4 Challenges Modern Families Face Today | Scott Donnell & Jimmie Jayes

This is Innovate and Overcome. I'm Richard Canfield and today we're diving into the real stories behind extraordinary success right here on NOW Media Television. Today on Innovate and Overcome, we have a special treat. I'm excited to introduce my friends Scott Donnell and Jimmy Jays. Scott is the Wall Street Journal best selling author of the Value Creation Kid, the healthy struggles your children need to succeed and partnered with Jimmy. Together they are creating the next generation of legacy builders. They have interviewed the wealthiest families about creating legacy and how they pass down a generational mindset. They now bring that incredible knowledge to the inspired entrepreneurs that they serve so they can implement what's been proven to work. Today we'll unpack how you can teach these strategies to raise independent kids that can tackle the world in any scenario. Scott, Jimmy, welcome to the program.

Good to be here.

Thanks a lot.

Now I've had the pleasure of knowing you guys for a while. Jimmy, of course we've been friends for a very long time. In fact, I, I picked up my family and moved to your community because of how amazing you, you share with me. It was to escape some of aspects of Canadian Winter to some degree. And you know, I, I absolutely love how you've been very focused and dedicated on teaching and helping kids have the right type of environment for which they can grow and thrive. That's something that's, we've always connected on and in fact, before I even became a father, you recommended a book to me called the First national bank of dad. And so I bought this book before I even my first son was born. And you know, coincidentally, here I have a copy of Value Creation Kit in my hand as well. For those of you who want to learn how to do some of the strategies we're going to talk about today, these are great books to start developing the right mindset. Now what I'm really curious about is what prompted you guys to even begin doing this? What is the, what is the need of the busy entrepreneur today to have these types of conversations and strategies at the family level to start to have the enjoyment and the legacy they want to see built, actually built.

Well, Jimmy, you want to go first or me?

Well, I'll tell you what it was. For me, it was a moment where I was in a swimming pool with my son and completely not present. My mind is racing. I'm thinking about all of the calls that are happening on my phone, all of the people that I'm supposed to be getting back to and, and I just had this moment where I remembered starting Entrepreneurship before I even had kids. And somebody asked me, like, if time and money weren't a thing, what would you do? And my answer was very clear. It was, I think I'd just be a really great dad. And it wasn't about a car and it wasn't about money. And here I am, supposed to be at, like, the top of the business world, had just spoken on stage in front of 17,000 people. And now I'm back home and I'm supposed to be spending time with my son. And instead I've got anxiety. And I just. I had this moment where we're ready to go into the pool and I gotta close the locker door with my phone in it. And I close the door, my phone is still in my hand, and I'm like, oh, I can't bring my phone with me. And I proceeded to spend the next 30 minutes with my son, but not with my son at all. Because I was thinking about all this business stuff. I'm like, what's the point? The whole reason that I built this thing was to be able to not have a job and to be a present father. And here I am, and I spend less time with my kids than what most employees do. So that was really kind of the catalyst for me to say, man, I need to do something different. And that kind of started a journey for me over the course of a number of years of trying to learn and figure out what do I do to be able to be a present dad.

I love that. And those moments of awareness are so impactful. And now, Scott, you've had the chance to connect with a lot of families talking about these things, and you yourself have four kids. And so what was it that really connected with you on why there was a need for this? You recognize that there's information that's just not getting out there and people aren't implementing. So how did this come up for you?

Yeah, so my whole career has been helping families and kids. So about 20 years now, we've helped around 10 million families. Nine companies. We're starting our, our 10th now, Fig and Eagle, to teach this the, the, the strategies of the best families in the world. But one of the, the transformative moments in my life, I get a call from a friend, and his two kids are 23 and 25. And he's in tears. And I'm like, oh, boy, What? Who died? What happened? Oh, my gosh. And this is like, you know, nine o' clock at night. And he's like, man, what is going on? My 25 year old is completely checked out, running up the credit card, lazy, no spiraling in life, blaming us and just, I, I, it kills me to watch this. My 23 year old, completely turned away from all of our family values and faith. And those are my two kids and I am a wreck. He said, what did I do wrong? We did everything that we thought we were supposed to do. We got our kids into the best schools, we moved to the right zip code, we were in church on Sundays. We got them into the sports, they were in the top everything. And he had outsourced his parenting for decades, not realizing it. And you know, I won't tell you all the, the things I told him. We'll probably get into that during this, this episode, this recording. But I, I will tell you this. So many families, they think that they're doing what they can and they think they're doing the right things, but they're, they're outsourcing to everybody else. And that was the moment I realized that transformation doesn't happen on the field or at a desk. It happens around the dinner table. It happens at home. You, you are not the one that gets to dictate quality time versus quantity time with your kids. The Legos you do with a five year old might be a core memory for the rest of their life. The random conversation, coming home from an errand might be the transformation moment. There's just time, right? And if you want an incredible legacy, which we have our own definition of legacy, which we're going to have to get into, but if you want an incredible legacy, spend twice as much time with your family and half as much money. It boils down to that. That's how you give them roots and wings to soar and create an incredible legacy. So that's really one of the pivotal moments where I was like, I got to spend the rest of my life doing this and teaching this and learning from the best in the world. So that's how we got here.

