can delay gratification for fifteen minutes.

This is a public and sporting-event-like contest, and every Challenger plus the game’s Dutch Uncle can be PEAKed. Fifteen minutes is a long time, so younger kids might play for shorter durations, and other activities can be going on to keep things from getting boring.

I like very small cookies as the treat, rather than marshmallows, but miniatures can work, too. In any case, a little sugar in a Toddler goes a long way.

The game scores like this:

If there are zero successful Challengers, each gets his own treat, by default, at the time of his opting out of the game.

If there are one or more successful Challengers, those who succeed get a second treat as their reward for delaying their gratification.

If all Challengers are successful, each gets the second treat, and each of the PEAK evaluators gets a treat, too, for being a part of such an awesome experience. Why? Say this as a chant: “When everyone wins – EVERYONE wins!”

A note about orientation: C/I education makes rivals, D/S education makes friends.

What the original marshmallow experiment actually measures is the quality of a child’s upbringing – the consistent, habituated expectations his parents have for him from birth. Highly Cautious and Driven parents raise children who are well-practiced in delay-gratification. Incandescent and Sociable parents less so. The Marshmallow Challenge evens up the odds by giving all children regular practice weighing the costs and benefits of delaying rewards.

The kids who are already Driven or Cautious probably won’t improve much – although they will love playing – but the Sociables, in particular, will show huge gains in very short order.

Endurance, patience, tolerance, forbearance – these are not innate qualities but learned virtues. The Marshmallow Challenge – either this formal (more…)

Life’s a dance. Who knew?

Photo by: PICS by MARTY

Most are left in the state of Squalor they were born into: Illiterate in any way that could make a difference and qualified for zero tasks that require qualifications. Most of the rest are given what amounts to Occupational Therapy: They are taught just enough to be stood in a corner and forgotten for life.

Here’s what’s worse: Even the “lucky” few who are actually allowed to cultivate the mind to some degree are still miserable for life. Having communed with the great minds who came before us, they know that educated people dance in the gardens of reason – but they also know they ain’t dancing.

It’s easy to see why: The values hierarchy of the entire educational establishment is upside down. Instead of praising and rewarding all students for expressing their humanity, we focus only on the very most reptilian strengths of the very most reptilian children, pushing them into high-paying jobs as the next generation of mammal-herders.

Most children are never permitted to grow much beyond the charming mammals they are born as. The “lucky” few are warped into gruesome reptiles – with long-tailed resumés to whip the mammals into line. And everyone is miserable…

This is easy to fix. DISC – human character and personality – is cultivated. Right now, we are bending over backwards to cultivate a very few Ci/INTJ nerds to be our ruling class – and throwing all the other children away. If instead we refocus education to cultivate Ds/Sd virtues and values in all children, then all children will be educated so well that they all will dance in Splendor.

Now: Education for almost none, with lifelong misery for all.

My way: Education for all, misery for none.

And all we have to do is turn around.

This is news. Everything else is noise. Get caught up.

Q: What do you get when you play volleyball without a net?A: Better.Photo by: Hanna Norlin

Children are cultivated, to the extent they are, in Cautious and Driven displays, especially Ci catalogings of facts: “What does the cow say?” “What does the owl say?” This serves over time to make them competitive and cruel, and it erects the cautious tyranny by which the promise of education is revoked for 98% of everyone. The PEAK scoring matrix leads kids the other way, over time, toward cooperation and kindness – toward peak humanity, for life, for everyone involved.

First the bad news, me from Shyly’s delight:

So: Why did your daughter tell you every week how much she hated piano lessons until she finally dug in her heels and quit, never playing again? It’s because you and her piano teacher entered into an unwitting conspiracy to penalize her incessantly for failing to produce faithful note-for-note mimicry of desiccated sheet music, instead of helping her learn to love music as Shyly would have, if she could have, by living it from the inside out. Technical mastery requires immense motivation, the motivation you killed before it could even take root by insisting that a tiny green shoot is less than nothing if it cannot instantly tower among ancient oaks. If we trained our dogs like this, their spirits – and their tails – would be down all the time, too.

Find the love for life your dog never lives a day without at Amazon.com:Shyly’s delight: Work, play and love like a Labrador.

And this is all of education, of course. The Cautious students excel academically. Why wouldn’t they? They read all the material, do all the assignments and follow all the rules. They are the perfect pets for a Cautious tyranny. And the Incandescents shine (more…)

What is ThriversEd? It’s a new way to play. Toddlers who master it will play better at everything – for life.Photo by: yorkd

So: What is ThriversEd?

It’s a way of playing with Toddlers that might look an awful lot like a talk show to an afternoon TV watcher: Lots of music and dancing, recurring structured activities (including Stone Soup), regular audience interaction.

At its most basic, ThriversEd is an activities program for a playground or day-care center: Busking with busy-ness. Picture a doofus who looks a lot like me with an acoustic guitar and a quick wit. Rock ’n’ Roll to induce dancing to a temporary torpor, Stone Soup, The Marshmallow Challenge or some other game, chat, rinse and repeat.

That is the indispensable essence of ThriversEd, beyond which everything else is a frill: A cyclic structured EduPlay by way of BuskerTainment. As a curriculum, it is actively and overtly didactic, but it is ecumenical except for the explicit doctrinal strategy: Cultivating Ds/Sd habits of mind in Toddlers, all as the means of teaching them to thrive by habituated thriving. And every bit of this will look like very fun play to kids.

Accordingly, ThriversEd is broadly horizontal: Appropriate authority is earned and fungible (as with The Dutch Uncle Game), and evaluations can move in all directions, regardless of age or status. Meanwhile, the content is understood to be emergent, organic and crowd-sourced: Except for the guitar and the quick wit, most of the fun will be created by the kids themselves, in the moment. That is: Not a top-down, artist/teacher-aims-at-audience structure, but rather a wide-open volleyball-without-a-net experience, where many people contribute to make a satisfying whole.

Note that I consistently refer to Toddlers as people. That matters (more…)

How do you learn how to thrive?Photo by: Anne Berit Heggem

How can anyone do a curriculum for people who can’t talk yet? Hide and watch.

Here’s a piece of it, a scoring matrix, and this can apply to any sort of evaluation, not just kid stuff.

I call it PEAK, which is acronymic for Proficient, Efficient, Appealing and Kind.

In ThriversEd, anyone can do a PEAK scoring of any work of the mind, with the goal being to provide feedback, thus to goad improvement over time.

Hence, each evaluation matters, as does the aggregate of all of the evaluations, but the score that will matter most, over time, will be the relative change in evaluations. By doing many presentations, over time, each Thriver will be able to coach his own growth.

The PEAK score is broken down in these proportions:

Proficient = 10% of the final score
Efficient = 20% of the final score
Appealing = 30% of the final score
Kind = 40% of the final score

The DISC strategy behind that could not be more bald: We are scoring, every time, for Doing, Showing, Sharing and Scrupling. The fact of getting the whole job done will promote Driven and Cautious virtues, but working hard for the Incandescent and Sociable values will repay effort. Each individual is induced, over time, to work harder where he is weakest, with everyone being gently and gradually moved toward the Ds/Sd DISC alignment.

Here’s a way of evaluating the evaluation categories:

A work is proficient when it does what it sets about to do. It is efficient when it does that job in a way that seems most logical and direct – maximal payoff with minimal waste. It is appealing when it delights the senses and the mind. And it is kind when it deepens human connections.

I anticipate kids doing presentations and demonstrations – like Toastmasters For Toddlers, one minute per each year of age – (more…)