The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and Jessica Lahey Talk Parenting, the Process of Writing, and How to Fail Gracefully

Episode Date: June 27, 2020

In today’s episode, Ryan and author and teacher Jessica Lahey talk about how to teach your kids to fail, the process of putting together a book, and more.Sign up for The Stoic Parent, Daily Stoic’s newest course, today: http://dailystoic.com/stoicparentJessica Lahey is the New York Times bestselling author of The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed. She has written for The New York Times and The Atlantic and has taught middle and high school for over a decade. Get The Gift of Failure: https://geni.us/R8mA4This episode is brought to you by GoMacro. GoMacro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors—the perfect fuel for your summer expeditions. Visit http://gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order over $60, plus free shipping.This episode is also brought to you by the Theragun. The new Gen 4 Theragun is perfect for easing muscle aches and tightness, helping you recover from physical exertion, long periods of sitting down, and more—and its new motor makes it as quiet as an electric toothbrush. Try the Theragun risk-free for 30 days, starting at just $199. ***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Jessica Lahey: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jesslaheyInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/teacherlahey/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jessicapottslahey/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four that can help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy

in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to worker to get the kids to school. When we have the time to think to go for a walk to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring. The Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the day and partying at night with your best friends and have it be 100% paid for? FTX Founder Sam Bankman Freed lived that dream life, but it was all funded with other people's money, but he allegedly stole.

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docu-series about the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of FTX, and its founder, Sam Beckman-Freed. Follow Spellcaster wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Prime members, you can listen to episodes ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily St app today. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. For something like 10 plus years now,

I've been doing this email where I just recommend books every month and I started it because I had some idea that maybe in the future I wanted to be a writer and I loved books and I just wanted to recommend awesome books that I liked and thought it might be the only reason people might sign up for an email list for me. So you can imagine over the years, you know, at first I was just excited that every once in a while a publicist from a publisher would offer me a book. Then I started occasionally hearing from authors who wanted me to read

their books and then I started hearing from authors who, you know, had saw that I had recommended their books and it's been this it authors who had saw that I had recommended their books. And it's been this cool thing. It's probably thousands and thousands of books at this point or maybe close to a thousand books, I don't know. I've recommended all sorts of books and all sorts of topics. In a way, it's also expanded in my mind. It's introduced me to a whole bunch of books I wouldn't have read otherwise.

And one of those books is a book called The Gift of Failure, how the best parents learn to let go so their children can succeed. I actually read this long before I had kids Jessica, the author, Jessica Leihi. She emailed me out of the blue and she said, Hey, I think you might like my book. You know, here's this essay that I wrote for the Atlantic about, you know, how failure is important for kids and it connects to your idea of the obstacle being the way. And she was interested in stochasticism. So she sent me the book. And for whatever reason that it arrived on a day

when I didn't have a book to read, and I started flipping through it, and I just read the whole thing, and I loved it. And she and I have since become friends. I went and saw her give a talk at a private school in Austin a couple years ago. And her writing's been very influential in the parenting approach that my wife and I are using

with our two young kids. And so I wanted to have her on the podcast to talk about this idea of, you know, it's so easy to want to make things easy for your kids. And maybe you had parents like that or maybe you saw kids you knew who had parents like that. And although it seems kind, it's actually quite selfish and quite destructive.

The Stoics were about resiliency. They were about sort of cultivating the ability to deal with challenges. Actually, Senna Kataks about this, he says, if you've never been challenged, like you're a deserving of pity, because you don't know what you're capable of. And he says, it's the boxer who's been bloody,

who's been knocked down. That's the one who's formidable in the fight. The other one sort of falls at the first sight of blood. And so Jessica's book is really important, whether you're thinking about being a parent or if you're just somebody who deals with employees or you work with children or a teacher, whatever her writing is just fantastic.

She's a member of the Amazon Studios Thought Leader Board. She actually helped create some of the educational curriculum for the show Stinky and Dirty, which my son is absolutely obsessed with. I've watched many, many episodes of this show. She lives out in the country in Vermont. So I very much relate to her on Instagram. She's worth a follow there.

