Tag: family

A Conversation About Ecuador

I joined the wonderful World Wanderers Podcast (hosted by Amanda Kingsmith and Praxis participant Ryan Ferguson!) to talk about our family trip to Ecuador.

I haven’t listened to the episode yet, but we recorded it less than a week after we got back from the trip and I remember wondering if I’d even been able to process the experience enough to talk about it sensibly.  I did talk about it (a lot…I think I probably rambled at length…sorry!) and give a sort of quick take on the good, bad, and ugly and some lessons learned.  Still, I’m sure as time goes on we’ll form more ideas about our experience.

It was really awesome and also really hard.  It didn’t go to plan, but I wouldn’t trade it.  A great adventure I don’t think any of us will forget!

Anyway, take a listen to the episode if you’re interested in hearing one person’s take on international travel with kids.  Oh, and listen to other episodes of WWP.  It’s a great show!

Here’s the episode.

Ecuador Trip By the Numbers

  • 5 weeks (one more remaining)
  • 3 complete changes in plan
  • 2.3 times over budget
  • 3 languages (kind of) spoken
  • 8 exotic fruits we’ve never heard of ingested
  • 7 colds
  • 3 sinus infections
  • 3 foodborne illnesses
  • 1 sprained ankle
  • 1 (probably) broken nose
  • 1 ear infection
  • 1 visit to the doctor
  • 4 cities stayed in
  • 9 cities visited
  • 3 climate zones experienced
  • 9 power outages
  • 14 books read (between my wife and I)
  • 2 visitors from back home
  • 1,000,000 (rough estimate) hours swimming
  • 28 hours spent driving
  • 30 or more videos streamed on Amazon/Netflix
  • 2 houses lived in
  • 4 flights (by the time we’re done)
  • 3 dollars spent on the best lunch ever experienced
  • 2,374 miles from home
  • 1 hell of a good time!

Let Your Kids Suffer

I’m convinced one of the best things a parent can do is let their kids suffer.  It’s also one of the hardest.

I don’t mean suffer from imposed deprivations, scolding, withholding of affection, or physical illness.  I mean suffering from the things that are inevitable parts of life and without which no happiness can come.

Mastering a skill.  Learning social dynamics.  Resolving conflict.  Choosing between two good (or two bad) options.  Discovering who you really are and how you fit in with the world around you.  These all involve some level of suffering, sometimes a great deal.  Yet none of them can successfully happen if a parent swoops in to circumvent the hardship inherent in the process.

When your kids are fighting with other kids, or getting hurt feelings over misunderstandings, or in agony over inability to achieve a digital or physical feat it can be brutal to observe.  Every fiber of your parental being wants to intervene and stop the struggle.  Maybe at least offer to buy them a food they really like to ease the pain a bit.  But such interventions rob kids of the growth that comes from learning to adapt and discover their own unique method of achieving their goals and finding happiness.

Even boredom can be hard to watch a child suffer through.  But if we rush in to entertain them and ease their boredom with reams of suggestions and exhortations we short-circuit their process of learning to be interested and interesting.

One of the best parenting tips I have stumbled on, and one I remind myself daily, is simply to do less parenting and let my kids do more living.  Even when it’s not all rainbows for them.

How the Internet is Like Language

The power went out, and with it the WiFi, for four hours the other day while a pole was being replaced and again for an hour today while the A/C was being fixed.  It was almost overwhelming how lonely and isolating it felt.

Before you think me too dramatic let me say that we’re currently in a rental house in Ecuador, in a neighborhood that still consists primarily of empty lots or newly constructed but not yet occupied houses and we’re 45 minutes from the nearest city and without a car at the moment.  None of these things feel isolating when the internet is working.  (As an aside, the WiFi here is better than the best I can get back in South Carolina.)

It’s not that I spend all day on the web.  The bulk of my work requires internet and I do use it heavily, but there are many hours every day where I’m reading, exercising, playing with my kids, eating, preparing food, sleeping, or just relaxing when I do not use the internet.  One would think a few hours without WiFi would simply let me switch to one of these activities with no mental stress.  But it didn’t work that way.

The minute it went down I felt trapped in a desolate place, separated from the world.  Not because I wanted to do something specifically requiring the internet at that moment, but because I didn’t have the option.

WiFi provides a kind of invisible psychological ether that connects me to all of humanity.  Just knowing it’s there, at the tip of my fingers through my smartphone, gives me a profound spiritual sense of connection to all mankind and to great ideas and facts and images and more.  It is the subtle substrate that makes me always a part of a network or community, even when I’m quietly reading or sleeping.

In Ecuador we’ve had experiences where we were nearly incapable of communication with the other humans around us due to my deficiency in Spanish and some Ecuadorians rapid speech.  In our current neighborhood there are many French Canadian expats who speak not a word of anything but French.  At times a feeling of fear and disconnection can sweep over you when you realize you cannot share ideas with any of the people around you.  What if you need something?  What if you just want to chat and aren’t up to the exhausting task of sign-language and hackneyed Spenchglish?  You’re stuck on a (metaphorical) island, surrounded by people but without any connective tissue.

The parallels between these experiences are striking.  Geographic proximity and physical presence do not connect us with our world.  Information and a means of exchanging it do.  That is the task language performs.  The internet performs it even better.  It can instantly translate between languages, among its other wonders.  The web is like a performance enhancing drug for language.  It exponentially increases the idea sharing power of words.

This silly idea that the internet and social media have somehow severed human connections or weakened community is an absurdity espoused by those blind to the world around them.  It’s no less ridiculous than claiming, “People used to really connect before language was invented.  Now all they do is constantly stream ideas back and forth with sound waves.”

It’s not even the speaking or web browsing.  It’s knowing you can.  What a powerful connective web for the human race.

