Your Kids Don’t Need More Achievement. They Need More Freedom | Dr. Peter Gray - EP 826

33:39So she contends that there really isn't any difference between what she is seeing now based on her data sets and what was seen in the 50s and 70s. How do you respond to something like that? Of course, I'd be interested in that data. It's interesting. It'd be nice to know what the questions are. The issues faced by college students are in some sense different from the issues faced by younger children. College is always, and also I would be interested, are these first-year college students? Are they second, third, fourth-year college students that the data come from? First year of college is often a very stressful time.

34:22You are maybe for the first time getting low grades, especially that was true. And the first time you're away from home and you're out of your comfort environment, you're trying to adapt to a whole new set of people. The anxiety and depression of first year in college is longstanding. My mother talked about that when she dropped out of college her first year and never went back. And so that would have been on the 1930s. So I think that in some sense, the experience of college students, especially early on, perhaps hasn't changed as much as others. On the other hand, there is no question but what.

35:01When you look at the survey data, when you're asking kids, even college students, about their levels of anxiety and depression, when you're directly assessing that, whether it's by self-report or whether it's by giving them clinical questionnaire, the data are clear that for college students, as well as younger people, the rates of anxiety and depression have gone up. Let's go back to childhood then for a second. I think parents today often feel like an enormous pressure that they have to optimize every aspect of childhood. And my question to you is, when beyond school did childhood become something to manage instead of something for them to experience?

35:55And then what happens psychologically when this happens, when adults begin solving too many of the problems that kids need to discover on their own earlier in life? So I think that this burden that parents take on of trying to manage their children's lives, trying to be aware all the time of what they're doing, worrying all the time about what effects this or that might have on them, worrying about their future, trying to gear their lives so that they get into the most expensive college they can get into. All of this is referred to by researchers as intensive parenting. And intensive parenting first became a thing.

36:43It began, that term actually came around by researchers as early as the 1980s. But in the 1980s, it was primarily a practice of very wealthy parents who could afford to do it, could afford to hire people to help them do it. But the very wealthy class of parents began to take on this sense that I need to gear and steer my children towards success in the world. And these are parents who were successful themselves. They were wealthy. They were successful. They wanted to be sure that their children also were that way. And I think this began to spread already in the 1980s, by the 1990s, I think this was already spreading to a greater number of people, including people who actually couldn't afford it.

37:41They couldn't afford the money and they really couldn't afford the time to do everything that the intensive parenting prescriptions say that you're supposed to do. But they still believe that they should do that and And they felt guilty if they couldn't do that. There's been documentation of this in various ways over time. I think one of the factors that contributed to this is the increased gap of wealth between the rich and the poor. It began really during the Reagan administration. The decline of labor unions, the change in the tax structures that favored the rich at at the expense of the poor, greatly increase the gap between the rich and the poor.

38:27There are a couple of economists who've written a book comparing, they've done research comparing across nations and over time. And their thesis is the greater the gap is between rich and the poor, the more parents begin to believe that they have to ensure that their children are on a track to get good jobs. And they believe that entails hard work in childhood. They believe that entails doing well in school, excelling in extracurricular activities. In other words, parents begin to think of childhood not as a time of free play and creativity but as a time of resume building and the parents are going to take charge of that resume building make sure the children do the things that they need to do to build a good resume i think it's a logical argument i think that did figure into it it's not the only thing but i think that figured into that kind of change that occurred.

39:36I think I have two kids who are college plus age. One is 28 and he just finished his second degree and is currently a senior at the University of Florida. And as I was looking back, one of them ended up going to a prep school for high school. The other one went to a public school. And it was interesting. The one who went to the private school, there was an immense pressure from the private school for them to try to get into the best school that they possibly could. So a big push to try to get into Ivy League or equivalents. We didn't feel as much as that push in the public school, but the younger of the two put enormous pressure on herself to try to do that same thing because she equated that if she was going to have success later on in life, she needed to get into the best school that she possibly could, which I think is a common thing that people think.