If you want to see foxes and horses and all sorts of country living things. Great writer, great thinker. I think this conversation's really important. She has a new book coming out called The Addiction and Occulation, Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence. That won't be out until 2021. So in the meantime, I strongly suggest you check out her book, The Gift of Failure. It's a wonderful book. You can check out some of her writing. She used to do a call in for The New York Times. You can check out

her stuff at the Atlantic. And then actually, if you do end up liking this interview, I talk more in depth with Jessica after as part of our new Stoic Parenting course, which we're calling the Stoic Parent, 10 Commandments for Raising Great Kids. And I'm trying to apply thinkers like Jessica with the insights from Marcus Aurelius and Senaika and Epictetus and all sorts

even even those sort of famous literary parents whether it's it's Lee from East of Eden or it's Mr. Rogers or it's you know coach Taylor from Friday night lights or it's Moff from Little House in the Prairie. I'm interested in you know how do we come up with models, ideas, a code, a set of best principles and practices for parenting? And how does this sort of intersect with the teachings of the stoke? So we've been hard at work at this. It's out now. You can check that out. Go to dailystoke.com slash parents. I think it's awesome. I think it's one of the best things we've done. These laws are one of the more personal challenges that we've done. So you can you can listen to my extended interview with Jessica there where we break

down some of the more important laws about how you raise a reader, how you sort of work for not just your own kids, but the community of kids, how you raise resilient kids, how you how you love your kids. I'm conditionally some great stuff there. In addition to what we have here for you for free. So you can check that out at dailystout.com slash parents. But listen to this interview, check out Jessica's stuff and hope to have some more episodes for you soon. Be well. Talk soon. So I was thinking that, you know, obviously the title and the concept of my book, this idea of the obstacle being the way sort of in a sense is saying the exact same thing that your book is saying, although it years is geared much more towards parenting than mine. Parenting

was very far from my mind when I was writing that book at 25 or 26, but, but, but this idea of, of failure being a gift that there's good that can come out of mistakes, falling short, you know, things not going the way that you would like them to go. To me, it seems like a very stoic idea. You know, it actually didn't start in parenting for me. It started in teaching for me and only blood on over into parenting

when I realized that I was doing, that you know, the things that I was really pissed off at my students parents for sort of creating this learned helplessness in their kids, you know, saving them every single time they forgot their homework, that kind of thing. I was all, I was very much on a high horse about this too, and I was really pissed off at them, and then I realized I was doing the same thing with my own kids. And that's when it started bleeding over into the parenting. And, but originally, the whole thing came from a perspective of what helps kids learn the best. And, you know, there wasn't a lot of great research

sort of on the intersection of autonomy, support of parenting or directive parenting and learning. And sort of that's what I became really interested in. And it turns out that when we're really directive or controlling of our kids, that it actually undermines their ability to learn, not just their motivation. So yeah, there's absolutely a big crossover between the two ideas.

And it's not that I want kids to screw up and fail that sort of beside the point, what I'm more interested in is how they react when they do, because it's not if it's a when, as we all know. So that element right there of how do we perceive that screw up, that mistake, that failure, and how do we react to the things we can control and the things we can't? I think that's where the intersection really lies.

Yeah, no, it's interesting. I think when the, when the obstacle's way Yeah, no, it's interesting. I think when the obstacles went away, first came out people with symptoms, go like, okay, so should I be seeking out adversity? And my answer was always sort of like, life will take care of that for you. And so I don't think parents need to be looking for opportunities for their kids to fail.

It's primarily making sure that when they inevitably do fail, you're not depriving them of the chance of seeing it for what it is and learning that lesson. Yes, and no, I think there is this, the thing that was happening with my students and inevitably with my kids as well is that there was this real hesitation to do anything that created a challenge because they're, and this goes sort of to the work of Carol Dweck with mindset that there was, it was really easy to get complacent and to coast because that's safe, because then, you know, if you've got this label of, you know, gifted and talented or smart or whatever, stuck to

your forehead, then the way to keep that, to hang on to that, and to feel good about yourself, was to not screw anything up. So there is this need, I think, for us to encourage our kids, and not so much by forcing them to do it, but by modeling it, modeling these actions for them, to stretch their brains and stretch their, you know, their concept of what they can do, and to challenge

themselves because the kids that don't challenge themselves, they're the ones that are going to kind of stay stagnant. So it's not that we're like looking for adversity for kids, but we are looking for them to do new things that will stretch their intelligence and stretch their capacity and make new connections in their brains. Because really, we're talking about kids and especially adolescents who have these incredibly plastic brains and without that sort of challenge, we don't create more connection and expand the potential for even greater intelligence. So yes and no to that question.