Amazing. Well, we're going to unpack that quite a bit throughout the episode. Now, I'm curious. As you know, you've each kind of told an impactful story, but you've been surrounded by and helping entrepreneurs. You're both coaches, you both love coaching, you love what that's all about. You recognize its value. When you think about the people that you're helping now, and you've had a lot of people go through your program learning how to take more of that time to have better dinner table conversations and so forth, what are you recognizing and seeing in Them as far as the challenges and struggles that they're dealing with on a day to day basis in raising kids today.

A ton. See, nobody's ever raised a kid in 2025. Nobody's ever done this before. I mean, there's been parenting forever. But if you look at the forces that are coming at our kids from the world and from culture, that is, that is exponentially increasing right now, right, it is getting wild and parents are getting blindsided left and right. And so no one's been busy. I mean, everyone's been busy as parents forever, especially with young kids or teens. Like everyone's been busy with no margin and they're tired. But it is getting wild nowadays. You cannot turn off the phone. Work follows you home. You think you're doing all this for your family, but you never ask them. You never got their permission to go miss all this stuff and do all the work. Be careful. Because I think what a lot of entrepreneurs trick themselves into is that they're doing it for their family when they're really doing it for themselves. They're doing it for their own success, their own significance, their own security, their own accolades and achievement, unfortunately, at the sacrifice of the family. Now, that doesn't mean you don't drive. That doesn't mean that you don't do your work in such a way that impacts and serves millions and millions of other people. In fact, if you do it the right way, you can have more impact and more abundance than ever before. We just trick ourselves and we think that pedaling harder on the bike gets us what, everything we want. But we just end up being exhausted all the time. And you can't breathe life into your spouse or your kids if you're always out of breath.

Yeah, I love that. Now you talk about these four forces and we're going to unpack some of those as we go through our conversation today. But maybe, Jimmy, you can just give us a lay of the land. What are the forces that we're talking about that are really impacting people in the parenting realm and the current 2025 we find ourselves in.

Yeah, there's these four forces that, like Scott said, just haven't existed before. And so sometimes as a parent, if you have younger kids, you look at, you know, my mom comes over, somebody from another generation, and, you know, they're kind of looking at how things are going and what they don't realize is the life is really, really different. So one of those forces is what we call the dopamine distortion, which I'll talk about in just one second. Another one of them is the anti family focus that is just being bombarded down on our families all of the time. One of them is instant gratification. We live in an instant gratification world more and more and more and more. And if you look at all of the metrics about what makes for a successful kid, delayed gratification is one of those. And yet we're pushing this instant gratification on them all, all of the time. And one of them is the AI revolution that is happening right now. And before we jump into any of these, I want to be really clear, we're really excited for the future. Like, we think that kids are going to have opportunities that have never been seen before. The stuff that you're going to be able to do, the stuff that you can presently do, is crazy, right? We have kids that instead of selling a picture that they drew, they're turning that picture into stickers and selling it on repeat on a website. Like, you couldn't do that a couple of years ago.

Rachel, I made a SaaS product with my friend Lior last week in 40 minutes, using about 30,000 lines of code that was built by AI right before us with prompts. An entire SaaS in 40 minutes. That would have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in six months. Right? The world is changing and it can be in our favor if we understand the priorities.

We're just getting started. Stick around. More vision, more resilience, and more innovation. Coming up next on Innovate and Overcome. Welcome back. I'm Richard Canfield, and this is Innovate and Overcome on NOW Media Television. Let's jump right back in.