40:37Do you think in some ways that is what is driving this, that there's this feeling that you have, not just here in the States, but I see the same thing in Great Britain. I see the same thing in India. Same thing when I talk to people who are from China, that getting into these premier schools is what's going to dictate your success later in life. So you have to grind in order to accomplish the things that allow you to get into them. Yeah, I think this is what people believe. I think to a considerable degree, it's a myth. There's actually been research showing that if you control for background factors, you control for economic class, you control as well as you can for innate abilities.

41:27And then you look at those when you've created these sort of artificial match twins, if you will, and one of them goes to Harvard or its equivalent and the other one goes to the local state college. By age 40, the research shows they're earning the same amount of money. Even by that measure, they're earning the same amount of money. There was no advantage to going to Harvard. There are some advantages to going to Harvard in the recruitment stage, but there are also advantages called the big fish in the little pond effect of going to the lesser school where you stand out, you get great recommendations, you get invited by the professor into the laboratory and so forth.

42:08So it's a bit of a myth that you're going to be far better off. Now, nobody ever believed that you're going to be happier in life as a result of going to the prestigious school nobody ever argued that as far as i can tell and there's zero evidence for that there's never been any evidence for that so if you judge a successful life by am i happy am i content with my life am i comfortable in my own skin, there's no benefit to going to the more expensive, prestigious college. So parents have been misled. There's a way, the problem is people don't understand the distinction between a correlation and a cause.

42:55So when you look at correlational data, of course, kids who went to Ivy League schools are at least superficially by measures of money, by measures of status, doing way better than those who went to the local college. But they also came from far wealthier families. They were different in disposition to begin with. They were people who cared about status and money because that's part of why they went there and so on and so forth. It's not a reasonable comparison. them. It's only by doing those controlled studies that you can say what really is the Harvard effect as opposed to what is simply a correlate of those who happen to go to Harvard versus those who don't.

43:42So that's number one. The other thing I want to point out here is there's a researcher named Sonoya Luther, who unfortunately died a few years ago, way too young, and who she originally was a professor at Columbia Teachers College, and she was doing research on the mental health of teenagers. And originally, she had been doing research in the inner city, I believe probably in New York City, of children, of young people, teenagers in poverty. And she was finding relatively high rates of anxiety, depression, alcohol use, drug abuse, and so on and so forth. And the way she told the story, the way she tells the story is that one of her, and she was attributing it to poverty, but one of her graduate students, the way she tells the story, challenged her on that, said, well, how do you know it's poverty?

44:36What's your control group? Maybe kids from wealthy families are similarly suffering. So she did a study. She did a same study among teenagers in Westchester which I believe is the wealthiest county in New York State. She found higher levels of anxiety, depression, binge drinking, illegal drug use among them than she did among the poverty kids in the inner city. And it changed the direction of her research. At first, she was calling this a problem of affluence. She attributed it somehow to growing up in an affluent family. But the more she did the research, the more she realized it isn't affluence per se.

45:29it is the pressure that's applied to kids, particularly by the school that they're going to, but also by the parents who are pushing the kids to do well in school and achieve in other ways. She found that, and she began to identify what she called high achievement schools. Some of these would be private prep schools, but others would be public schools in wealthy neighborhoods, all of which are schools that pride themselves on how many of their graduates go on to elite colleges, how high the test scores are, and all of that. And therefore, the schools are motivated to get you into those colleges, to get those scores high, and that means pressures on the kids.

46:20What she found is that it wasn't just, if you're going to that kind of a school, it wasn't just the kids from wealthy families. There were also kids in those schools, a certain number of kids in those schools who are not from wealthy families. And they were suffering just as much as those from wealthy families. And there were some kids from even wealthy families who were not suffering so much. So what made the difference? And what she determined was the difference was the degree to which the kids were being pressured by multiple sources, not only by the school, but by the parents themselves. The kids who were protected from this were those who had parents who really did not care how they were doing in school, truly did not care.

