It’s a Sad Truth; School, College, and Parents Can’t Supply What You Need
Take control of the three realities that shape your life
We know that life isn’t a dress rehearsal for a final act that magically delivers everything we thought we wanted.
The 3 Realities that Shape Our Lives
The first reality is that you could reflect on your situation relative to the womb that birthed you into this world. Something we all have zero control over. (see Warren Buffet’s famous remarks on this aspect of life at the end of this article.)
Even if you don’t buy Buffett’s idea that only government can alleviate certain forms of inequality, one thing that’s great about Buffett’s reality is his appreciation of luck and the realization that he won a lottery ticket by dint of his birth.
So many of our elites can’t stop talking about how hard they worked or the importance of taking risks when it’s most likely they arrived at their status in life courtesy of a privileged womb. Buffett readily acknowledges that he had incredible good fortune from the moment he was born.
The cards you were dealt at birth may not have included anything that would be remotely capable of winning in a poker game.
The second reality is your current position in life, which may have no relation to your intellect, work ethic, morals, or opportunities to excel at school and in post-education life.
How you deal with whatever situation you’re experiencing will most certainly impact your future, particularly if you are prone to feel hard-done-by or frustrated or stressed by events over which you have little or no control. Equally, you may have arrived at your present situation by way of poor choices or decisions. Either way, history is hard to change and so you now have an opportunity to rule a line under all that historical crap and open a new blank page on which you can start anew.
To do that, you may find solace in the wisdom of the Stoics, who arrived on the scene about 2,000 years ago and are best known for their mantra, which essentially dictated that a person should not devote emotional energy to the things she/he cannot control. To do so is to risk disabling your agency.
The third reality is the opportunities presented or sought to develop the critical skills needed to navigate life and, hopefully, realize one's true potential.
What I call Life-Skills are what some people might call soft-skills, and others call hard-skills. Either way, my Life-Skills are like your essential personality characteristics. The array of inner strengths you draw upon to ensure you aren’t sucked into the vortex of the bad stuff we all encounter.
Developing my Life-Skills might be entirely accidental or by careful design and a half-decent work ethic.
So those 3 realities of the womb that birthed you, your emotional strength to deal with what’s thrown at you, and your attitude to developing key life skills are the factors to be aware of to achieve your full potential.
On the other hand, you may have all the attributes that provide a platform to develop your agency, which means your capacity to influence through your thoughts and actions. "Influence” applies primarily to your own life and secondly to the lives of others.
In early 2021, many people have been feeling “flat”, and it’s important to be more consciously open to receiving, even when what’s coming your way doesn’t quite fit your expectations of how things should be. Like any change, some detachment is needed to see things anew, as is stillness, which is best achieved by not being constantly busy. Being busy for many is a psychological defence.
During illness, our world shrinks. In social isolation, our world shrinks. Yet it’s precisely now that our vision must enlarge. Choosing to be the smallest bit more generous, perhaps more tolerant in both directions (giving and receiving), is itself an act of empowerment, an act of self-respect and even love — for ourselves and all with whom we share this planet.
When we’re down, our thoughts leap into a frightening future. When we slow down, by contrast, we can experience the moment and, when we can, infuse it with greater vitality and hope. We can surround people and situations with the energies of thoughtfulness, kindness, and care rather than anxiety or raw terror. And when we do this, we each will benefit.
Doesn’t matter whether you’re 15 or 50. The people and institutions you think will enable you to develop, refine, and leverage your Agency simply aren’t up to the task. They are almost certainly operating based on an outdated 20th-century model. Meaning that what they can give you will be of minimal use to your life in the early 2020s.
That scenario got me thinking. I figured we all need a personalised model and pathway so we have the means to develop and define our Agency and the options we can create to have a chance of reaching our true potential.
What is clear is that the approaches of 20th-century parents and educators are well and truly defunct. They are simply no longer relevant and cannot give us a basis for developing and applying our Agency to cope with contemporary challenges.
Educators and curriculum designers haven’t realized that the 21st century is nothing like the 20th century. When you consider the complexity of 21st-century life coupled with the challenges of COVID, it’s obvious what should have been bleeding-obvious, even as we closed out the 20th century.
We’re all embarking on a journey to places none of us have ever experienced. This is precisely when we most need a suite of life-skills that we can apply to leverage our agency.
Mentors have a role, too. We all need the comfort of wise counsel. Very few people who reflect on success in life have achieved their version of success without mentors.
But when it comes to the crucial decisions we’re all facing, the cold, hard truth is that we each need to develop the competence to make good decisions and choices.
A few years ago, I started thinking about these issues, and in 2020, I put serious focus on how to best support young people. Initially, I realized the challenges were pan-generational. I think I’m like most parents and had the comfortable perspective that schooling would provide the knowledge and skills my boys needed. I was very disappointed.
As they travelled through school life, it was obvious that the curriculum I had been taught had hardly changed, and the quality of the teaching staff, even in private schools, was generally average at best. There were definitely some exceptional teachers who stood head and shoulders above the bunch.