The overall sentiment is that this is great news for our children. However, these four forces at work right now are training our children for the opposite of what they need to learn in order to be able to succeed. So I'll give you an example. One of them is this dopamine distortion that we're talking about. And so you asked, what are parents dealing with? Well, anybody with kids might have had a situation before where you're asking your child to do something over and over and over, and you're like, are you, are you even in the house right now? And you look over and they're on their iPad and they're glued to it, and it's like they can't hear you. And that's not something that happened, you know, years and years ago. But I think the part that the parents miss is this dopamine distortion. It's not by mistake. It's not an accident. All of the people that used to work in Vegas where it was their job to get you to sit at the table for one more minute, one more minute, one more minute at the slot machine. They all work in app development now. And so there's a show called Cocomelon and kids used to be that it was about an 8 second clip before it would jump to the next thing. Cocomelon jumps every second to second and a half. It's just jump cut, jump cut, jump cut, jump cut. And it's, it's activating this dopamine in our kids brains. And it's borderline sinister that they will literally take kids, they'll put them into a room, they've got two giant TV screens. One of them is playing Cocomelon, the second one is playing like here's a giraffe, here's somebody pouring a hot coffee, here's a mountain. Every time kids break contact from Cocomelon for a second, they make a note about that and then they change that 1.5 second jump cut with gamma colors.

High variance of color. Like for neon to like bouncing, bouncing, bouncing to start triggering chemicals in your brain that are the same chemicals that get released during cocaine or, or heroin or, or high level drugs or at a slot machine. Like the goal is to addict you.

So we're like what, what do I need to do? What am I, how am I failing as a parent? What's wrong with me? What's wrong with my child? What you don't realize is that it's painful. Built by design. And that's just one show. Every app on your iPad probably has five to 10 developers on it. If you got 50 apps on your iPad, that's 500 people whose full time job it is to get your child to not turn off that one app. So it's this battle that we're fighting constantly. If you have older kids and they're playing video games and they come off like they're crazy, well it's because they just got put into fight or flight. They're fighting in a little literal war where they're playing a game where they're running away from dinosaurs as one of the ones my son was doing. And they've got all this emotion, all this fight or flight, like chemicals going into the body and nowhere for it to physically go. And so that's the tip of the iceberg of, of the dopamine distortion that's happening right now. And that's the result of it is we have anxious kids and as parents it's harder than ever to be able to get their attention.

Well, it's, it's interesting because I mean, these, I don't think anyone watching this. They've probably never looked at it or thought about it in this context because we're too busy running our own life. We're not looking at these types of statistics. I mean, everyone watching has been in or around a casino at some point. You know, what the sounds are like, what the screens look like, and just take that image in your mind, the feeling of walking through that environment and now imagine and put your child in that environment. But it's what's in their hands right now. And I think that's a really good visual. And so I think about this and as you identify it, and I also recognize that, you know, a question that I've asked the older generation before, I always found myself whenever I walked into a room, who's the oldest person in the room I can go talk to? I always felt more connected to those individuals for some reason. And I've recently asked, you know, as an example, my parents, my in laws parents, and a number of other individuals who raised kids in the 80s and the late 70s and so on. And I asked them the question, what, what was the biggest challenge that you had raising kids? What was the biggest struggle? What was the biggest thing you were worried about? And the reality is they don't have anything. The only thing that I've heard, really that stood out was the Cold War. So we grew up, I grew up in a Cold War environment and that was the biggest threat to be concerned about really for any parent. The other thing was just like, how do we make sure we pay our bills? And beyond that, there was nothing else. You were running free. You know, I'm sure there was multiple times where I probably could have easily died by doing silly things as a kid, relatively unsupervised. And it's nothing, no knock against, you know, my parents or anything. They did an amazing job and I loved my childhood because of it. And now contrast is today trying to explain to them what are the challenges that we're facing raising children? What are the things that we're actually concerned about? The conversations that my wife and I have about the direction of the world, the things that they're trying to teach children that maybe don't line up with our value system. And we have no way of separating ourselves from it unless we're separating them from it almost entirely, which is why we're seeing like homeschooling is on a huge Rise in North America, et cetera. So, you know, I'm curious, these conversations that you've had with. With folks in older. Older demographics.