47:11Where you'd sit around, enjoy, the family enjoyed you for who you were. They weren't trying to make you into something that you were not. If you decided, I don't want to go to college, they would be fine with that. Those are the kids who are not suffering. And she also, we were talking a little bit earlier about college students, she and some of her colleagues followed some of these kids through college and they continued to suffer in college at much higher rates than other college kids who had gotten there with less pressure to begin with. it's this kind of pressure for superficial achievement that children are experiencing largely at school pressure but it's not just in school kids are feeling pressured to do well in extracurricular activities to get onto the traveling team to win to be to colleges like the elite colleges where everybody's got a 4.0 average when they apply everybody's got the highest scores on the SATs that you could possibly get.

48:17So then they begin to look at, well, what are they doing outside? And what clubs are they president of? What sports teams are they starring in? And so forth. So the pressure on kids is not just to perform well in school, it's to join all this other stuff that takes all their time. And then they feel pressured about that, about performing well. This is really, in my mind, this is child abuse, what we're doing. This kind of pressure on young people to perform in these kind of superficial things. These are not real achievements. It's not a real achievement to get high grades in school. It's a very narrow kind of achievement, has very little to do with life.

48:57It's not a real achievement to make that sports team and be a star in it. That has very little to do with what your future life is going to be, unless you're going to be a professional athlete, which is only a tiny minority of young people for whom that's going to be true. Well, I am so glad you brought her research up because I cited her several times in my upcoming book as well. And you were right. Her life was taken much too young, unfortunately, because I thought she had so much more in addition to what she had already worked on to contribute. So Peter, one thing, speaking of this, I want to ask you about is when I went into trying to understand all this and trying to understand in many ways what was happening to my kids, but what had also happened to me, because I ended up becoming what we're describing here, when you're taught to achieve, to earn your worth.

49:54I didn't go into this to study mattering. I went into this to understand what was underneath all of this. But the farther I got into it, I started to try to explore whether agency and mattering reinforce one another. And did children become more agentic because they feel they matter? or do they discover they matter because they're trusted to act independently? And when we put all of these forces upon them, as opposed to the family where they're treated as they matter because of who they are, does that weakening of mattering start becoming a root cause of what's happening here? So I haven't thought about mattering to the degree that you certainly have, but I think that it relates very much to self-determination.

50:58If you are feeling in charge of your own life, if you are doing what you have decided to do, generally you feel you matter. You've decided to do this because in some sense, why did you decide to do this? Because it matters. It matters to you at least. If it doesn't matter to anybody else, at least it matters to you. So when people, I think about it, so I noticed that the title of your podcast is Passions Strike or something like that. That's the word passion in there. So I've been very interested in how young people develop passions. And I'm convinced that our schooling system prevents children from developing passions because your passions don't count.

51:45Your interests don't count when you are in school. All that counts is what they tell you're supposed to do. So I have spent part of my career studying children who are growing up unschooled, who aren't going to a typical school, who are homeschooled by the method commonly called unschooling, which is a bad term because it sounds like they're not being educated. But basically where they are allowed to take charge of their own learning, make their own decisions about what they're learning, when they're learning, how they're learning. what they're doing and so on. And I've also studied children in schools for self-directed education, especially the Sudbury Valley School, where my own son went to school many years ago, where the philosophy is that children learn best when they are directing their own activities.

52:33Children are not segregated by age. They're interacting with one another. They're in charge of their lives from the beginning. One of the things I've found in studies of the graduates of that kind of a school, as well as grown unschoolers, is that by and large, they are in jobs that they love. How did this happen? Because while they were children, they had ample time to play. Play and explore. How do you discover your passion? How do you discover what's meaningful to you? What matters to you? you discover it as a child in play you play at this you play at that you play out of various things you acquire kind of a broad understanding of things by playing and exploring in various ways but then something really hits you i love to do this right i really love to do this and you do it enough that you become good at it.