I’d also been watching the traditional concept of a career breaking down and working life adapting to suit exploitative business models with a devotion to shareholder primacy. Profits and growth were all that mattered.
For many people, work had evolved into a giant shit sandwich, and our young people were eating that shit sandwich.
More recently, in my role as founder of a Not-for-profit, I applied my Life-Skills concept plus everything I’ve learned to design a skills development model I call the Life-Skills Schema. Elements of the schema have already been successfully piloted in late 2020 at a high school near where I live in Sydney. Read about the high school project.
My new Life-Skills concept applies to people of all ages.
These 9 essential Life-Skills can be taught on a row, column, diagonal, or an individual skill basis.
The three streams (rows), Consciously Exploring, Realising Goals, and Influencing Effectively, equip people of all ages with the full range of skills needed to apply their Agency in the 21st century.
Personalizing your Life-Skills Adventure
Life is most certainly an adventure—an adventure without a map, an adventure that you can plot. Often, the realization that you have or had this power doesn’t dawn until late in life.
And what a tragedy. The realization that you had the opportunity could have grasped it, and it slipped by, never to return.
As I write these words, I have my earbuds in, and the music is loud. The song “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes begins. How apropos.
“Be yourself, give your free will a chance. You’ve got to want to succeed.”
Go find that song and play it loud. Play it often. Play it really loud.
Why the Life-Skills Schema has 9 Cells
In French, the word neuf means both nine and new. In German, the words for nine and new are neun and neu, and in Spanish, nueve and nuevo. As you count and reach nine, you know you are about to make a new start. 9 is composed of the all-powerful 3x3. Buddhist tradition holds nine as the supreme spiritual power and a celestial number. It is 3x3, which is the most auspicious of all the numbers.
Completion; fulfillment; attainment; the beginning and the end; the whole number; a celestial and angelic number.
Warren Buffett, co-chair of the 10,000 Small Businesses Advisory Council, takes part in a panel discussion following a news conference announcing a $20 million partnership to bring Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses initiative to the city of Detroit, Michigan, November 26, 2013.
A student asked him what shaped his political views (Buffett is a Democrat). The famous investor offered a great thought experiment, which helped him think through the kind of world he wants to live in. In it he characterizes something he calls the “Ovarian Lottery”:
“My political views were formed by this process. Just imagine that it is 24 hours before you are born. A genie comes and says to you in the womb, “You look like an extraordinarily responsible, intelligent, potential human being. [You’re] going to emerge in 24 hours and it is an enormous responsibility I am going to assign to you — determination of the political, economic and social system into which you are going to emerge. You set the rules, any political system, democracy, parliamentary, anything you wish — you can set the economic structure, communistic, capitalistic, set anything in motion and I guarantee you that when you emerge this world will exist for you, your children and grandchildren.
What’s the catch? One catch — just before you emerge you have to go through a huge bucket with 7 billion slips, one for each human. Dip your hand in and that is what you get — you could be born intelligent or not intelligent, born healthy or disabled, born black or white, born in the US or in Bangladesh, etc. You have no idea which slip you will get. Not knowing which slip you are going to get, how would you design the world? Do you want men to push around females? It’s a 50/50 chance you get female. If you think about the political world, you want a system that gets what people want. You want more and more output because you’ll have more wealth to share around.
The US is a great system, turns out $50,000 GDP per capita, 6 times the amount when I was born in just one lifetime. But not knowing what slip you get, you want a system that once it produces output, you don’t want anyone to be left behind. You want to incentivize the top performers, don’t want equality in results, but do want something that those who get the bad tickets still have a decent life. You also don’t want fear in people’s minds — fear of lack of money in old age, fear of cost of health care. I call this the “Ovarian Lottery.”
My sisters didn’t get the same ticket. Expectations for them were that they would marry well, or if they work, would work as a nurse, teacher, etc. If you are designing the world knowing 50/50 male or female, you don’t want this type of world for women — you could get female. Design your world this way; this should be your philosophy. I look at Forbes 400, look at their figures and see how it’s gone up in the last 30 years. Americans at the bottom are also improving, and that is great, but we don’t want that degree of inequality. Only governments can correct that. Right way to look at it is the standpoint of how you would view the world if you didn’t know who you would be. If you’re not willing to gamble with your slip out of 100 random slips, you are lucky! The top 1% of 7 billion people. Everyone is wired differently. You can’t say you do everything yourself. We all have teachers, and people before us who led us to where we are. We can’t let people fall too far behind. You all definitely got good slips.”
About the author: Greg Twemlow, Founder of XperientialAI©.
Greg Twemlow: “Empowering future leaders and organizations by designing and delivering AI-integrated experiential learning programs that blend technology, ethics, and philosophy. Through consultancy, mentorship, innovation coaching, and thought leadership, I help CEOs, business leaders, and individuals ethically and efficiently implement AI solutions while fostering a culture of trust, integrity, and wisdom in an AI-driven world.” Contact Greg: greg@xperiential.ai