Ecuador Update: Random Reflections from Abroad

  • The jungle is nice. Except for all the trees.
  • Hippies from every country are exactly the same.
  • Surfers do very little surfing.
  • Lines on the road are mere suggestions here and nobody takes them.
  • A “speed bump” in Ecuador is a large concrete protrusion on a major highway that, if taken at speeds exceeding roughly 3MPH, will dismantle your entire vehicle and several vertebrae.
  • Johnny Cash is a great English teacher on account of his slow singing.  Though phrases like, “The whirlwind is in the thorn tree” may have limited usefulness.
  • It is grossly mistaken to call underdeveloped living “the simple life”.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The lack of complex market institutions means the most basic of tasks become incredibly complex.  Getting food, water, medicine, or transportation necessitate various social networks, waiting and hoping on others, massive time and know-how, etc.  Survival amid simple institutions is very complex.  Conversely, highly developed and complex institutions make survival so simple as to require no thought whatsoever.  If you want a simple life, find the most advanced capital structure and complex web of market institutions and live there.  If you want complexity move to the jungle.
  • I vastly prefer Ecuador’s southern coast to the northern coast.
  • The jungle has a very weird and slightly dark vibe to it.  I understand The Heart of Darkness a lot better than I used to.
  • WiFi travels through bamboo a lot better than concrete.
  • Bamboo might be the most amazing plant on the planet.
  • WiFi and cell phones may end up being the greatest advances in human history.
  • Few things in the world are scarier than having a sick child in a remote place.  Also the jungle makes everything scarier.
  • For $40 you can get an excellent children’s doctor to take a quick break from the hospital and come meet you across the street in his private clinic for medical care.
  • For another $10 you can get three different medications from the pharmacy.
  • It cost $70 and four hours round trip to make it to the city to obtain these medical services.
  • I grew up in a town with a totally awesome name: Kalamazoo.  I just found one in Ecuador with an even better name: Jipijapa.
  • Country folk is country folk, no matter where you go.
  • How in God’s name are there so many kinds of fruit I’ve never heard of and several that apparently have no name besides, “Kind of like an orange”, or, “Kind of like a tomato” (translation: nothing like a tomato)?
  • Never have I felt the sheer stupidity of the “buy local” concept more than as a visitor to another country where signs everywhere urge, “CUANDO VAYAS A COMPRAR, PRIMERO ECUADOR!”  As an outsider, and one who is eager to exchange with people in this wonderful place it feels even more petty, inbred, and moronic than when I encounter “Buy American”, or, “Buy local” back home, which I’ve become more numb to.  Free trade is awesome.  Nativism is stupid. Always and everywhere.
  • In many poor towns and villages the houses and land are in great disrepair yet most of the people populating them have near immaculate personal appearance.  Clean, fresh, well-fitted and trendy clothes.  Neatly cut and styled hair.  It is a stark contrast to the dwellings and shops around them.  I don’t know enough to verify, but my hunch is that it’s an excellent example of the insights of people like Peruvian economist Hernando DeSoto.  The houses and shops are in shaky legal standing with regards to ownership, therefore improvements are subject to attract more attention and cost more in taxes, regulations, etc., whereas one’s person and attire have much clearer ownership.  Whatever the reason for the disrepair, it seems clear it is not due to a lack of interest in cleanliness or improvement on the part of most of the residents.  They look better put together than people at an average Target in the Midwest.
  • Do taste buds change with latitude or is instant coffee always this good?
  • If a person who is 10% proficient in Spanish and a person 10% proficient in English can have 80% of a deep, meaningful, hours-long conversation, what are we doing with all those other words the rest of the time?
  • I’m even more intrigued by Ayahuasca than I was before.
  • My laptop has made it known in no uncertain terms that she requires A/C and she’ll throw a hissy fit if her demands are not met.
  • A word about dogs.  Yes, dogs.  The dogs here are ownerless.  Yet they are hardly “wild” in the sense you might imagine.  Never have I seen more docility and friendliness among canines.  In the nicer villages they are healthy, amiable, incredibly relaxed, and utterly harmless.  Yet I have not once seen anyone hit, yell at, or engage in any action remotely resembling training or cajoling any of these creatures.  They put the unwieldy, kid-attacking, frantic-barking, yard-pooping, crotch-sniffing, leash-straining horrendous beasts from my cozy US suburb to shame.  I do not like dogs as pets.  Yet I actually kind of like the presence of dogs wandering and sleeping in the streets here.  It seems the most natural thing in the world.  Perhaps dogs are meant as autonomous human companions, keeping away other vermin, eating the scraps at the fireplace, and lounging around the gates of our dwellings and streets of our neighborhoods, rather than enslaved to chain-linked lots with leashes and newspapers and electric fences and Kibbles and fake “walks” and alternating neglect and indulgence and dog pills and dog counseling and dog daycare?  The pet-loving people of the world act shocked and appalled at my distaste for their dogs.  But who knows, maybe I’m the humane one…

Getting Started on Entrepreneurship While You’re Young

In “The Future of School” I share my biggest regret:

“I wish I had more confidence, and earlier, about going my own way.”

It took me a long time to realize that all the things I thought and did differently weren’t things I should try to shut down, hide, or change.  They were my greatest strengths.

When you’re 14, 16, or 18, all the world seems to be screaming at you to look like the average of some aggregate.  Well-meaning teachers, parents, coaches, relatives, and friends want to know how you stack up on a series of “normal” indicators of status and ability.  They want you to know the stuff everyone else your age knows, and do the stuff everyone else your age does.

But the reality is that it’s the “Crazy Ones” who change the world.  It’s those who gain the courage and confidence to not suppress their unique take; their hacks and workarounds; their weird approaches and unconventional interests and solutions.  These are the makings of an entrepreneur.

And let’s be clear: entrepreneurship is the greatest single skill needed for the present and future marketplace.  Machines and software are taking off like never before, and they can follow rules and obey orders and perform rote tasks better than humans.  This is not cause for concern, but a huge opportunity.  It frees up humans to do what only humans can: creatively problem solve, innovate, experiment, and adapt.

But it does mean that the vast majority of what’s taught in traditional education settings is of little and decreasing value.  Knowledge of facts is nearly obsolete.  We have Google.  Memorization is silly when we have unlimited digital storage.  Following the crowd kills the best instincts and opportunities for value creation.  We need to re-ignite the entrepreneurial spark that everyone is born with.

That’s why we’ve built a 60-day entrepreneurship eCourse for teens.  It all begins with a mindset.  The mindset I wish I would have found sooner.  The mindset that says your best assets are your most unique attributes.  It’s about turning your creativity into a discipline.  It’s about becoming a self-directed, perpetual learner.  It’s about experimentation, trial and error, and approaching life like a game.

This course is hard.  You could easily scan it and gain a few bits of wisdom.  But that’s not what it’s built for.  It’s built for an intensive 60 days.  It’s built to make you a little uncomfortable as you learn to explore your own strengths, weaknesses, and passions, build a basic website, and share your ideas and lessons learned along the way.  If you go through it – really go through it and complete every part – you will absolutely walk away a different person, closer to your goals and the life you want to live.

If you complete the whole thing we’ll be impressed.  In fact, we’re giving you a free coaching session with course creator and Praxis Education Director T.K. Coleman if you do.  You think you can do it?

You don’t need to have that big business idea to begin on the entrepreneurial journey.  It starts by becoming the type of person who is ready and able to seize the moment when that big idea comes.  It starts now.

Are you ready?

Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course

2015: A Personal Year in Review

Four great reads!

 

Alright, my good friend and Praxis colleague TK Coleman convinced me to share this personal recap in a blog post after I shared it with him in an email.  It feels a little weird or narcissistic, but I guess a little reflection is permitted this time of year.  Besides, I had nothing to write today and I’m not going to miss my daily post!

