Michael Strong, founder of ExpanseOnline.co, helps young people find their talent by asking what they love, what they're good at, what the world will pay for, and what the world needs. He focuses on building communication skills, collaboration, and problem-solving before worrying about academics or college.
What do you love? I want to know when I talk to a young person, what do you love? What do you love? What are you good at? What will the world pay for? And what does the world need? The intersection of those four circles, concepts, give us a path to a great life. I want to help coach young people to an amazing life. And if we can figure out, if we can work with young person, help them discover their creativity, their intellect, their entrepreneurial energy, their interpersonal skills, so that they can grow and spend the next several thousand hours of their life becoming truly amazing at something they love, they will have beautiful opportunities as an adult. So when I begin working with somebody, I regard myself as a talent development coach. I want to look for young talent and help that young talent become the most amazing version of itself it can be. We do need world-class communication skills. Pretty much everyone benefits from a very high level reading, writing, thinking, listening skills. And so we develop those. We also need world-class interpersonal skills. You need to know how to work with people in a group, how to collaborate, how to bring people in, how to lead without dominating. The whole set of interpersonal skills, those are pretty much universal as well. We need to be able to analyze problems rationally, although different people, that role, that plays a different role in different lives in different ways. So before I even begin to talk about the academic portion of our program, which is designed in order to help each child optimize his or her skills to become amazing— before we even get into that, first I want to know how you're amazing, how we might be able to help you become even more amazing. Then we want to monomaniacally focus on helping you crank up your capacity as an amazing human being. We'll help you get into high school, college, the workplace in various ways, but I see those as details after we figure out how you have the potential to be amazing, what we can do to help you get there. I'm Michael Strong, founder of the expan— of expanseonline.co, a talent development accelerator for teens and children, say 10 and up. Thanks, bye-bye.