Sure. No, and I want to come back to that in a second, but I was curious, like the gift of failure was your first book and anyone who's done a book or a sort of a first big, anything knows that it's sort of failure is not only endemic every step of the way, but you just get your ass kicked because you don't know all the things that you didn't even know. I'm curious, how does that book come together for you and what were the struggles for you in it? Oh my gosh, the thing was,

it was a really strange situation. I had been writing about education for a while, but very quietly and sort of on, you know, a lot of educators or administrators may have known my work, but I was definitely not visible on a national, let alone an international stage. And then I wrote an article for the Atlantic, called Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail,

based on a study that had come out of Australia. And it was, yes, it was very much right place, right time. I, yes, I'm my co-hosts over, my two best friends and my co-hosts at the podcast that I do, tell me I'm not allowed to say, I got lucky, but it was very much right place, right time. And so there was this big auction to sell the book. It was like 14 editors bidding. It was amazing. It went on for days. So then I sat down to write this thing. And I'd only really written essays like, you know, 1200 to 2000 words. And so

I didn't know how to write a book. And so I wrote it and did it completely the wrong way my editor and I didn't check in in the middle. I didn't submit chapters in the middle. And it wasn't her fault. It was sort of, you know, just I didn't know what I was doing. And she I handed the book in. And I should probably note that the day after I handed the book in, I went horseback riding with my husband. And I had been helping train this mayor to resell and she bucked me off on my head. And I suffered a pretty significant head injury that made it so that I really couldn't read or write

for a little while, it was bad. And I got my edits back on the book by way of her requesting a meeting with me in her office in New York. And you know, when you get summoned, it's like being summoned to the principles of this. Yeah, when you get summoned, it's not going to be good. And it wasn't. And she essentially, what she said was this book is just not

publishable in its current form. Luckily, this crazy, sounds crazy to say this. Luckily, the head injury had made it apparent that we were going to have to push the book by a year anyway. I couldn't edit. So we had a lot of time on our hands. And she actually said, maybe we should think about bringing in a ghost. And for writer, yeah, for writer to hear that she needs a ghost writer, it was so humiliating to me. I can't believe I just didn't throw up in our office right there. But it would have been a really easy out for me. It would have been a, you know, I would have had to work on the book, but I would have had a lot of hand holding.

And instead, what I said was, look, I've got this big notebook with me. You give me all of the ugly, all of the harsh edits. Just tell me what I have to do to be a better writer. Because I was a writing teacher at the time. Not just, I wasn't just a writer. I was a writing teacher at the time. Not just I wasn't just a writer, I was a writing teacher. So she essentially over an hour laid it out for me and told me everything I'd have to do. And I said, look, give me two chapters. Like this is probation.

Give me two chapters to do this by myself. And we'll see how it goes. And she was wonderful since we had the time. Gave them to me. And those two turned into four. wonderful since we had the time, gave them to me and those two turned into four, which turned into a book that I'm so much more proud of than I ever would have been, if I had sort of rolled over and said, yeah, why don't we bring someone in to help me? The other thing that's been really interesting

is I just finished, just working on the copy edits now from my second book. And I essentially took out that old notebook when I was starting to write the second book and said, okay, here's essentially my list of mistakes not to repeat and created these checklists of, okay, before you had anything in, go through this entire checklist and make sure you learn from every single one of these mistakes, no matter how sick to your stomach, they make you feel. And that book came back with hardly any edits. It was one of the proudest moments,

and I was all by myself and my office known was there to see it. It was one of the proudest moments I've had in my entire career because I learned from my own mistakes. So really, without realizing it, this entire book has been the greatest sort of gift of failure story that was very personal to me. Yeah, I was gonna say,

like you're sort of describing exactly the kind of moment that we try desperately to prevent other people from experiencing and we try desperately to prevent ourselves from experiencing, right? Like you were... It's so scary. I mean, and you don't wanna say, and honestly, my husband at a certain point

at the concussion I had also created just a really bad depression. So to certain point, after I got my edits back, my husband would just look at me to like sort of gauge my sort of emotional temperature. And I would just start to weep. And the last thing you want to do with someone you love is sort of, you know, if he could have fixed it for me, I'm sure he would have. And it's the same with our kids or my students when they're beating themselves up because they think they're stupid or they think they're incompetent or they think they're less than that's the you just you love them. You want to fix that for them and and take away that frustration, but it turns out that frustration, that feeling of

being frustrated with a difficult task is the very thing that you need to feel acquainted with. If not comfortable with, at least acquainted with, in order to benefit from these really valuable teaching tools I have in my back pocket, these things called desirable difficulties that I'd use in my classroom all the time, that are the way we learn things that are difficult for us to learn. And I'm really in retrospect, incredibly grateful for that experience.

