The Truth Revealed: Nature Vs. Nurture

0:08Welcome back to the show. Today's topic is nature versus nurture. It's one of the things I get asked about most, whether it's developing business leaders and raising people, not environment or raising children. Ed, what matters, nature or nurture? It's been a debate that's gone on for eons. And there's really two camps. The first camp says that it's all nature. It's all evolution. It's all genetics. How somebody is going to turn out is all their biology, their talents, their skills, their success level, their happiness. It's all nature, right? The other camp says, no, it's not nature at all. It's nurture.

0:39It's the environment that somebody has raised him. so you know one point of view like a guy like john lock the philosopher he was a real big guy on that the mind is a blank slate and that we're born into an environment and the experiences and memories that we have the situations we find ourselves in the thoughts that are programmed into us that's what develops us obviously other people think no that's not the case because two children can be raised in the exact same house can't they say an alcoholic home like i was raised in one of them turns out to be you know very very successful and happy and another child has trouble with alcohol themselves or doesn't have a high level of success or has problems.

1:15And so really, if it's all environment, why is it that two people can come out of an environment completely different? Same time, you can't really argue the fact that some of us are born with certain abilities, certain talents, certain predispositions. And so here's what I'm going to submit to you that I have stumbled onto in my life in raising children and raising business leaders and developing them. You ready? Nurture their nature. The great parents, the great business leaders nurture the nature of this person. Meaning, let's just take about it from a parenting standpoint. Your child was probably born with certain talents, skills, and giftedness.

1:54And as a parent, one of your primary jobs is to help them discover what those things are. I talk about this a lot. In fact, I'm writing a book right now that I think is going to change the world called Let Me Tell You About You. And it's got an awful lot to do with how I've developed my friendships, my children, business people, and telling them about them. And what that really means is to look inside somebody, to observe them, and to be looking for what is their giftedness? What are their tendencies? What are their talents? What are their proclivities? And to tell them about those things. And then once you've identified them, allow the environment you create to nurture that nature.

2:30Too often, we pick one camp or the other. And like most arguments in life, both are right. But almost nobody's ever taken on this philosophy. In fact, I'll bet this is the first time for most of you you've ever heard this before, because I had never heard it before until I started developing it. I looked at my children. I thought, well, one of them is a certain way more than the other one, a little bit, you know, if that's their intellectual level or their ability to process information or their problem solving, test taking skills, right? The other one's maybe a little bit more intense and has a common sense that's just giftedness or their humor, their ability to build relationships with people, their athleticism, whatever it might be.

3:05As a leader, and we'll just use this in the parenting context, but this is true in business, the great leaders have a unique ability to observe people and see their nature, see their unique talents and gifts. I believe everybody was born with two or three or four very unique talents and gifts special just to them. That's their nature. They were born with, and let's just be honest, you look at your own children or friends of yours or yourself, you know, maybe your talent is your gift is your ability to problem solve or think through solutions. Maybe it's your IQ. Maybe it's your humor. Maybe it's your physical beauty, how you listen to people, your nurturing ability, your intensity, your passion, your peace under duress, your equanimity.

3:45There's so many different things. Your engineering skills for some of you. I can't even change a light bulb, right? Your ability to communicate, right? Your ability to make people feel a certain emotion. It could be whatever, sewing, it could be working on a car, it could be building a company, it could be your vision, it could be your marketing ability, your energy, whatever the talent is. One of the keys in life is to figure out as early as you can what those two or three things are that God gave you. And by the way, it's okay if you're even a little bit wrong in the beginning. And maybe you only pick one or two and you've got some hidden ones that will be uncovered later.

4:18But as a father, as a friend, I am constantly trying to look for the greatness in them. Now, as a person of faith and as a Christian, what I'm really looking at for me, the way I think it, is I'm looking for the Christ in them. I'm looking for the gift that was sown into them before they were even born. And for me, I love opening that up. I see, I look at people like they're a gift and I want to have my focus with them in the present. So I think about a present and a gift. And then I think my job is to open up that gift and to find inside of it what the talent and the gift is. And so I do that very regularly.

4:55I'm going to write about it in my book. I'm not covering all of it today. But if you became a friend of mine pretty quickly in the game, I will begin to point out to you what some of those gifts you have are that I see. And sometimes it's a revelation to people. And sometimes it's a confirmation of something they've always believed but was embarrassed to believe about themselves or wasn't sure that it was true. As a father, very early on, I started to look, what are their tendencies? What are their gifts? What are they good at? What are their proclivities? And then to point them out, Bella Boo, you're so fast.

5:23I can't believe how much faster that you run than everybody. And man, socially, everybody likes you because you're so funny, because you're so brilliant and witty. And you've got this ability to make other people feel good about themselves and they feel connected to you. By the way, it's important to begin to nurture that part of her nature. You're a Maximus. You're so brilliant. How you can almost have a photographic memory and you remember things and you ace every test and you're so kind and gentle and your work ethic is beyond belief, man. Like your ability, everyone likes you. Everyone thinks you're kind.