Praxis is the main driver of my activities and goals, and our continued growth, amazing network of business partners, totally awesome alumni and participants, and expanded offerings (about to be announced!) make me proud of what we’ve done in 2015 and excited about 2016.  Beyond the business, I also have a few personal goals, all still very much related to my mission of freedom and progress.

What was my 2015 like?  Mostly laying groundwork and exploring new ways to create.  Here’s some of the stuff I accomplished that I’m most proud of:

  • Blogged every day.
  • Launched a podcast and released 64 episodes with 40 different guests.
  • Started writing on Medium and gained over 250,000 article views and more than 5,900 followers.
  • Did more than 30 (can’t remember exact number) of interviews on podcasts, news outlets, etc.
  • Gave more than 20 presentations in 15 cities.
  • Published two more books, bringing the total to four.
  • Recorded a song for the first time ever!
  • Read about 30 books.
  • Travelled with the family to Florida and Pittsburgh, and spent a week in Jamaica with my wife.
  • Published in more than 20 different outlets.
  • Launched a monthly newsletter.
  • Gained more than 2,000 new social media followers.
  • Ran a successful KickStarter campaign raising $5,379 for a $4,850 goal.
  • Booked a six-week trip to Ecuador for the family.
  • Ruthlessly removed even more stuff from my life leaving me less stressed and less crunched for time than I’ve ever been.
  • Had a total reach of 491,652 though the podcast, blog, and articles I have data for. (This one gets me.  My goal for the year was 500,000.)*

I certainly had some shortcomings in 2015.  I missed my goal to do one form of exercise a day probably 5% of the time (which is embarrassing when you realize I consider even a few pushups sufficient.)  Though I hit my daily blogging goal, too many days I churned out something less than what I think I could have in terms of quality.  I didn’t read as many books as I wanted to, and almost no fiction, which I planned to read a lot of.

Most of all, I feel like my efforts at being a good, peaceful, calm unschooling dad fell short in everything but theory.  I now know clearly what kind of parent I want to be and why (both huge improvements over the last few years trying to figure it out), but I still struggle every single day to translate that head knowledge into daily habits and behaviors.  Hopefully my kids are as resilient as I suspect they are.

Again in 2016 Praxis is the focus.  Outside of my family, it’s what I live and breathe and I’ll be focusing even more tightly on our goals for the business and everything we stand for.  I do have a few personal goals I’m thinking about for the year ahead as well.  Possibly another book, growing the podcast, perhaps changing up my writing routine to do longer pieces weekly instead of shorter posts daily (still trying to decide on this one), etc.

Regardless, thanks to every single one of you who has read, clicked, liked, shared, listened, commented, loved, critiqued, and even openly hated what I’ve been creating.  I’ve always said I do this for me, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say it feels great to connect with people over the ideas I love!

(In case you’re wondering, by far the most popular piece in 2015 was this article on why playing LEGO is better than learning algebra.  The most popular podcast episode was this interview with my son on being unschooled.)

*UPDATE: 12/31/15 – For unknown reasons, a few old posts of mine got picked up again and generated a ton of views right after I wrote this.  Just after noon on December 31, I broke the 500,000 mark.  Here’s to a goal being met!

Why My Wife and I (and Our Three Kids) are Spending Six Weeks in Ecuador

Sticking with an important theme in my life the better question might be, “Why not?”

Still, given our stage in life, our kids ages, and our work and financial situation, it does raise some eyebrows when we tell people of our Ecuadorian excursion planned for early 2016.  There are several reasons we chose to do this, not least of which is the fact that there are far, far more reasons we can come up with not to do this.

That’s the thing.  The reasons not to will only ever pile up.  Screw that.  Perfect timing is a myth.  If we waited for the right time we never would have gotten married, had kids, adopted, taken new jobs, moved, moved again, started a business, unschooled, and all the other things we cherish most about our life.

The Idea

It began a little less than a year ago.  I was flying home from a business trip and listening to an episode of the Tim Ferriss Podcast.  It was an excerpt from a book called Vagabonding by Rolf Potts.  I knew in my gut I wanted to get out into the broader world with my family.  Not out of nowhere.  The podcast was just a nudge.  My own experience had me jonesing for international adventure for me and my kids already.

Between ages 12-20 I spent at least a few weeks, sometimes a few months, every summer in another country.  Mexico, Peru, Kenya, Honduras.  These were the most important and formative experiences of my youth.  I loved it.  It was really hard sometimes.  I learned so much and gained so much perspective.  Perhaps I’ll write more another time about what these trips did for me, but one of the things was to teach me forward orientation.  The first few times it was crushing to make deep connections to dear friends across the world then leave, never to see them again (and pre-Facebook, never to talk to them in most cases).  It made me learn to live in the moment and not hold on too tightly to past experiences.

My wife and I have always wanted to travel with our kids and let them experience the world outside the suburbs.  Not because we think it’s somehow morally superior or because we want to be international do-gooders.  Just because it’s really fun, and the best kind of challenge.  We both know how hard it was for us to move from the small-town Midwest just a few states away, and how good it was.  It’s too easy to assume your current geography is the best fit for you simply because you’ve never ventured out.  We want our kids to feel like the world is small and not be afraid of exploring all of their options.  We don’t want the exit option to feel so daunting to them.

The Decision

I got back from that trip and told my wife to listen to the podcast episode.  She did.  She knew right away what I was going to suggest and she wholeheartedly agreed.  Let’s spend some time abroad with the kids.  Not a vacation.  Not as visitors touring the sites.  Just normal, day to day life in a different place.  We knew this required more than a few weeks and a location that wasn’t just for popular attractions.  Don’t get me wrong, I love popular touristy stuff and we aren’t the type to go searching for the “too cool for the travel guide” spots when we travel.  But this wasn’t about travel.  It was about living.

I wanted two months, she wanted one, we settled on six weeks.  It seemed long enough to make us both uncomfortable and wonder if we’d get bored and restless and homesick.  We couldn’t just distract ourselves with novelty for six weeks.  We’d have to establish a daily routine.  Perfect.

The Timing

It seems weird to try to spend time abroad at this point in our lives.  Our kids are 4, 6, and 10.  That’s still pretty young.  We are not in a place to put money into anything besides day-to-day expenses.  I launched my company, Praxis, just two years ago and every ounce of material and mental resources go into building it.  We moved here to the Charleston, SC area just four years ago and we love it.  It’s beautiful, we’re not bored, and we’re beginning to make very deep and rewarding social bonds.  My wife and I are young, so it’s not like the clock is running out on us.

But we don’t want perfection.  We don’t want some experience that’s been planned and built up for years or decades.  We don’t want to overthink it.  We don’t want it to be that big of a deal.  We just want to try living somewhere else for a bit.  That’s it.  When will we be in a better situation?  Realistically, never.  There will always be something more pressing to spend our energy on.