Yeah, I can share one shift that I'm seeing. Parenting. Some. Something shifted a decade or two ago from parenting as formational and educational to parenting as entertainment. You think your job as a parent now is to entertain your kids throughout the day, making sure they have the toys or the games or that they, you know, I have to go do the laundry or cook something or grab something or I have a work call on Zoom in the home office. So I'm going to make sure that they're entertained while I'm doing that. And kids need to be bored. In fact, it's the greatest detox ever is for a child to actually play. They're not playing when they're addicted to a screen or you're giving them something to numb them. They're actually, when they're playing and they're finding out their own fun to make. They're actually. They're triggering a different side of their brain than a dopamine oxytocin hit. They're triggering the creative side. They're triggering the character formation side. They're triggering this curiosity about the world that actually serves kids way better than anything else as they form and they grow. And so your job as a parent isn't to just keep your kids entertained, because that's what a mark of good parents is that they think is, well, my kids, I need to have them make sure they have a fun childhood. So we're going to go from, you know, screen to sport, to travel to trip to extracurricular, and just fill their schedule full of stuff until they pass out at bedtime. That's. That's an entertainment parenting versus a formational education parenting. And so I think that's one of the biggest shifts I've seen. And that's why so many moms, for instance, feel like their identity is to make sure that they're fixing any problem for their kid, solving all the issues for their kids, paying for everything and providing for everything for their kids, because they, God forbid their kids ever have to struggle and go through something to learn on their own. But that's the only way we grow, is to struggle and learn something on our own. And so there's just been a huge shift in parenting. And that, you know, honestly, what that does is it isolates people, right? The dopamine distortion force we're talking about, the byproduct is isolation. It's not connection. It's Isolation. We are segmenting people. We are segmenting. Segmenting our kids to a giant list of extracurriculars and a giant list of, you know, get them on a screen, get them. Get them occupied, get them entertained. You're isolating children from true relationship and true connection with you. Which is why we created our entire transformation series called Connection. That's the whole point of our Fig and Eagle workshop titled Connection. Let's connect with our children on use technology for education, not entertainment. How are we going to do dinners together? How are we going to do travel and routines and traditions? And how do we move through conflict? How do we understand love, languages and emotional bank accounts like that is what we focus on with the families learning from the best in the world so that we can connect with the next generation instead of isolate.

Well, that makes me think of, again, the example of connecting with the ground. We talk about a place. Part of your platform is roots and wings and developing those strong roots. And so, Jimmy, maybe before we go to our next break, talk us a little bit about what it means to develop roots within the family structure as part of the foundation that you're building to create the legacy you really want.

Yeah. So roots, I think you talked a second ago about just like people's values going away and people doing more homeschooling. And really, that is another one of the forces which is this anti family forces, and this is why we need roots inside of the home is. I believe that it is just as intentional as what Cocoa Melon is doing with. With dopamine. I think that same force is at play around the anti family and about tearing apart the family unit. And what it's causing is kids that are rudderless. And I think this is. Scott, you're great at talking a little bit over this. Just give us a second about kind of this anti family focus.

Well, culture is fighting us today, saying that kids are an expense. Kids are a waste of resources, don't have kids, don't get married, wait longer. Also, they want to rip apart a kid's identity. There's only. There's a. There's infinite identities. In fact, there's infinite genders. What they're trying to do is rip you away from your family and your family's values and to try to give you a new value and a new identity out in the world. And so much of what we see online and through marketing and through the pressures of culture is this, hey, Richard, you're not good enough on your own. You're not complete on your own. You're not loved, you're not enough. Go buy this and you'll get fixed. Go wear this makeup. Go look this way. Go do this thing. Hit the next milestone. Be a success. You have to hustle and drive and kill yourself for decades if you actually want to be a success. See, these are anti family forces that rip children away and they take away their rudder. And unless you give them an anchor in the family's identity and the values, right, giving them roots like Jimmy was talking about, then they're going to go get an identity. The world is hungry to give them another identity that's going to keep them miserable and anxious and screw in there with their mental health for the rest of their life.

Well, I'm excited about unpacking some of the solutions you guys have developed around this so that we can get families on the right track, so we can get the kids. Kids on the right track, so that we can make real impactful change. We're going to dig into that as soon as we come back after this important break. We're just getting started. Stick around. More vision, more resilience, and more innovation. Coming up next on Innovate and Overcome. Welcome back. I'm Richard Canfield, and this is Innovate and Overcome on NOW Media Television. Let's jump right back in. We are back with Scott Donnell and Jimmy Jays having an incredible conversation about changing the way that we see that nucleus of the family creating a proper foundation for us to really build something that you truly want with your family to have. Now, Jimmy, walk us through. How do we go about setting that foundation in place?