53:39And then if you've been in this kind of environment where you're used to making your own plans, you don't have other people making all your plans for you, you begin to think, all right, now I'm a teenager. It won't be too long before I'm going to have to make my own living. How do I want to make a living? I want to make a living doing what I love to do, what matters. to me. And so I've documented in a high percentage of these people, I've studied about 150 such people, and a very high percentage of them, they are going on into careers that are direct extensions of their passionate interests. Those careers matter to them.

54:25Sometimes it matters to them because they see that it's doing good for the world. That's actually pretty common. But also because they've chosen, not only is this what I like to do, but it's something where I'm actually contributing to the world. But other cases, I'm an artist. People may or may not enjoy my art, but my art matters to me. That's what I am. That's what I identify. I think that clearly there's a relationship between this sense of I'm in charge of my life. So many of these concepts overlap with one another. If they're not identical, at least they overlap. The self-direction, the whole self-determination theory, when you have agency, when you're in charge of what you're doing, as opposed to just doing things to please other people, then it feels like it matters.

55:16I have a pivot point now. I have spoken to Richard Ryan on multiple occasions. I understand self-determination theory very well because it was one of the two core frameworks I used in my book to kind of architect how I was thinking about mattering. And as I told you, I recently had Marty Seligman on the show and we spent a significant amount of the interview discussing the youth mental health crisis. And Marty told me something that really surprised me. He said that going in to his research and his new book on agency, he expected that declining agency and his decades of work on learned helplessness were going to explain what we're seeing about the youth mental health crisis.

56:09But he told me that over the past six to nine months, he's been using artificial intelligence to analyze huge amounts of historical data sets, and that he has reluctantly, very reluctantly, come to the conclusion that Jonathan Haidt's explanation that social media is the stronger driver currently fits the evidence better than what he has. he thought would explain it. And so where I want to go with this is, Peter, if all three of you were sitting together at a table and you all three agree we're facing a youth mental health crisis, it seems where you disagree is about causation. What evidence would you put on the table to the other two that you think they're overlooking?

57:08So it's hard for me to respond to what Stoutman is saying because I don't know the data and I haven't had a chance to look at that. But I can clearly respond to what Jonathan Haidt is saying. So what is the evidence? So first of all, what Jonathan Haidt ignores is the fact that the rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among teenagers in the United States was as high in 1990 as it is today, as high in 1990 as it became at its peak in 2018. It's actually gone down a little bit since then. And so there was a decline in anxiety, depression, in suicide at all age groups most significantly in teenagers because these things tend to show up more in teenagers than in younger children not a decline all the way to 1950s levels but about 40 percent of the way back i present this data in my book i've presented it in some of my other writings almost nobody talks about that so 1990 was before the internet we didn't have any of Test technology in 1990.

58:25Why did things improve between 1990 and 2010? They actually improved. The only thing I can come up with, I've looked at every possibility, and what I come up with is technology improved it. Kids had already, by 1990, been greatly stifled from being able to play and explore and do things independently of their parents. already a lot of the changes that I've talked about that had occurred. Beginning in 1990, they had a new way. By the early 1990s, most families with teenagers in the United States had a computer. And by the middle of the 1990s, certainly by the end, most of them had an internet connection.

59:15And those families, and there's research showing this, that teenagers were the ones who figured out how to use that stuff. And they taught their parents how to use it. And the great majority of families, I can speak from experience. My own son was the one who learned how to use my early Apple computer and showed me how to use it. So I didn't have to type on a regular typewriter anymore. I experienced that. And families across the country experienced that. suddenly teenagers had a new power and they quickly learned that they could use this to communicate with their friends through early versions of what we now call social media they could play video games which are real play there's a lot of research showing this is real play i think that's what accounted for the improved mental health over that period and there's a lot of research demonstrating that, including at least one study by Richard Ryan, in which he showed that these video games that the kids were glomming onto satisfied the three basic needs of self-determination theory, the need for autonomy, the need for competence.