Besides, there are several ways in which we’re in a perfect position to do this.  I own my own business and all of my colleagues work remotely.  Besides travel season, all I need is WiFi.  I live and breathe Praxis, but where I live and breathe it from is of little relevance most of the time.  We unschool our kids.  We have no schedule or obligations.  One of the reasons we chose to unschool was so that we could do stuff just like this.  How many kids get to do that?  Our kid aren’t wasting away in cinder block cells all day, so why should we follow the same routine as those that are?

We know it will be really, really hard.  Especially for me in the most intense phase of growing a business and trying to revolutionize the world.  But everything we do at Praxis is about living life on your terms.  If we preach it, we can live it too.

The Details

We had several constraints and preferences, but a lot of play room.  I travel a lot to conferences and events to speak and promote my company and the ideas behind it.  We couldn’t go in late spring/early summer, or in the fall.  Speaking season.  We also needed this to be really, really affordable.  As in, all-in, this six weeks in Ecuador needs to cost the same or less as if we had stayed home for the same six weeks.  We also needed reliable, solid WiFi.  (One of the first things we did was have our AirBnB host run a test and verify the speed, which is the same as what Comcast gives me in SC.)

We weren’t ready to fly more than 4-5 hours with kids as young as four, so South  and Central America were the target.  We searched around on AirBnB for a few days and found a place that looked crazy cool.  A bamboo beach house like something out of Swiss Family Robinson.  It was gorgeous, large enough, and well-rated.  No A/C and open, so mosquito nets, but otherwise not primitive.  Good price, good WiFi.  Why not?

The Act

Never the type to dwell too long on a matter, we booked it.  Was there something better?  Probably.  Would it be worth the agonizing and the time and energy to find it?  Probably not.

Once our non-refundable house was booked, the rest had to happen as a matter of course.  We’ve been alternating between excitement and terror since then, but that’s exactly what we want.  Just a little fear to overcome, mixed with the thrill of overcoming it.

We’ll set out just after the Super Bowl (what, you think I’m going to miss the NFL season?) and return around the Ides of March.  If all goes to plan it won’t be noticeable from the outside.  I’ll be working most of the day most days of the week as usual.  The kids will be doing what unschoolers do, which is precisely what drives their curiosity and interest, and we’ll be grocery shopping, going for walks, cooking, cleaning, reading, meeting with people, and enjoying the beach.

We’ll also be sweating, struggling to communicate in a village of Spanish speakers, adapting to new foods and smells and sights, and probably in many moments fighting homesickness.

This may be the first of many experiences living abroad.  It may be the last we ever do.  That’s why we’re doing it.  We need to know.  Will we love or hate it?  No amount of analysis can answer the question.  We’ll go find out for ourselves.

Gains From a Radically Different Daily Structure

The other day I was in line at a Chipotle in Chicago.  It was around noon on a weekday, so the line was almost out the door.  It took 30 minutes.  It dawned on me just how wasteful and unhappy the whole situation was.  Why should we all wait so long to get food when an hour or two later the cooks and servers would be waiting around with few customers?

The same is true for traffic during rush hour, parking on the weekends, and prices during vacation.  The absurdity of the suffering we all endure and the economic and psychic cost of all this waiting, planning, and crowding is hard to measure.  But it’s real.

It all stems from the same source: the regimentation of life.  Every kid goes to school at the exact same time every day, stays for the same number of hours, leaves at the same time, and has the same days off.  More variation exists in the working world, but not much.  The bulk of producers clock in at roughly the same time every morning, eat lunch in unison, and head home en mass.

The odd thing is none of this is necessary for a growing number, possibly even most of us.  How many jobs require someone to actually be physically present between the hours of 9 and 5?  Why the heck do kids need to sit in clumps of same aged children for identical hours to be forced to study the same things in the same way?  We can work from almost anywhere.  We can learn from almost anywhere.  Most of us have the tools, the freedom of movement, and the resources.  Why don’t we see a diversity of daily schedules?  Why don’t more people treat Tuesday as the weekend?  Why don’t more people do all their errands during the day and their work at night?  Why don’t more people abandon regular offices or classrooms altogether?

There are some benefits the the regimen, but not enough to justify the costs we endure.  These practices continue primarily because of a mindset.  We have status quo bias.  We feel guilt or confusion at the idea of not being present 9-5 at work or 8-3 at school.  It’s an obsession with externally defined roles and goals at the expense of outcomes and value created.  What do we want and need to learn or create or earn?  How and when can we best do it?  Those are the important questions and the answers, if we are honest, would vary widely and look little like the routines most of us subject ourselves to.

Imagine a world where kids freely explored, worked, played, and learned on their own terms and timelines.  Imagine a world where people of all ages worked when and how they worked best.  Imagine a week not punctuated by any regular rush hour or weekend or meal time.  Certainly patterns would emerge and some schedules would be more common than others, but absent our rigid adherence to an outdated schedule, supply and demand would be regulated by the money, time, and headache of peaks and troughs, and the market would smooth out and have smaller ups and downs.

The value of such a shift would be immense.  Think of how many hours people would not be sitting in traffic if few had to show up at the same time to the office or school in the morning.  Think about the hours and money that would not be spent during peak times for flights, hotels, parking lots, and Disney World tickets.  Think of the immense subjective value enhancement by not enduring the throngs.  Little if any of these major gains would show up in GDP measurements.  In fact, it may hurt GDP.  Less spending on the same goods.  Less need for parking structures, etc.

We are seeing a slow but steady move in this direction, which is part of the reason I’ve argued that GDP is a dated and increasingly useless measure of anything valuable.  Let’s speed up the process by asking “Why not?” instead of “Why?” about radical new structures that make us happier.  You let your kids unschool?  Why not.  You work remotely?  Why not.  You take the day off to go to the beach in the middle of the day?  Why not.

It might not be doable for you in any big ways, but I bet there are some stressful patterns in your life that are relics of a bygone era and can be shed with little difficulty.

How My Son Learned to Read When We Stopped Trying to Teach Him

We were homeschooling and our son was six years old.  He had a good vocabulary and comprehension of ideas beyond many kids his age.  We knew reading would open up the world to him, we knew he’d like it, and we knew he was very capable of doing it.  But he didn’t.

We tried flashcards.  We tried read-alongs.  We tried playing hardball and we tried being fun and exciting.  We tried restricting activities until he’d done his reading lessons, and we tried giving rewards.  All these efforts had two things in common: they didn’t help him read one bit and they made our relationship with him worse.  Being a parent and being a child cease to be fun when you’re at odds all the time.

So, at an age when we were starting to worry about his lagging behind, we simply stopped trying.  We quit the whole effort.  He was nearly seven when we gave it up in favor of more peace and harmony in the house.

Daily life was a little easier, yet we still had this nagging worry about him.  What will happen if he’s behind where he’s supposed to be for his age?  Still, everything about our efforts to make him read felt wrong, so we simply ignored the fears.