Yeah. So the opposite of the two forces that we talked about, one of them is isolation and one of them is rudderlessness. And really what we want is the flip side of those, right? We want connection inside of the home and we want to really have guiding core values. That is what drives every decision that our kids make. And this is actually something that doesn't take a bunch of extra work. It's actually something that makes your life easier as a parent. You see, kids really think in story. And so if you ever find yourself repeating the same thing over and over and over and over, do this, do this, do this, do this. And you're telling them the same thing over and over and over. The reason that that's happening is because they're forgetting. And the reason they're forgetting is because you're telling instead of storytelling. We need stories. Kids crave stories. It's how our brains are hardwired to work. And you want to have stories Inside of the home that. That are intentionally crafted, right? If. If the world is out there and they've got two screens and one of them's doing jump cuts to make sure that our, like, that's the level of intentionality that they have to get our kids attention. We gotta have a level of intentionality around the stories that we tell. So we're not just telling random stories. We're going through and saying, what are some of the values that we have as a family? And you gotta be able to tell what we call the best stories. And the best stories are stories. It's an acronym. B stands for be on the court, not in the stands. You're not telling a story by describing it like something that you like a game that you watched. You're telling it like you were on the court. What were the senses? Right? What. What was it like to be on the court? It's a very different experience. E is for emotions are felt. And so you gotta be able to put emotions into stories. And one of the ways you do that is by using senses. If you talk about what it felt like, what it sounded like, what it smelled like, that is a way to really bring the story, like, get present around the story. The next one is S for best. So B is be on the court. E is for emotions are felt. S is for senses. How are we using those. Those different senses? And we want to start near the end, so. So the S is for start near the end, not a bunch of preamble. How can you start as close to the climax of the story as possible? And then T is for transformation, right? We want to transform, not inform. So what is the value? And if you tell a story this way to your kids and you wrap it up with a value, that's what they're going to remember. Kids aren't going to remember a lesson about honesty. They are going to remember the story about the time that grandpa walked a mile to return $20 because it was the right thing to do. If you're tired of reminding your kids, stop telling them stuff and start telling stories.

I love that. That's very impactful. And I mean, that's a very actionable item that people can do. And I'm sure listeners are thinking about some of those stories as they hear that out loud. What are you seeing happen? As you know, you have entrepreneurs coming through your program and they're learning these skill sets and they're starting to implement them in an incremental way. What's some of the feedback that you're getting? From the experiences they're having around dinner table conversations and beginning to establish this.

Type of storytelling, I see immediate transformation. We say all the time legacy, it's a recipe, not a lottery ticket. And our definition of legacy might be different than what the listeners are thinking. Legacy is not dying with as much millions of dollars of net worth as humanly possible. Thinking that that fixes future generations, right? We believe in heritage over inheritance. And that's really the roots that we're talking about. Legacy is where your kids blow by you in all the ways that we actually care about. Like, let's get honest here, I do not care if my kids get millions of dollars from me when I die. I care that they're raised with our values, our identity as a family, our beliefs, their trust in the Lord, their heart for others, their impact in the world, their relationship, intimacy with their own family. I want my kids to blow by me in all those ways, okay? That means so much more to me than dying with a big Wells Fargo checking account, okay? So that's really the goal here, is we have to give them these roots. You know, if you give kids wings, which I think we'll talk about in a minute, wings are critical courage and capabilities and, you know, mindsets and skills to succeed in this coming world. That's the wing side of this. But if you give them just wings and no roots, then you've raised a bunch of vultures who are going to extract for a living. They're going to compete for a living. They're going to be mining for value without connecting to you, right? They're going to win. But you'll never see your grandkids. You're not going to get FaceTimes from them when things good or bad happen. They're not going to come home for dinners on Sundays or holidays or weekends or travel trips. You will be a byproduct thought in their life. This is why roots are so critical, right? You give them an anchor with which to be guided when the storms come in their life. You create anti fragile children. Well, you got to have an identity there so that the antifragileness succeeds in their life without them forgetting all about you, you know? But then if you do wing, if you do roots like we just talked about, but no wings to soar. That's where you get Cheeto eating, video game playing, basement kids, okay? I see this all the time. You know, I'm in the. I've been online, we've had.

They want to stay. They want to stay home and not go anywhere. Because they don't want to soar out, out in the world. And they're, they're so connected to the home environment that they're not willing to thrive outside of it.