1:00:25And if you're playing socially, if you're playing multiplayer games, the need for connections with your peers. So he's even written about that. So that makes a lot of sense. I've looked at various other possible explanations and they simply don't hold up. This one seems to definitely hold up. There's also data showing studies at that time showing that those kids, if you control for background factors, control for other factors, those kids who are on computers, communicating with others, playing games on computers, were doing psychologically better than those who are not. So then what happened in 2010?

1:01:02So Jonathan Haidt wants to say it is because this is the era where most kids now had smartphones. So they're not only using a computer, desktop computer or a laptop computer at home, but they're carrying around this little computer, which is with them all the time, and which is distracting them from other things. It's leading. So you know the whole arguments that he presents. It's a logical argument. It's plausible. The problem is the data do not support it. The data clearly do not support it. I've looked at, there are four kinds of studies that have been done, hundreds of studies that have been done, which overall do not provide support.

1:01:48Jonathan Haidt's book, he hired a research assistant to dig out the data and the research assistant found a few studies that seemed to support that theory and that's what went into the book the book doesn't even refer to the meta analyses of studies the large the reviews of studies the peer published reviews of studies it doesn't refer to the people who are actually doing this research with one exception and that's somebody who has done a minimal amount of that research. So, and not surprisingly, the book has been criticized by essentially all the people who do research in this field. The first review of it was by Candace Odgers in the journal Nature, in which her first couple of paragraphs of sentences were something like this.

1:02:40Jonathan Haidt has written a very scary story that parents are inclined to believe because it fits what they already believe, but it's not a story supported by science. And then she went on from there. This is what I also agree, and this is what many other researchers in this area have pointed out. Here's some of the lines of evidence. When you look overall, there is no meaningful correlation between how much time a child or teenager is spending on smartphones or on social media or on screens in general, no matter how you look at it, there's no meaningful correlation between that and measures of their mental health.

1:03:23You can find particular small studies where there's a positive correlation between that and good mental health, others where there's a correlation between that and bad mental health. But when you look at the large studies, the better designed studies, when you look at the meta-analyses of all of the studies, no overall effect, no meaningful effect. So that's one finding. A second finding is that, and to me, I'll skip a couple of the other categories of findings because to me, the most significant finding is this. This is an American phenomenon. This increase in anxiety, depression, and suicide that occurred between 2010 and 2018 is an American phenomenon.

1:04:13It did not occur worldwide. Smartphones and social media were rolled out worldwide. Kids in Europe are not deprived of smartphones and social media. They glommed onto it just as our kids are. They're basically on the same social media platforms as our kids are. They're using computers, they're using smartphones in the same way as ours. While suicide rate among young people was increasing steeply in the United States, in the European Union, it was actually declining between 2010 and 20. You don't see that data in Jonathan Haidt's book. There are worldwide studies showing no relationship between when this technology rolled out and teens got onto it, and changes in teen mental health overall there's no relationship now what i talk about in my book i looked are there some other countries that showed an increase in anxiety depression and other measures of mental problems among young people around the same time that occurred in the united states and i found two other countries for which that was true there may be some other countries for which this is true.

1:05:28But two that I found that clearly this is true is the UK, particularly England, but the data are for the UK, but England is about 80 % of the UK, and Sweden, interestingly. What is similar between the UK, Sweden, and the United States? All three of those countries showed experience nationally mandated changes in how schooling is done the uk especially england it wasn't all of the uk that adopted but england adopted a change in schooling very similar to common core and so did sweden sweden adopted at about the same time as we did england adopted it three or four years later interestingly their increase in anxiety depression among young people began three or four years later than it did in either Sweden or the United States.

1:06:28In other words, changes in young people's mental health tracks changes in how we do schooling. It does not track changes in the availability of technology to young people. Thank you for that counter argument. My own research, where I've tried to look at this objectively, and I am not a researcher like you are, or Slugman is, or Haidt is, when I looked at this objectively, I started to look at it as a signal issue. Where did we start losing the signal. And I traced it back all the way to the start of the Industrial Revolution. And what I come to a hypothesis is that the signal has been reduced through reducing childhood freedom, reducing academic pressure, increasing parental anxiety, declining opportunities for agency across youth, and then a systematic erosion then amongst all the institution that we surround ourselves around, which is why it continues to cascade even beyond childhood now into so many adults' lives.