5:57Nobody's got a bad word to say about you. Outwork everybody. And to notice these talents, because when you point out the Christ in somebody, or what we'll just call for today's if you're secular or aren't a believer, if you just point out the giftedness in somebody, you have connected yourself to them in a way that maybe one or two other people in their entire lifetime will. Did you hear what I just said? When you tell a human being, I see this gift in you and they know kind of intuitively it's true about them or they didn't know and then they begin to evaluate it and prove it, you have connected or yoked yourself to them in a way that almost no other human being ever will because you've touched something in them that is so deep, that's so innate, that's so true, that you build a bond and a connection with them, an energy, a vibrational frequency, a soul-type connection that really they'll never have with anybody else, maybe one or two other people.

6:48And you'll be able to impact and affect them in a way that most people never will. So as a father, my main job is to love them and to believe in them, to encourage them, but also to see them and help them uncover what their gift is. what their nature is, and then to nurture it. As a business leader, when I'm evaluating people, it's to find out, oh, it's your ability to problem solve. Oh my gosh, you're the one that's calm under pressure. Oh, you're the one who puts different pieces together of a puzzle like I've never seen before. Or it's your copywriting ability or your communication skills or your ability to deduce information that's complex into something simple.

7:28Oh no, you're the person who galvanizes the team, whatever it is. And I'm looking for those things. And then what I'm going to do is put them in an environment that nurtures that nature. And now people begin to perform at a superhuman level and you have a superhuman, supernatural bond with them. And so I want you to begin to think about that in the relationships you have with your children, if you have children, or if you don't, your boyfriend or girlfriend, your friends, how good are you bet have you been at pointing out to them their giftedness and their greatness you do it in a real way you're not some cornball right but over time you go i told you lately literally how amazing you are at x y and z man i think you should be using that more to help other people or start a business or to do x or y this is why so many human beings don't feel good about themselves and most of that is nurture it was their environment okay because let me just be real with you.

8:25A lot of winning is not just mental, it's environmental. But yet there are people that transcend their environment. But what if you had both? What if you took somebody's nature and you created an environment around them that nurtured it? Now they've got the environment and the talent and the gift. They're almost unstoppable. And so I want you to really begin to think about why is it that most people don't feel great about themselves? Here's what I think. conditioning, patterns, the way people have treated them, their environment, and they don't have a defense against it. The defense against that is to know you.

8:59And to know oneself is to know what your giftedness is, to know what your nature is, to know what your talents are. And so when you don't know those things, or you know them, but you're not utilizing them in your life, then the environment will crush you. And then you begin to lose hope and belief in yourself. In fact, if you're somebody today who's listening to the show or watching it and you've lost some hope and belief in yourself, forget all your external results. Those external results are the environment, right? So if you're just looking at the results, your environment is constantly reinforcing to you.

9:30You're not good enough. You're not that special. You're not going to win. You're not going to be happy. So screw all that. What I want you to do is to look inside you. What are some of your talents and gifts? If you weren't being humble, What are they? Is it your listening skills? Maybe it's just your moral compass, your humor, how much you truly care about people, your intellect, your physical touch, right? What you look like. Maybe it's none of those things. Maybe those aren't your gifts. Maybe your gift is your persistence, your resiliency, your generosity, your faith. Okay? I don't know what it is.

10:05But when you begin to look inside yourself and say, what are the things that I'm naturally good at? And maybe often in life, because somebody is very good at something and it becomes natural to them, meaning it is their nature, they take it for granted and don't think it's special. Did you hear that? Because something is natural for you to do, you just don't think it's special or you think everybody has that, but they don't. And so that's why you need a leader with vision to say, I see that gift. And then I'm going to put you in an environment where I nurture it. Just pointing it out repetitively.

10:39is part of nurturing it. Okay? So I stand that we are supposed to be nurturing people's nature. So if you're sitting here today alone and you're not happy, go inside. What are some of my gifts? I'm going to give myself credit for them. One of my great gifts that I've found in myself is my intentions. You know, I'm not the smartest person in the world. I was not the fastest when I played baseball or the best hitter. You know, I don't know that I can do everything for my friends or as a father, I've made tons of mistakes. One of my gifts is I believe I have very good intent and I stack that. And because I had those intentions, I met a leader, Wayne Dyer, when I was young and my dad did this too, and my mom.

11:23That was a good boy. That was a good person, that I had a good heart, that I deserve to be happy and to win and to help other people. One of those gifts is my intent. Now, for me, I think everybody has good intentions. That's no big deal. The truth is, is at 52 years old, I can tell you for sure that's not true. And so can you. There's lots of people that don't have good intentions, but I do. And that's one of my great gifts. That may seem simple. See, we overlook. We think, well, the gift has to be that I can 360 windmill dunk. Now that's a gift. Or I can run you like Usain Bolt, whatever it might be, right?

11:58Or man, I have the IQ of an Elon Musk or the vision of a Steve Jobs, right? Or the beauty of a Beyonce or the singing ability. Yeah, those are apparent gifts, but what are yours? And for most of us, those gifts remain invisible because nobody shines a light on them for us. But once that light shined, all of a sudden we become the Beyonce of our own lives. We become the LeBron of our own lives. We become the Musk of our own lives. our happiness, our emotions, our productivity, our achievements, the way we can contribute to other people becomes exponentially different. And so my recommendation, I guess, today is to say to you that in your friendships with your children, with your parents, with your friends, whoever that might be, within your business, and even this with strangers, with people that you just meet, or you want to get better at meeting people, look for their giftedness.