Right? And then you boot them out and they become entitled victims. The first time a storm comes, they blame you, the government, their employer, whatever it would be. And they check out. They become lazy and anxious for the rest of their life. That's what happens if you give roots but no wings. Sure, they may carry on your heart and your identity as a family, but they don't have any tool sets to succeed. And then there's resentment, Right? In fact, I see this all the time with successful entrepreneurs. I've been on social media for a few years now. We've had hundreds of millions of views on our content. I gave it all up, ironically, for eight months. But I see all these influencers out there saying, I made my kids a millionaire when they were 14 years old. I set up this policy, I got them this duplex, I bought them this thing, I set them up for life.

Look at this.

Well, that's a problem because now they're going to be netting 10 or 20 grand a month when they're 22, 23 years old. Checked out like, just like living for themselves, like being lazy, careful. I would much rather you did it with them. Right. If you do more with your kids than for them, then they're going to learn it themselves and exponentially blow by you. Right? So get the duplex with them, get the policy with them, have them upkeep and rebuild and remodel and understand the systems and the pol. Like get them to do more on their own and you can guide them and coach them. Now they'll be, they'll be 23 years old on their fifth property, they'll be on their fourth policy. They'll be thinking through creating value for other people for a living instead of depending on you and the value you created for them. That's the difference.

In other words, are you building the LEGO set for them or are you letting them build the LEGO set? Yeah, And I think and watching it.

Fail and watching it crumble three or four times. So they learn, right?

Yeah. The distinction I'm hearing here. And maybe Jimmy, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but you know, the roots is really the belief structure, the value structure. That's the, that's the glue in mindset that you're establishing. And the wings has more to do with the skill set and the ability. So it's, it's here's what we need to know and believe and understand and recognize, and it's in its importance. And then here's how we go about showing that and implementing it out in the real world. Is that a good way of looking at the distinction between roots and wings?

Yeah, I love that. And what I would add to it is sometimes, sometimes entrepreneurs have the problem of not giving their kids wings, which sounds crazy, but it's because as entrepreneurs, we're really great problem solvers and we jump in and solve every problem. And so our kids don't get an opportunity to solve any problems ever, because we're always jumping in and solving it for them. So when you're talking about, you know, we just bought you a duplex, or we bought this policy for you, or we made you a millionaire. Have you ever heard the term scared money? Scared money is when you've got money, but you don't know how you got it and you don't know how to get it again. And it doesn't matter how much money you have, if you don't have confidence that you can go and rebuild it, then you don't even enjoy it. Every time you spend it, it's like gut wrenching to you because you don't know when you're going to be able to make it again. And if you just take a look at people that become a celebrity for the first time and they come into a whole bunch of money, their life doesn't get better. Their life usually goes off the rails and gets worse.

Pro athletes.

Pro athletes, another example of this. So trust fund children, right? So if you could give your kids all of your money, or you could give them all of your knowledge, or you could give them all of your experiences, you had to choose one for everybody listening. What, what would you want to pass down? And if you give them money without the knowledge and the experiences, sometimes they're worse off. But if you can give them the experiences or if you can give them the knowledge now, they can go and they can rebuild. They can. They can create value on their own without needing it to be attached to you. So I think a lot of times it gets painted as like the kid in the basement eating Cheetos. And they're lazy. Sometimes they're not lazy, sometimes they're terrified because they haven't had a chance to be able to solve a problem ever in their life. And growing up, I used to play little video games and you'd have these little tiny quests that you would do that you would get XP for and it would. It would make your character stronger. And then when you got to a boss fight, a boss battle, you had a character that could handle that fight, but if you skipped all those little battles, that then you didn't have any XP and you couldn't actually win anything. And parents, a lot of times with great intentions, especially entrepreneurial parents, we jump in and we solve every single problem. Oh, my kid's not getting enough playing time. In sports, they're the best player. Let me jump in and solve that for them.

We're just getting started. Stick around. More vision, more resilience, and more innovation. Coming up next on Innovate and Overcome. Welcome back. I'm Richard Canfield, and this is Innovate and Overcome on NOW Media Television. Let's jump right back in.