I was reading a lot of great books on how kids learn and I knew intellectually that kids need no instruction to learn to read.  They will learn when they find it valuable and if they are in an environment where it’s possible – one with books and other readers.  Still the head and the heart are very different things.  I knew kids were better at self-teaching than being taught, but I had to watch my own son, sharp as he was, remain completely outside the wonderful world of the written word.

Then it happened, just like so many of the books said it would.  You believe it in stories, but it’s still a surprise when it happens in real life.  One night I overheard my son reading aloud to himself in his bed.  And the first thing he read wasn’t Dick and Jane, but Calvin & Hobbes.  Not light fare for a brand new reader.

Let me back up a bit.  We would often read to him for a few minutes before bed, and lately he had been in love with some old Calvin & Hobbes comics I had from my adolescence.  We’d read him a few pages and say goodnight.  One night it was later than usual and he asked me if I’d read.  I was a bit grumpy and tired, and I said no, I was going to bed.  He protested a bit but could see I wasn’t up for it so he let it go, seeming defeated.  Ten minutes later I heard him reading.

He later told me that he wasn’t actually reading it that night, nor the first several nights after when he spoke the words (and often laughed) aloud.  He had heard us read it so many times he had the words memorized.  He was looking at the pictures and reciting the words like lines to a familiar song.  I didn’t know this until long after he could clearly read without first memorizing, but it really doesn’t matter.  In fact, it’s probably better that my wife and I assumed he was reading it when we first heard him, or we might have been tempted to intervene and try to cajole him into reading it without the cheat of memory and illustrations.  I know too well the kind of unhappy outcome that would have created.

For a year or more we fought with a kid who clearly had all the tools to read and we got nowhere.  He wasn’t faking his inability, he really couldn’t read.  Reading was always an activity that interrupted his day and was associated with expectant and often visibly (despite attempts to hide it) stressed parents.  It was a concept as useless as it was foreign.  But once he had a strong desire – to enjoy his favorite comic strip – and his inability to read was the barrier, he overcame it in no time and never even celebrated or announced it to us.  It was utilitarian, not some lofty thing to perform for a gold star or a pat on the back.  His ability and interest in reading, then writing and spelling, only intensified as he found it indispensable for playing games like Minecraft and Scribblenauts.

We’ve since made a full transition from the imposed curriculum of homeschooling to the kid-created structure of unschooling.  Looking back I’m a little ashamed of the silly way we approached things before, but at the time it was so hard to let go, with all that crippling fear.  There are so many “shoulds” pumped into parents brains from the moment they conceive.  There are percentiles and averages and tests and rankings galore.  But these are useful only to the statisticians and none of them have your child’s interest or happiness in mind.  Aggregates aren’t individuals.  Living your life, or attempting to shape your child’s life, to conform to the average of some population is not a recipe for success.  At best it will produce blandness.  At worst a broken spirit.

You can read any number of thinkers like John Holt, John Taylor Gatto, or Peter Gray on why our son’s experience is not exceptional, but normal.  You can look at studies that show kids who learn to read at age four and kids who learn at age nine have the same reading comprehension by age 11.  You can get story after story from places like the Sudbury Valley school about kids who taught themselves to read in a few short weeks once they got the interest, and even one girl who didn’t become interested until age 13 and then went on to win a literary prize.  But it’s all theory and myth until you experience it with your own child.

Read the books.  Look into the unschooling movement and literature.  But above all, take a step back from your own kids and realize that they are only young once and for such a short time.  Do you really want your memories with them to consist of fights and forced lessons?  Enjoy them.  Let them go their own way and navigate the world.  There are few things more exciting than when they come to you to ask for your help or insight because they really want it, or when they never do because they figure it out on their own and gain a confidence that cannot be won any other way.

The world we live in does not lack for natural incentives to learn to read.  The rewards are massive, as are the costs of illiteracy.  We don’t need to artificially incentivize reading the way a poor farmer might have a few hundred years ago.  When we do we do more harm than good, if not to our children’s ability to read then at least to our enjoyment of our time with them.  They figured out how to speak – the most difficult, nuanced, and complex skill a human can master – without any formal instruction.  They can learn to read too.

…………………………………………………………….

Here are a few other examples of learning by doing from my own life:

Why LEGO is more valuable than algebra

Why Mario Maker is better than a marketing major

The Advantages of Having a Family While Running a Business

The Advantages of Having a Family and Running a Business at the Same Time
What better motivation is there to succeed, use time wisely, and not feel defeated?

It’s no secret that being an entrepreneur is stressful and time consuming.  It requires not just physical but immense mental energy and brings pretty severe emotional swings.  Sometimes it involves emails or phone calls or travel at all hours of the day all days of the week all year long.  It’s also financially unpredictable.

All of these things suggest that having a family while starting or running a company is a bad idea.  I often tell young people that if they have a startup idea they should pursue it sooner than later, because the risk, stress, cost of failure, and available time will only get worse over time and after a spouse and kids.  Still, lots of people do it.  I’m doing it now.  Despite the very real ways in which a family makes entrepreneurship harder, there are some powerful advantages too.

Time

I’d rather be with my family than doing just about anything else.  This is a huge advantage.  When you’re starting a company and seeking funding, partners, employees, customers, and allies there are an infinite number of things you could do at any time.  Networking event downtown tonight?  Maybe you’ll meet someone there and make a decent connection.  The thing is, 80% of the events, calls, emails, and activities won’t be that valuable.  When you are a time billionaire (as my friend TK calls it), the opportunity cost is low.  You might as well go to the happy hour.  Something might come out of it.  So single entrepreneurs do it.  Over and over again.  They hit so many conferences and meetings that the line between what’s valuable and what’s a waste begins to blur.  They can get distracted and burned out on things that don’t really enhance their core value proposition or product.

When you would rather be with your family anyway, you develop a very high bar for any reason to do otherwise.  I’m not going to drive downtown and spend three hours sipping cocktails for a 30% chance of meeting a person with a 20% chance of introducing me to someone with a 10% chance of investing 5% of what I need to raise if it means not getting to watch Finding Nemo with my kids and tuck them in bed.  It raises the cost of wasted time and sharpens your ability to distinguish what’s really worth it.  You’ve heard of the 80/20 rule.  Being an entrepreneur with a family dramatically raises the stakes and makes you a lot better and quicker at identifying your 20% activities and ignoring the rest.  Saying ‘no’ is one of the most important skills an entrepreneur can learn, and having a family makes you a little better at it.

Perspective

When you’re running a venture, it’s all you think about.  As it should be.  Entrepreneur and investor Paul Graham says, “It’s hard to do a good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower”, and he’s right.  But things don’t always go well.  Sometimes they downright suck.  You lose a client, a deal falls through, your website launch is months late, you face legal battles, you can’t get a meeting with an investor, or any number of other hurdles real or imagined.  If you’ve got nothing but your business, these can destroy you.  If your venture is failing you feel like you are failing.  Someone who feels like a failure in life is not going to create a winner in business.