At the time, it was horrific. I wanted to roll up in a ball, go helpless, which as it turns out, learned helplessness, that's exactly what we want to do as a species. It's sort of our, it's our go-to response to anything unpleasant to long-term suffering or pain is to roll up in a ball and want to give up. And the way to, this is based on research out of University of Pennsylvania with Martin Seligman,

the way we short-circuit that automatic response to go helpless is to grant the person feeling helpless more control. So I guess getting that control back was the very thing that helped me not feel helpless and will help our kids, will help my students not feel helpless over the long term. One one thing I want to unpack there that I think pertains to more than just writers and I think is sort of connected to the growth mindset idea too is, okay, so you throw everything you have

into a project, you know, you launch a company, you open a coffee shop, you, you know have into a project, you launch a company, you open a coffee shop, you do a dance performance, or you write a book, or whatever it is, you run for office, and you lose, or the numbers aren't good, or you get a savage review, or you get a sum into an editorial meeting. There's sort of two responses.

One is you identify your identity is so tied up in the product that you do. That all of that feels like an attack on your worth as a human being. Everything you stand for, you know, whether you deserve to be alive or not. Then the other is you can step back and go, okay, actually this person is giving me feedback or information about something that I want to be as good as it can be. And so if you can't, if you are so, I think people so identify with the results of what they do, that they can't separate the failure or the feedback or the criticism from themselves. And then therefore, they really are faced with only one option, which is to close themselves off and reject the feedback entirely

because that meeting is your editor telling you, you are a worthless person and you don't deserve to exist. This is a really, really important point. And actually, if you look at the research on, there's some gender stuff going on here too. If you read the work of Rachel Simmons or Lisa DeMor, Rachel Simmons talks about this in her book, Enough As She Is, Girls and Boys, and this is a huge generality, of course, as it always is, we're talking about gender. Girls have more of a tendency to internalize that, you know, when you,

when you screw something up, when you fail at something, to look at that thing that they fail that and say, Oh, I failed. I am a failure. Whereas boys are a little bit better at sort of putting that thing they fail that over there and saying that thing right there. I failed it. That I'm cool. I'm, and this is, I'm fine. But that thing over there is, I screwed that up. So I think, and that's something, there is, I screwed that up. So I think, and that's something, you know, I try to keep in mind in my classroom. But my favorite way to respond to a question like that actually has to do with, I don't know if you've read Tim Hartford's book, Adapt. But in that book, oh, I love that book. And Tim, he, he's out of London School

and Economics, and he talks a little bit, he talks a lot in that book about the fact that the business people that see these bad reviews, these failures, these horrible sort of failures of a concept or execution, the people that look at that and say, okay, we have an opportunity here, but let's start over. Let's look at this whole thing, tear apart what doesn't work, take forward with us, what does work, and figure out a way to move

forward with this thing, or scrap it all together. I mean, really, that's at the heart of sort of the design thinking mentality around product creation. And he gives these great examples in the book, adapt of people who did that well, who, you know, really screwed something up and then approached the fix from a perspective of humility, from a, there's no blaming, there's no sort of like you screwed that up, you're going to take the fall for that so you're fired. But of, as, you know, let's own these mistakes we made and figure out how to not do them again. And that's what I'm always trying to teach either my kids or my students, which is, okay, this went wrong.

So what are you going to salvage from this experience and take it forward with you to the next iteration? And what are you going to leave behind rather than trying to bang your head against a wall and make this element of what you did work? That's not going to work. So let's leave that behind. Let's leave the emotional baggage behind and let's move forward with this next promising idea

for the next iteration. And that's my job as a parent and a teacher to help guide you that, not to fix the problem for my kids or my students, but to help them talk through how they're going to move forward from that failure. Yeah, and that's the sort of key stoke idea of, you know, it's not what's happened or what is happening, but it's how you respond.

And what's interesting for kids too, I sort of picked this up in some of Paul Tuff's books who's writing I love. Now, he's like, what's so interesting about school is that it doesn't matter, right? Like it's totally a made up construct. Like, you know, you had this idea as a kid that, you know, there's some permanent file being kept on you, which of course, you know, like isn't really true and that, you know,

your grades really matter and of course, it isn't true and the test scores really matter, which of course isn't true. And yet, if you can't sort of buy into the construct, you're never going to succeed in the environment, which does determine a bunch of the course of your life. So he sort of talks about like the marshmallow test, like you have to buy into the marshmallow, you have to buy into the construct of the marshmallow test to be able to succeed on it. And so I think that's one of the one of the one of the things that my kids aren't there yet,

but I think is important. I get all these emails from you know from from kids who are dropping out of college and they're not doing law school. I think one of the things we do is like we take it all so seriously when really we should like and the stoke talk about sort of stepping back and seeing what's perspective. If you can see it more as a game, or you can see it more as this sort of thing that's that you're participating in, rather than this life and death. I mean, I think evolutionarily it makes sense why we treat things as life and death.