1:07:55Because whether it's our governments, our workforces, consumerism that Aaron Iuvia studies or other things, they're all eroding more and more of our individuality and treating us less as a human and more as a utility. And that's what I've come to believe is causing this to cascade now from youth into adulthood and beyond. Do you think any of that is also true? I absolutely do. I think that is true. But I think that when we're talking about looking at a sort of more time-limited samples, why were there changes between 1950 and 1990? Why were there changes between 1990 and 2010? Why were there further changes between 2010 and 2000?

1:08:51What you've described is a background that sets the stage for those changes, sets the conditions that allow these kinds of societal changes to have these effects on people. And I think that's absolutely true. It's interesting regarding what you're saying. One of the things that I learned from the anthropologists who studied hunter-gatherer children and hunter-gatherers in general is these people are remarkably well-adjusted. They don't have anxiety and depression. Some people call it a Western phenomenon, But it's a kind of a modern phenomenon from the long history of... I've also had an interesting experience.

1:09:32I really got first interested in the changes in children's well-being over time. When I was giving a talk in Florida, and I met a young woman who had come from Kenya. She was native of Kenya, had come from Kenya at age 16. And she came up to me and she said, the first thing I noticed when I came to America from Kenya was how unhappy people are. And especially how unhappy the children are. She also added how unhappy the dogs are. She said they're all on leashes. They're all on leashes. Kids and dogs and everybody in Kenya are much freer. They are in poverty. they're suffering from, but they're not suffering psychologically the way people are in the United States.

1:10:30And then I met other people from what we now call developing countries where they said the same thing. They said, we came to America seeking a better life, but we see that the children are less happy here than they were in the country that we came from. And I began to think, well, what are we doing to make the children so unhappy? And led to my really beginning to look at the historical changes that have reduced children's opportunities to be free and do what children need to do, and the effects that has on their psychological well-being, on who they become growing up, whether they develop passions, whether they develop lives that are meaningful to them, that matter to them.

1:11:13I think that there's no question that there's something about the modern wealthy societies, if you're looking at psychological suffering as opposed to physical suffering, people are suffering more in modern wealthy societies than in societies that in some sense are still pre-industrial. Peter, my last question for you is this. We have talked a lot about what has been going wrong. What brings you hope about the future and what are things that parents who may be listening today could do to change a lot of the trajectory that we've been discussing? In my last chapter, the biggest chapter of my new book, I talk about some beginnings of positive changes, and I talk about what people, regardless of their position in our society, could be doing to restore childhood.

1:12:15And there are some promising things happening. For example, there's an increasing number of schools which are adopting what we at the Let Grow organization call play club, which is an hour of free age mixed play before school or after school, where there are people supervising it, but not intervening, allowing, making it safe enough so parents feel it's safe for their kids to play there. There are libraries starting to have free play at the library. There are some recreation groups who are beginning to say, let's instead of just have all organized sports, let's have what we might call the sandlot experience, where you show up and you make up your own game if you're going to sign up for that.

1:12:57There are people involved in town planning who are beginning to think about, we need to make plans that will make it easier for children to get to school by themselves and safe enough that parents will allow. We need to make bicycle paths. We need to make sidewalks. We need to put over major highways. We need to put pedestrian and cycling paths over them. This is not the movement it should be, but it's an incipient movement. And there's also, I believe, increasing awareness among parents. Admittedly, I hear from a biased sample of parents, the people who read my stuff and respond to me. But at least from that sample, I believe that there is an increased awareness that their children need more free play, more independence.