Having a Business and a Family at the Same Time
What were you saying about not having a good life?

It’s times like these when a family is the most amazing psychological strength I’ve found.  Crumpled in a real or metaphorical heap on the floor feeling like you just got your ass kicked by the world and all is lost, you look up at two cute little girls having a tea party and asking you if some imaginary tea will make you feel better.  How can you not smile?  The number of times I’ve laughed at myself for feeling like I just can’t win is countless.  Every time it’s because I consider my family and wonder how I could ever feel desperate.  Who cares if the businesses struggles or fails or I have to go work another job to make ends meet?  If I accomplish nothing else in my life besides raising these kids and spending time with my wonderful wife, who could ever call that a waste?

This perspective is healthy and needed.  Yeah, you want to be your work and throw yourself 100% into it.  But you also want to be more than your work.  Families have an amazing way of helping you see that you are.

Motivation

No matter how type-A you are and how many sleepless nights you’re willing to put in, you’re still human, and humans are lazy.  We prefer lounging to working.  Sometimes we disguise lounging as working and fill our time with activities that don’t add real value because the valuable stuff is hard or boring.  Especially after the early build and launch phase, the dip comes and it’s really hard to push yourself to do a bunch of crappy tasks to keep things moving forward.  If you have no family, and therefore very little time or financial obligation, you can easily pivot to a new job, pick up some side work, or sleep on a friend’s couch if your lack of effort should result in lack of income or delayed success.  You can wait to work hard until the moment of inspiration comes, no matter what day or hour it strikes.  When you have a family, these are all much harder to do.  If it’s 2:00 PM on a Friday and you agreed to hang with the kids for the evening beginning at 6:00, and then a long-promised family camping trip will consume the weekend, you have no choice.  You’ve got to make the next several hours count.  You’ve got to do the hard work no matter how little you want to.

It’s not only the financial incentive and desire to provide stable quality of life and time availability to your family, but also the desire to provide an example.  You want your kids to be excited by the opportunities life provides.  You want them to work hard.  You want them to see that you never gave up on your vision and you always buckled down and made things happen.  Especially if you work from home as I often do, you want your kids to get a feel for what it’s like and see your relentless focus and drive.  Alone in an apartment, it’s easier to justify a break for binge-watching your favorite show (I sneak that in after the kids are in bed.  What? I’m not a machine!).  Worst case, your venture fails and everyone still thinks you’re cool for trying it.  With a family failure is more costly, and that can be a great motivator.

Don’t Fear

While being entrepreneurial as a mindset and way of life is open and available to everyone, starting a business of your own is definitely not for everyone.  But if you feel that fire burning within and think it’s too late for you because you have a family and can never compete with single and childless founders out there, you’re wrong.  There are a great many entrepreneurial wives, husbands, fathers, and mothers, and we’ve got some advantages that those without a family don’t.

Father’s Day is a Little Weird for Me

I’m sitting alone in a bar in Austin at 10:30 AM on a rainy Sunday. Waiting for a little bit of bacon, waffles, and diced red potatoes. It’s Father’s Day. I’ve already had more than enough coffee, so water is my sole companion as I wait.

I’m tired. I just finished a day of being “on”, participating in a debate followed by a panel at a high energy conference with broken air conditioning and not enough food and water. I talked to people all day, often near shouting over loud, energetic music. It was good. I’m doing what I care about and talking about things that matter deeply to me. How to be free. How to create your own path. How to live fully alive. How to rebel against stagnant mindsets and institutions.

I’m not big on Father’s Day and other Hallmark holidays, but this calm, humid Sunday morning it got to me. My dad. How am I supposed to feel? Thankful to him for being there? He’s always been there, but in a wheelchair with a closed head-injury and needing more care than he could give. All things considered, he’s a great dad. It’s one of the things that sometimes makes it hard.

A lot of people grew up without fathers. Tragedy, abandonment, death, and divorce have thrown many a kid gut-wrenching curveballs I can’t imagine. They’ve got to learn to cope, but also to grieve. To feel the anger, resentment, or deep sadness of the hole in their life. But what am I supposed to do? My dad was always there, kind, impossible not to love, and also unable to walk, remember anything of consequence, or be independent at all.

I can’t grieve his absence. That would be an affront to his unmistakable and warm presence. Still, those few memories I retain from before his accident – rushing upstairs to play “Jumping on the Bed Fred” when he got home from work, him lying on the couch in sweatpants watching football or Star Trek, him helping me in to the hot vinyl seats of our old car – give me glassy eyes.

My waffles are here. Give me a minute.

OK, I’m back.

Several years ago I was lying awake in bed and it came to me. A fictionalized account of what happened with my dad after his car accident all those years ago. A few years later I put it up as one of the first posts on this blog. I’m glad it was so early on, when I had no readers. Fiction is a format I’m really unfamiliar with as a writer, and it feels a little bit awkward. Still, it was the first time I had ever written anything besides a vague adolescent poem or two about the subject of my dad. It was the only form that allowed me to. I guess today I’m taking a more direct approach, which feels equally odd.

I like to write about my ideas, not my feelings. Yet on the topic of my dad, his accident, and my life growing up with and without him, I don’t really have any ideas. I only have feelings, and even those aren’t that well-processed.

One of the strangest things, which I imagine must be far stranger for my mother, is that I actually have two dads. I have the one who gave me his genetic material, who set the foundation for our family, and who held me and played with me those first three years. He’s still alive in my memory, and mostly in romanticized legends I’ve pieced together from stories about him. Then there’s my dad who’s with us today. By all accounts a funny (in an ironic, playful sort of way), kind, caring, compassionate guy who never says a negative word about anyone, and whose occasional agitation has an endearing quality. He’s not one of those people I’ve met in some nursing homes who, when faced with physical or mental disabilities vent nothing but pent-up anger (perhaps partially because they’re in nursing homes). He’s the farthest thing from that you can imagine. He requires 24 hour care, but even though it can take a toll physically, he’s not someone you can get mad at. Well, sometimes you can, when he keeps asking the same question every five minutes due to short term memory loss, but even then, it’s my lack of patience and not any intended malice on his part.

I love both of my dads. My relationship with my head-injured dad is actually great, and makes me smile just to think about it. I miss that old pup (his term, not mine). I called him today. It’s not a complicated relationship. In fact, it’s probably easier than any other relationship in my life. He loves me unconditionally and is always proud of me, even though he usually forgets what I’m up to, how old I am, whether I live at home, and whether or not he really owes me a million dollars (I have fun with that one). He’s easy for me to love as well. His soul shines through and reveals my own flimsy attempts at compassion and joy in contrast to his.