12:53In my case, Look for the Christ in them. Look for their talent and point it out and tell them that over and over again. Usually with my very famous or well-known friends, that little group of people, when people say, how do you get so close to so-and-so? Because what most people do is spend all their time telling them how amazing it is the environment is that they've created for their life. The money they've made, the jet they've got, the TV show they have, the concert they filled up, the election they won. and they are really focusing all the time on their nature, their nurture, like kind of what they've developed.

13:28I spend my time looking inside that person and saying, man, your real gift isn't that. It's how genuine and kind you are, or it's how intense you are, or it's how relentless you are. And I bond myself in a way that's very unique with them because I'm looking at that. I'm looking at the internal, not the external when I meet a human being. Now, by the way, once in a while, that external is one of their gifts. They're physically beautiful or unbelievably strong, whatever it might be. That might be. But for the vast majority of people, that gift is on the inside, not the outside. We just as a culture only usually celebrate external gifts.

14:05And that's who becomes famous because they have an ability, maybe like I do, to speak. That's an external obvious thing. Or someone can sing or run fast or they're strong or hit a ball further or putt well. or in a cage, they can pin somebody. We see the external gifts. The great leaders in life, the great parents in life, see the internal gifts. So my recommendation to you today is to become an advocate of both points of view. And I can tell you as someone who's built big businesses, who's built a family, who's built a bunch of friendships, who's a little bit further down the road, what our job is in life is to nurture the nature and the giftedness in other people.

14:41This will become a muscle you build. It won't be very easy at first, but when you just become intentional and aware of it, You begin to see human beings differently. You'll immediately connect with them. You will connect with your Uber driver differently instantly. You will connect with a server in a restaurant. You'll connect with your doctor. You will connect with your friends. You will make new friends. You will develop and build people in your company in a way you've never done that before. You can actually remake your relationship with your significant other. You can fix a relationship with someone that doesn't work.

15:09You can get closer to your mom or dad if it's been distant. And man, can you You become a world-class parent if you begin to do this. Your whole way you look at people now is a gift, and you're in the present with that gift, and your job is to open it up and look inside and find their nature. It could change your life. So my recommendation to you today is to do exactly that. From a scientific perspective, really what nature means is biological or genetic predispositions that impact one's human traits, physical, emotional, or intellectual. Nurture, by contrast, describes the influence of learning and other environmental factors in someone's life.

15:45I like to take advantage of both. I believe we were put here on this earth to help other people, to build other people up, to leverage the gifts and talents of one another to do something great, to advance culture, to advance society. We have flipped that on its back in this culture, where now what we really do with one another is find out the things we don't like. Find out their weaknesses. Go for the jugular. Here's what's wrong with them. Here's what they think that's stupid. Here's their problem. And we actually now look for the gotcha. We look for the negative. We literally have abandoned finding the giftedness.

16:22What type of country, what type of world would we be if we all took advantage of each other's beautiful gifts that God gave us and leveraged those and began to focus a whole lot less on the weaknesses? Because I've got news for you. As a human being, you were born with flaws. I got news for you. So are the other people that you're in your life. So if we're going to focus on that, those are easy to find. And that is a terrible way to go through life. It's a terrible way to build a family. It's a terrible way to build a friendship. It's a terrible way to build a country. It's a terrible world to live in because that's not what we were born to do.

16:56We were born inherently with sins and flaws and mistakes and frailties. but we are also born with three or four great things about us. And life is about taking those three or four things and leveraging them to the benefit of other human beings. You want to find a happy person? They may not have made a lot of money yet. They don't have to have made a lot of money yet. You find a happy person, they have found two or three gifts inside themselves. And then they have gone on a mission and a crusade and a cause to use those gifts in a mission to change other people's lives in some potential way and their own lives.

17:31Say to you again, a happy, blissful person has figured out, oh, these are one or two or three of my gifts. I'm going to now figure out how to use these gifts in the service of other human beings, in my business, in my personal life, in my charitable giving, whatever that might be in my family. Now I'm going to show you a person who's got a great life. They may not have even got all the way to the promised land yet, but what they have is hope, what they have is a future, what they have is a vision and a dream, what they have is a purpose. because now their environment is nurturing that nature. I'm here to help you any way I can.

18:06And so that means follow me on Instagram, follow my social media. I have a friend named Brendan Brouchard has got this app I'm a big believer in called Growth Day. If you go to growthday.com forward slash ed, you can get involved there. You can come see me speak. I have a coaching program in the Arate Syndicate as well. But the bottom line is, if you just want to come here for free every single week, I'm here to serve you. I hope I'm giving you content that's better than the stuff you pay for in the outside world of seminars and events. And I'll give it to you here for free because it's from someone who's actually maybe accomplished a little something in their life.

18:37So God bless you. Nurture your nature and do that for other people. Max out. This is the Ed Milad Show.

18:56You