1:13:42and I make suggestions to parents about how they can promote that. One of the things that I have a whole list in one of my Substack posts, I list 13 things you could do to bring more freedom and independence to your children's lives, even in today's world. But one of the things I'll just have time for one of them is sit down with your kid and say, are there things that you would like to do independently that you're not doing right now. Maybe you're not doing it because you haven't really thought about what you would like to do. Maybe you're not doing it because you think I wouldn't allow you to do it.

1:14:20Maybe you're not doing it because it might be a little bit scary. But other things, and make a list of them. And then to sit with that list and think, okay, I think it would be great if you did this. Or maybe your desire to ride your bicycle to the other end of town, I'm not quite ready for you to do that, but let's compromise. We could ride here or there independently. So to engage your child in a conversation about what they would like to do independently without a parent or other adult there guarding them along the way, telling them what to do, protecting them, and then allowing them to do it.

1:15:04Thank you so much, Peter. Where's the best place for listeners to learn about all your amazing work and your books, et cetera? I do have a website, which you can easily find, a personal website, just petergray.org. And it lists my books. It also shows how you could, If you're interested, pre-order my new book. It has of most interest to many people. There is a page that has links to many of my published academic articles. And don't be scared by my calling them academic articles. They're written in a way that any literate person can read and understand. And so if you're interested in my research and my academic writing, most of the articles that are relevant to what we've been talking here are available free downloadable there.

1:15:57I also write a regular substack called Play Makes This Human, and you can easily find that. Just Google Play Makes This Human or Peter Gray substack, in which I try to write a post letter once a week, or sometimes it stretches out to 10 days, but it's almost always a kind of research-based one. I'm not a person, generally speaking, that just talk off the top of my head. I'm a researcher by nature. I want to document things. I want to talk about what does the data actually tell us as opposed to what our intuitions tell us because our intuitions are very frequently wrong. Yes, they are. Good way to end.

1:16:45Thank you so much, and congratulations on this wonderful new book. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. I hope that conversation with Peter Gray gave you a different way to think about childhood, agency, and even the way we discover what matters to us. One of the ideas I found especially powerful was Peter's argument that passion isn't something we necessarily discover by sitting down and deciding what we want to do with our lives. We discover it through exploration. We try things. We follow our curiosity. we become absorbed in something, and over time, those experiences begin to reveal what genuinely matters to us.

1:17:21In that sense, play isn't simply preparation for life. It's one of the ways we begin to discover who we are. But that raises a bigger question for all of us. What happens when the world around us changes faster than the way we've learned to navigate it? Because the challenges of adaptation doesn't end when childhood does. In many ways, it becomes even more important as we move through adulthood when the environments we work in, the technologies we depend on, and the assumptions we build our lives around can change faster than we realize. And that brings us to our next conversation with Alec Lidowitz, an investor, entrepreneur, and author who has spent his career looking at complex systems through multiple lenses, from mathematics and anthropology to law, business, and markets.

1:18:05Our conversation took us into a question that I think sits at the heart of this entire series. Is adaptability simply the ability to keep up with change, or is it the ability to recognize when the direction you're moving in is no longer the right one? Alec gave me an analogy that stayed with me. He described what happens when the current, the wind, and the world around us are moving rapidly. You can be working incredibly hard, surrounded by other people who are working just as hard and still find yourself moving in the wrong direction. Sometimes the most important thing you can do isn't to swim harder.

1:18:42It's to lift your head up and understand what has changed. Take a listen. When the current's moving fast, when the wind is moving fast, when the world's changing super fast, what do you need to do? You need to lift your head up because you could be swimming with another group of people exactly super fast in the absolute wrong direction. Things are changing so fast. If I'm on the wrong course, who cares if I'm swimming with another group of people? Blockbuster was swimming really fast, giving you popcorn and raisinets inside a store that was selling you DVDs. Wrong frame. Netflix had the frame.

1:19:16It doesn't matter. Adaptability is what says you're touching true reality as it is right now. And without it? That's in our next episode on Thursday. Until then, remember, the better we understand the forces shaping us, the more intentionally we choose how we respond to them. I'm John Miles and as always stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion struck.

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