It’s my other dad that makes things complicated. I didn’t have time to get to know him. I never had the joy of being coached by him in baseball, or beating him on the basketball court, or arguing over things that dads and sons argue about. It’s really hard to miss him and feel ripped off because of his absence. That feels like it would be a slight to the dad that’s still here. But I do miss him.

It’s hard to build an accurate picture of who he was, and sometimes I’m not even sure I want to.

He was probably a lot less amazing than I imagine he was or would have been had the accident never happened. Who knows? Maybe I’d think he was a big stick-in-the-mud. Maybe we’d fight about everything. I’ll never know. I know he wasn’t perfect, and I even believe that I’ve gained a great many good qualities due to the unique way my siblings and I were raised, with lots of independence by necessity. Still, I wonder a lot. I know his financial decisions allowed us to live a safe, comfortable life even after he could no longer work. I know his decision with my mom to homeschool us changed my life in ways I’m more thankful for every day. I know his beliefs, regardless of how well his actions did or did not mirror them, created a sound foundation that I value and that has served me well.

My waffles are almost done. The bacon is gone, and most of the potatoes. It feels like time to wrap this up. I’m not really sure what else to say. I don’t feel bad for myself. I grieve sometimes. I started crying a little bit at the table here while writing this, which mercifully warded off the waitress and bought me a little more time. One day it really hit me hard, when I was first trying to get Praxis off the ground and getting thrashed by roadblock after roadblock, I just broke down in an airport and asked God why in hell I didn’t have a dad to bounce things off of.

Yet, my dad is here. I look at my wife, whose father died two years ago, far too young, and I cannot deny she is experiencing a deeper loss than I know. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to process this complex situation.

For anyone else out there who grew up with a dad who was present, but handicapped in some way, I know it’s a little weird. I know my dad loved me, loves me, and I’m so glad for his presence in my life. I guess this is my card this year. Happy Father’s Day dad. Thank you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go smoke a cigar to pay homage to the time before I was born when you snuck outside of church for a cigarillo, you rebel you.

You Have to Pick Two

I wrote recently about how you can’t have a growing business, a robust social life, and a great family life all at once.  You only get to pick two.  The implication is that, though everyone wants all three, you get a maximum of two if you want to succeed.  I’m beginning to think the heuristic is not just a maximum, but a minimum as well.  You don’t just get to pick two, you have to pick two.

If you pour yourself fully in to any one of these at the expense of the others, you’re unlikely to find long term success and fulfillment.  If you’re a passionate, single-minded entrepreneur, you need to create space for some kind of social life or family/significant other.  You won’t be your best if you don’t.

Many people accept this notion but mistakenly assume all that’s needed is a balance of time spent on the activities.  As long as I carve out 30% of my time to not work I’ll be balanced because I’ll be with friends or family.  This is far from the truth.  You need time with an interest or hobby around which friends congregate, or family time, but you can’t expect it to happen simply because you set aside time to not work.  You have to be just as intentional with your non-work time as you are with time spent working.  You have to be definite and deliberate in the creation of a social or family life.

Again, it’s not about the number of hours spent on each.  Maybe you’re able to pour yourself into a job with only a four hour workweek.  Maybe you can have a meaningful social life with nothing more than one kite-boarding session a week.  The point is to ensure you have more than one thing on which to put your energy and attention.  One needs to serve as an outlet for things left unexpressed in the other.

I don’t believe it’s really about creating a stark divide or work/life balance either.  Depending on your personality and habits, you may need that in order to do your two things.  Or you may need a seamless synthesis.  I tend to have a much better family and work life when I have fuzzier lines between them.  I love working from home. I’m writing this at the breakfast table with noisy kids all around.  I like taking my kids with me on work trips when I can.  I enjoy responding to emails at all hours, and I feel less stressed and more in the moment with family when I don’t have to put work completely on hold.  You may be the opposite.  Neither is better or worse.  The important thing is to have something outside of work to devote yourself to.

Interview with a Decamom: Heather Hinkle

IMG_8390How many people know a mother of nine with a tenth in the womb? I’m related to one. Don’t hold that against her. She’s got children between the ages 2 and 12, with one set of twins in there.

IMM: I guess the obvious question to ask a mother of (nearly) ten is, why? Are you trying to field a baseball team?

HH: No, I hate sports. I love children and so does John and we always wanted a large family. We (obviously) have left our family planning to God!

IMM: Did the experience of growing up with such an angelic and genius younger brother cause you to desire tons of kids?

HH: Quite the contrary…it really made me doubt the wisdom of humanity propagating. I’m always fearful of my children displaying ‘Isaac-like’ behaviors.

IMM: Do you ever worry that each individual child won’t get enough attention with so many in the house? How to you try to remedy that?

HH: It’s definitely something both John and I contemplate and my full thoughts on the issue would take up more time than your readers would want to give. However, ways in which we try to combat it are by taking the older children to a special store they like, such as a bookstore, or taking the younger ones to the play-land at the mall. It can also be something as simple as one of us playing board-games with them once the smaller ones are in bed.

IMM: Are people generally kind and happy for you when they see you with all your kids, or do you get dirty looks? What’s the most surprising comment you’ve gotten?

HH: It’s interesting, but we’ve found in the south that people seem the least accepting of our large brood. This manifests itself by complete disinterest/ignoring of us. I’m not sure why this is, but we were approached/asked questions a lot more whilst living in the midwest. Once a lady at a store basically forced me to take a twenty dollar bill from her, to buy something for the family and another time an individual asked John how much money he made!

IMM: OK, you’re a homeschooling mom with a massive family. The picture most people have in their mind is of a giant farmhouse and a bunch of kids churning butter, wearing bowties, and giving each other violin lessons. Does that describe your home life?

HH: Nothing you listed describes us…except the bowties, which we don religiously. I think most people would be surprised to see that we live in a neighborhood, have a relatively small yard and our house is decorated really well!

IMM: Hardest and most rewarding parts of having such a big family?

HH: My pregnancies are definitely the hardest part for our family to endure; I wish I felt well and enjoyed them, but it is the exact opposite. It’s a sacrifice for all of us to endure eight months of me feeling sickly. And the weight…ugh! I look like Martin Short’s character, ‘Glick’ for my last two or three months. It’s hard to pinpoint what is the most rewarding aspect, but one would definitely be watching the kids interact with each other and how much they enjoy it…when they’re not arguing, of course!

IMM: Do you ever feel constrained by the fact that you are primarily defined by the size of your family? Do you feel held back from going after other things you want in life?

HH: Not especially; I feel I have plenty of other interests, etc. that define me. There are definitely times where I feel held back from pursuing other things I enjoy, but on the whole I feel that motherhood has propelled me to be more creative, organized and good with managing my time.

