Better Than 100%

The irreplaceable opportunity cost of pushing for perfect.

“What is Zac up to?”

Kim and I were in our bedroom. Sandy was napping. Zac was supposed to be, too, or at least resting. But we could hear rummaging, self-narration, and the occasional bang and tear from the living room.

I found him with an elaborate contraption of ropes tied to sticks tied to egg cartons tied to bottles, plus a porcupine quill. “It’s to catch animals,” he demonstrated.

Zac’s constantly up to stuff like this. Hatching plans, begging me to “ask the robot” how far a leopard can jump or which fish lives deepest in the ocean. Every book he wants to read is about animal facts. He asks every Uber driver what their favorite wild animal is and why.

I log all of it under a “Zac quirks” tag in my notes. Partly to never forget, but also to collect clues on what makes him different.

Zac starts kindergarten in September. As I’ve written, I’m worried his spikiness is about to get flattened.

Perfectly Well-Rounded Falls Flat

A hundred kids can score 100% across the board. When they do, you can’t tell any of them apart. That’s the definition of well-rounded: filed down until nothing sticks out. Super solid. Also super flat.

So as much as I’m excited by schools that promise to give my kids a super solid foundation to build something spectacular on, it’s not enough.

I want my kids to get 100% at something nobody else can.

Harvard’s Dean of Admissions, Bill Fitzsimmons, agrees.

“You’re trading in your uniqueness to be like everyone else, in the hope that you can be a little bit better at the thing that everybody else is also trying to be. But if you’re just playing the averages, then, on average, it won’t work.”

Spikes I Wish Someone Had Noticed

When I was a kid, I loved riddles. I memorized facts from the Guinness Book of World Records. The first thing I looked up on dial-up internet was the skylines of every North American city. I never had a tight clique but got along with everyone: weirdos, loners, popular kids. I cruised through math and physics and couldn’t care less about art or English, except I liked writing rhymes.

These were spikes poking through, like the developing wings of an octo-falco-badger-phant. Piece them together and they point somewhere: exploring, pattern-matching, a fascination with outliers.

Nobody bothered. There was no reason to. School’s job was the foundation. And my foundation was filling in with near perfect grades.

But I wish someone had taken note:

Why does Chris not seem to care about playing video games like his friends, and is content to watch them and give tips?

I wish they’d catered the curriculum to me rather than contained me within it:

You seem bored reading about feudal farming in France. But you love pattern-matching and travel. How about researching which places in the world today are most similar to each other?

I wish they’d pushed me to sharpen my edges with real world projects:

You seem to know all these crazy world records. What about collecting Kitsilano High School records for the yearbook?

Instead, school celebrated me for having one of the highest GPAs in my class. They polished my roundedness. So when it came time to choose a university major, I had zero clue. I chose Commerce because it seemed practical and kept the most options open.

I want the opposite for my kids.

I want school to help my kids whittle their options down to those that are impractical to anyone but them.

A Twig Only Grows Once

Push a young twig slightly in a direction and it changes where the whole branch ends up. Try the same push on a developed branch and it barely budges.

Before 25, a kid’s brain is a bunch of twigs, growing fast and wildly malleable. After that, it’s all branches. You can still learn new things, but you can’t catch up to what you could have developed if you’d started earlier.

Take Roger Federer. If he’d never picked up a tennis racket until 20, no amount of practice could have made him one of the greatest ever. Or perfect pitch. Researchers taught 24 children aged 2 to 6 to develop perfect pitch, a trait found in roughly 1 in 10,000 people. All 24 developed it.

The window for perfect pitch closes around 6. Windows for everything close - or become a lot harder to fit through. So the question is which windows you choose to prioritize. Schools prioritize the ones every kid shares. I’m more interested in the ones that make my kids different, and not shoving them into boxes that irrevocably stunt them.

The Windows Are Open

As much as I hope to find a school that will help Zac cultivate what makes him different, I’m not waiting around. I’m watching what Zac gravitates to when nobody’s directing, what he rejects that everyone else seems fine with, and how he reacts every time I expose him to something new.

Same with Sandy. On the Cape Town promenade, he found empty space ten meters from the grown-up breakdancers and let loose. Thirty minutes of non-stop breakdancing. We didn’t encourage him. Strangers came over to cheer him on. He didn’t notice. Zac would have been scanning for our reactions the whole time. Sandy was in his own world, as usual. That’s data too.

What does the data mean? I don’t know yet. But I know their windows are open right now. So I’m paying attention.

Keep doing exciting things,

Chris