Michael Strong argues every child has a unique form of genius, not just the exceptional few. He points to Picasso struggling with math and Richard Branson dropping out of high school as proof that school performance doesn't measure worth. Strong offers parents a framework called the bliss diagram to help identify what their child loves, excels at, and can earn money doing.
Hello, it's Michael Strong, founder of expanseonline.co. One of the things that I say that I think confuses, freaks out, or in some cases delegitimizes my perspective in the eyes of many is my notion that every child has a genius. I think on the one hand, many parents and many young people think, "No, I'm just ordinary." I think sadly a lot of parents think their child is just ordinary. And, you know, ordinary, ordinary is fine. OK. Delegitimizes, I think, some people like genius. That's rare. That's Einstein. That's Feynman and so forth. And certainly, that scale of mathematical ability, in the case of Feynman, general deep scientific understanding as in Einstein, that's certainly rare. But I'm fascinated with the uniqueness of every individual and the potential of each individual to be extraordinary. And I'll give you a few examples because our education system has so forced people to believe that they're capable if and only if they're good at school. But I know that that is absolute BS. There have been countless people who were bad at school who had very wonderful, powerful lives. Give you a couple of examples. Pablo Picasso could barely do arithmetic. So, you know, Obviously, he turned out to be very successful, and yet arithmetic was not part of his path. Does that mean he was an idiot? No, it does not mean he was an idiot. Very different example: Richard Branson's a high school dropout, and you could say, "What a loser, a high school dropout." Richard Branson? I don't think so. And these are just a couple of examples. Give you one more interesting example. It's not as prominent. I know I'll talk about two people who were completely unschooled, that is, had zero conventional education, did whatever they wanted as a child throughout what's normally called K-12. One of these young people now— and both these are now in their 60s— one of these in their 60s developed a wine of the month club. You know, it went through various things and eventually became an entrepreneur. Now he's a very successful wine of the month club where he sells high-end wines on a subscription basis. And it's great company and great life. School, completely irrelevant. A very different one was a man, he actually went to Summerhill, the famous British unschooling program, and he ended up, he had a fascination with voice and sound, so he, and he also loved Japan, he ended up going to Japan, and in Japan he became a voiceover actor, and he also became a voice coach. Those seem like very peculiar and interesting unusual paths. But because he was fascinated with voice, those were his things. And he developed a great career in Japan. Now he's come back to the US, and he coaches international executives on how to lose their accent, especially Japanese executives. But I just take these very different examples, famous people like Pablo Picasso and Richard Branson, and people you've never heard of who, without any schooling at all, created their own lives and created interesting, engaged lives. Doing things where they had a particular love or aptitude. And as a consequence, because they were in the habit of creating their own life day by day and taking initiative day by day, they did wonderful things. So when I sit down with the kid and I ask what he loves, what she loves, what do you love? I'm not looking for, I love Algebra 2 class. That's ridiculous. I'm not looking for, you know, I love video games. You know, that's okay, but we want to go beyond that. I want to know What do you really care about? Do you care about creating things? Do you care about making people happy? Do you care about contributing to the world? Do you care about making money? What do you care about? And then based on your whole range of who you are and what you care about, let's tease out— again, going back to the bliss diagram— how we can combine what you love, what you're good at, how you can make money, what the world needs. And we coach each child's distinctive being. If you're— if you have problems with the word genius, too heavy, yada yada, I don't care. Let's work with your child's unique being. What is unique about your child that he or she can manifest in the world? Let's work with that being and help them become the fabulous oak tree that that tiny acorn was intended to be. Thank you. I'm Michael Strong with expanseonline.com.