Oh, you're not getting the grade that you want. Let me jump in and solve that for you. Oh, and we're jumping in and solving, solving, solving, solving, solving. And what our kids are learning is that they don't need to solve any problems, and they. They're massively lacking grit. They're massively lacking resilience. They don't have what we call antifragile. And there's a really big difference between resilience and antifragile. So this is one of the things we talk about when we talk about courage, is if you take a look at the cow versus the buffalo, the cow runs away from storms. The buffalo drives heads first into storms, and because it's going into the storm, it goes through it way faster. Cows are slower, and they're going with the storm, so they're actually in the storm for way longer. So we want resilient kids that are like buffalo that know how to go head first into the storm. But it's not just that, because there's something called antifragile, and that's not the same as resilient. Antifragile means you actually get stronger when challenges come up, when there's challenges, when there's chaos. And the human immune system is a great example of this, right? When the immune system gets challenges, when it gets faced with chaos, it actually gets stronger. That's what we want our kids to be like. We want our kids to be able to get stronger when stuff happens. And an eagle is a great example of that. Just like the buffalo, they fly headfirst into the storm. But instead of just being resilient and gritting their way through the storm, the eagle uses the. The winds of the storm to actually gain altitude, and it flies above the storm. Where the storm can't touch it. And that is such a great analogy for what it means to be antifragile and what we want for our kids. And there's a. That might seem like, you know, cute story, Jimmy, but there is an example of a coach that we, all of us online know, Dan Sullivan. Scott, I'd love it if you just quickly tell the Dan Sullivan antifragile story of. Of changing the room in like a couple of seconds.

Yeah. Well, this is our entire courage series at Fig and Eagle now is we teach antifragile. So one of the greatest examples of that for me was with Dan Sullivan. He's one of the greatest entrepreneurial coaches on the planet. And it's 2020. It's March 20, 2020. So Covid hit a week before, okay, the world shut down. Things are in chaos. Entrepreneurs are sprinting like crazy. They're anxious. It's nuts. You know, half of us had businesses that depended on being out there, and the other half of us had no idea how we were going to make ends meet. And it was just wild chaos. And we get on a call with Dan Sullivan. These are some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the free zone program. There's about a hundred of us on the call, and it's. You could hear a pin drop. You could literally feel the people's anxiety. And Dan gets on and he looks at all of us right in the eye and he goes, gold rush. This is the new gold rush. This is one of the greatest opportunities I've ever seen in 50 years of coaching entrepreneurs. If you get above this storm and you start to understand where it's headed, you get your head on straight, you're going to see more opportunities than ever before. You're going to see more innovations than ever before. You are going to ride this storm and it's going to be unbelievable for your future. 10x. Let's go. Gold rush. And it just shifted the entire room. And then from then on out, everyone started to see this as an opportunity to grow, to learn, to innovate, to tweak. And many of us found our way out of it. Looking back, you know, a couple years after, all of us can point to that very moment as the thing that transformed our entire business and life for 10x growth. And that's an example of anti fragile thinking. Right. And so we have this piece in our courage series where we talk about being a coach for your children instead of a caretaker. Coach versus caretaker. And so many families don't realize that they're just caretaking their, their kids all the way through their teenage years. They're bubble wrapping them, they're paying for everything, they're fixing everything, they're dialing it in for their children. And you know, they don't realize the failure to launch syndrome that's coming. And instead of that, why don't we move much, much, much earlier to a coach mentality with our kids, which is high standards, but also high edification and training and encouragement and support for them to grow into anti fragile humans. So that's the thinking here of wings, right? You want to give them power, you know, the, the greatest force we. I know we're talking about the four forces today in this episode. One of the biggest forces that we created, our courage series four to attack it. Instant gratification, right? Instead of delayed gratification, it's the world is forcing our children to be thinking in terms of instant gratification. Lyft and Uber to go anywhere you want. So now kids don't even want a car at 16 or a driver's license. You have doordash, Ubereats, right? I can get something at the click of a button right now. Food to my house in 20 minutes.

Amazon yesterday.

Yeah, yeah, Amazon yesterday. Amazon go. Amazon Prime. Like one click. They have the patent for one click. And this is training an entire generation to believe that everything is immediate. Now instead of being a great investor, requires long term delayed gratification. Being a great spouse, husband, wife, requires lifelong delayed gratification, being a great friend. Like all these things, it's critical for us to teach delayed instead of instant. And that's where courage comes from.