IMM: How long does it take you to get everyone ready and out of the house?

HH: You’ll find out in a few weeks, when you and your lovely bride come to watch them! If we are talking Sunday morning, it’s about an hour-and-a-half to two hours from awakening to pulling out of the driveway. If it’s a normal day where we are just getting in the car to run an errand, it’s actually fairly quick, maybe 10-20 minutes.

IMM: How many loaves of bread do you go through in a week?

HH: Nine. I really have to keep my eyes out for good prices on bread, because we don’t care for Wonderbread and the like…though I’m not trying to besmirch their fine name. Buy-one-get-one deals are the best!

IMM: Do your kids seem to like being in a big family? Do any of them ever complain about it?

HH: Well, judging from the strained looks on several of their faces in the accompanying picture, I think it may be a hardship for them! They all really like it; they generally start praying for a new baby shortly after I have given birth! I encourage them to delay that prayer for awhile, so I have some time to recover and enjoy feeling well. In conversation you will hear them say, “They only have five children in their family”!

IMM: How many kids do you plan on having?

HH: As I said earlier, we leave family planning to God. But I hate vague answers such as that; my feeling is we will end up somewhere around sixteen.

IMM: Do you recommend having a big family to others? Are there some people you think would be better with a small family, or do you think it can work for anyone willing to try?

HH: I do think having a big family is extremely rewarding and I try to be encouraging to people about it, while still being real. I think most people would benefit from having a large (or larger) family, but the reality is you have to be extremely dedicated with your time, resources and emotional energy. People very rarely say they regret having another child, but more often regret not having had more.

IMM: If you could go back to just before you started having kids and give yourself one piece of advice, what would you say?

HH: This is a tough one, but I think it would have to be ‘Everything is a phase that will end, but will move into another phase’. I know that wasn’t very sage; I wish I could say something that made me look smarter and others would consider hanging on their fridge.

IMM: In the midst of raising and homeschooling all these kids, you’ve launched a business. What was the inspiration? Can you tell me about it?

HH: My business is called Bliss and Brahm and it is a clothing line specifically for twins which will carry coordinating items for boy/girl multiples. It is in the very rudimentary stages, but is really exciting in the sense that I am doing this from start-to-finish, from helping to design the sketches for the pieces to getting them shipped out to the buyers. My inspiration came eight years ago when I was searching for matching outfits for my own boy/girl twins and could not easily find items. The name came from my twins’ middle names!

IMM: Do you have a website or Facebook page? When will products be available?

HH: I do have a Facebook page called Bliss and Brahm. I wish I had an incentive to offer your readers to ‘like’ my page, but I’m going to count on the fact that you have been pounding into them the positives of free-market and entrepreneurial business ventures and hope that will compel them! My website is slated to be up in early July and we are actually launching our first line of clothing in March of 2014. I realize that seems a long way off, but the world of fashion runs on its own timeline. In the meantime, my website will allow browsers to see our progress and weigh in with their own thoughts and ideas.

IMM: Thank you!

Inequality vs. Favoritism

Inequality is inescapable and morally neutral.  There is no virtue in trying to eradicate it, and it makes no sense to talk of reducing it.

My children were born unequal.  They will remain unequal as they learn, achieve and acquire.  Any efforts to make them equal do harm to all parties involved.  Many people agree that I could never make them equal, but maybe I should try to make them more equal.  Equality is not a more or less concept, it is either or.

3 is not equal to 2.  Neither is 4 equal to 2.  It is meaningless to call one more equal to 2 than the other.  We could say that 3 is more equal to 2, because it is only one whole integer removed from 2.  We could say 4 is more equal to 2 because it is divisible by 2, and only one even number removed.  It is entirely dependent on our frame of reference.  Equality between individuals is as impossible as equality between 2 and 3, and degrees of inequality are entirely subjective; a matter of perception, different for all observers and participants.

It is fruitless to attempt to lessen inequality or increase equality.  In fact, it’s worse than fruitless, it is destructive.  Not only does it produce arbitrary and unpredictable results which disillusion and demotivate the targets, it fuels strife, envy, and limiting one’s potential to the achievements of their perceived betters.

Still, there is something to the desire to create equality.  I would be a terrible parent if I lavished gifts and affirmation, or insult and condemnation, on one child far more than the others.  Not because it would make them more unequal; they are and will always be unequal.  But because my deliberate action of applying the family rules, mores and norms selectively and unfairly would break trust and breed conflict.  I would be engaging in favoritism, either negative or positive.

I will not try to clearly define favoritism, because I think putting it into words actually makes it less understandable than if we stick with our intuitive and tacit understanding of the term.  It is not merely acting differently towards different people.  If I speak Spanish to a Spanish speaking person and English to an English speaking person I am not acting uniformly towards them, but I am not showing favoritism.  Interacting with my unequal children in ways that best resonate with their unique “language” is not favoritism either.  Favoritism is when the spoken or unspoken rules of the house are not consistently applied.

If it is known that doing X chores will get you Y payment, or that treating Dad’s iPad carelessly will result in less access to the iPad, these norms must be applied in a uniform way.  I may communicate the norms and remind my children of them in different ways based on their individuality and inequality, but if one kid gets paid more for the same work, or one gets access to the iPad despite throwing it against the wall and the others don’t, I’m engaging in favoritism that damages everyone.

Uniform application of the family norms will result in inequality, as is inevitable with unequal children.  Some will get more chores done and earn more money.  Some will have a hard time controlling emotions and end up throwing the iPad and losing access to it.  Their nature and choices will produce unequal results.  There is no evil in this.  To aim at equality puts the focus on outcomes; the relative positions resulting from individual actions within an institutional context.  This is a meaningless point of reference, and incredibly poisonous when chosen as the basis by which to judge institutions.  It devolves into, “Anything that rubs me the wrong way, or anything you excel at must be curbed.”  It’s a sentiment that coddles and nurtures our least civil and humane and most barbaric and short-sighted tendencies, usually in the name of the opposite.  It is the uniformity of treatment in relation to the understood rules and norms that matters, not the inequality that results.

The attempt to make my children equal, or more equal, or even treat them equally is futile and destructive.  It is enlightening and beneficial to keep an eye out for favoritism and uniform application of the rules.  I have to check my tendency to selectively apply the mostly unspoken institutional arrangements of the family, and it’s healthy to audit myself in this way.  But the minute I make equality the goal, confusion and frustration take hold, and the rules become more, not less, arbitrary.

Of course society is not a mirror of the family, but the lessons still apply.  To seek equality, or more equality, or less inequality, is an unproductive pursuit, and typically a mask for other frustrations we’re trying to ameliorate where we want the moral sanction of our peers to do so.  Drop it.  Inequality is morally neutral and needn’t be resisted or defended.  Focus on reliable and fair institutions that don’t systematize and reward favoritism, but make it harder and more costly.