Well, what I'm interested in, in the time that we have remaining, I'd really like to think about some of the opportunities that you guys see. And so you talked about the indiscretification that the things that we have now, AI is very important. It's popular, it's all over the place. Kids are growing up now in an AI world which was never possible before. It's like kids growing up before cell phones, Kids growing up on the Internet was launched. So, so we've seen milestones like this, but not like this. So if you're. What's going to happen if kids don't get taught some of these fundamentals and they have access to AI versus what do you see as the most powerful potential of the kids who develop roots, they develop wings, the capability and now they have the tools and technology to be able to do something grand with it. So I really love to hear from each of you around, what are the opportunities in 2025 and beyond for parents raising kids with roots and wings?

So I think there's some, there's some tactical answers to that question about, you know, what are ways that kids can use AI to make money?

Right?

There's some, there's some, there's something there. I think the heart of the question though is what are the beliefs and the skill sets that my children need to have in order to be able to survive in a completely different world. It used to be that there was this small percentage of people that thought like entrepreneurs and they were the crazy ones and everyone else did the safe, secure thing. And taking that mindset into the future is a really, really scary thing if you know what happens next. It's not just that there's self driving cars and truck drivers are going not to have jobs anymore, like surgeries will be done by machines. The number of things that AI and automation that is going to take over is absolutely mind numbing. And if you have a child that is thinking through and we're teaching them through like the standard educating system, just do things like we did it back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, they're in a lot of trouble because information, it used to take 100 years for information to double. That's how long it took. And when you think about information doubling meant that once there was a printing press, all of a sudden now it took 25 years for information to double. And then early 2000s we were at a point where every year it was doubling. Which means if you're going to school for a five year program at year number three of it, stuff that you learned in year one is now obsolete. And we're just now finding people that have been 10 years out of they went to school 10 years ago and or they graduated 10 years ago and they're realizing that their degree isn't actually helping them in the workplace, but they're saddled with all of this debt from university and they can't use it to make money. And so as a parent, the way that you used to deal with that was being like, oh, I need to make sure I get my kids in the best school or I need to make sure that they're going to school to be an engineer instead of this, or they need to go to school to learn how to code. And it's not that anymore, it's not what is the industry to send my child into because we can't predict what it's going to be. And the reason why Is because as of today, with AI, every 13 hours, information is doubling. So there's no way for me to know five years out from now, what job should you be getting in five years from today. You can't know. So instead of thinking that way, we have to completely evolve our thinking to say, what are the skills that our children need to know that are not work related? They need to know how to learn something new. They need to learn how to be able to fail and have it be okay if they don't learn. And a lot of these are skills of entrepreneurs. So we have to find ways to be able to teach this to our children. And the good news is that when you're looking for it, it's not tough to do every day. There's a daily lesson in the things that they're going through if we'll just allow it. When they're going through the opportunity to they're at home, instead of giving them chores to do and we just pay them no matter what, why not give your kids gigs? Why not have a whole menu of things that they can do? My daughter the other day, she's 10 years old, went door to door and is cleaning out some garbage bins for people for 20 bucks. And we're going to a baseball game today. And she made money for the baseball game because guess what, I don't pay for snacks at the baseball game. You pay for your own snacks. And so because of that, she's learning to go and create value in different places. And that's really what it comes down to is how can we instill some of these characteristics into our children so that they, when change happens, when they're not falling over. Because when you take all of these forces that are happening, it's creating kids that are fragile. It's creating kids that don't want anything to do with change, that are isolated, that want somebody else to solve their problems. And if you put that child 20 years into the future, into the world that's coming, they're going to be in a lot of hurt. And so it's really just about thinking about what are the skill sets that I want to, to give my children.

Amazing. Scott, final minute before we close, what do you want people and parents to know about how they can have an amazing future with their kids?

Yeah, I think Jimmy nailed it. In so much of this thinking of let's prepare our kids for the road, not the road for our kids. Right. These skill sets that we're talking about, problem solving, learning how to learn critical thinking, asking good questions, good communication skills. That's the thinking of the future. Not get the good grades to go to the good college to get the good job to go to retirement. That's our goal is let's give our kids strong roots, our family, our identity, our values, our beliefs and let's give them wings to soar in an ever changing world. And so the degree that we can help that at Fig and Eagle, we want to help families do that all over the world. So you'll be great. Don't worry. The future's bright. Just know where this the winds are going.

Amazing. Thank you so much gentlemen for what you're doing, helping families create a real legacy that actually matters. We'll be there when they're gone with the people they love most, their kids and their grandkids. Appreciate you both. And next week, stay tuned. We continue to unpack the amazing challenges being overcome by the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.