We're so far past that, that we end up treating very not serious things way too seriously, and then actually managed to not be as good as them as we could be. Well, and for kids, often that's because we're showering them with the whole, don't you understand how important this is? You know, you've got to get the grades, you've got,

you know, and even from a really young age, when, you know, we're investing in them, you know, and the parents had to use, the parents I talked to a lot, tend to use the word investing. We've invested so much in soccer, traveling soccer, that she can't get up now. And it all feels so urgent at all, like that we're doing so much of our parenting

or whatever in those emergency moments as opposed to sort of with this long term focus on process over the end product. And I think that idea that we have to hold onto the reins really tight and everything is so urgent and everything is so important, what that turns into is my writing students being afraid to write rough drafts because rough drafts, that's scary, it's rough, it's what are you gonna do? And I tried it, no matter how many times I tried to tell them

the story of how bad the first version of Gifted Failure was or how much writing I do that ends up just in the trash can. They never seem to believe me. And so it's really, really important for me to come back and show them, let's look at this writing you did last year and the writing you're doing now and let's see this progress that that you're only getting because you're allowing yourself to write what Anne Lamott called shitty first drafts. That stuff is so important. And yet we tend to get so emotionally tied to it that we can't seem to get out of our heads long enough

to move forward. And I end up having to use these things called free rights where they have to keep like their pen moving on the paper without letting it stop just because it allows you to let go just a little bit and have an experience of writing that's about flow instead. And that flow state, I mean, the only way they're going to get there, that mihajik sent. And that flow state, I mean, the only way they're gonna get there, that mihajik sent mihaiflo state, is through being really invested in the thing, for the sake of the thing itself, is instead of because, you know, they really need to get that A in this class in order to qualify for the other class

they want to take next year or get into college they want. That emotional connection, I think, a lot of that is the baggage that we stick on them. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident, not-so-expert-experts.

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in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. I think one of the reasons why some of this stuff feels so serious. I think is is I was talking to a basketball coach who's who's players haven't been you know able to play for the last three or four months right because of the endemic and and he was like I wish I could get them to see that this isn't that that you know he's like I can't get them to sort of see this with some perspective and And I was trying to walk him through. I was like, look, for you, three months as an adult, it is not a very long period of time. But if you're 17 or 18 years old, three months,

I forget the math. Three months is like 1% of your life. And if you think about it, how long they're going to be in college only four years, it's even a bigger chunk of that. And so I think one of the benefits of getting older and then obviously you can sort of hack this a little bit by reading and talking to older people is,

I think one of the reasons they're so chill is because they've sure been through the rhythms of things before. So I think that's one of the problems with sort of not letting your kids fail is that they already have like as a parent you failed so many times you've learned that lesson so you're like let's just get this right right.

Right. And they haven't failed and they actually have only had so many opportunities to fail in their life. They're actually depriving them of something that is disproportionately valuable sort of right here and right now because they haven't gotten their ass kicked 50 times right. They haven't had their heart broken before like you want to hit fast forward through something that they've they've never seen this movie before. Well it's funny you mentioned heartbreak i was talking to a

kid a teenager just last week actually who just got out of a relationship that you know she she was saying you know i just wish i hadn't wasted my time those two years on this relationship and and i was telling her about you know, she was saying, you know, I just wish I hadn't wasted my time, those two years on this relationship. And, and I was telling her about, you know, my first love and how, you know, that for me, it was a really challenging, painful time when I allowed myself to be treated in ways that I would be so ashamed of right now, but that being treated that way and getting out the other side and realizing that I was the one who ended it, you know, at the end of the relationship, that made me understand how I wanted to be treated and what I wanted in a human being. And the funny part for her was that I said, you know, when

this started and I saw you start to go through this, I wanted more than anything in the world to download my experience somehow into your brain so that you could understand how this was going to turn out in two years. But I can't do that. I can give you the best possible support. And by the way, when it comes to our kids, the way we really have to do that is by understanding that keeping the lines of communication open by supporting them and making sure that we don't think they're stupid for what they're doing or that we don't we're not dismissing them out of hand. Because they're going to need to come and talk to us about those things when you know that end result that we could have avoided if they just take in our advice. But I try to think of a lot of things because that's the way it makes the most sense to me is by thinking about love and heartbreak. When I come to a point where I really, really just want

to take over, take the reins for my kid, and just do an end run around an experience because wouldn't it be faster if I just told them from my own experience when it went wrong with me, I think about that heartbreak thing. Because really, there are so many things that we try to do an end run around that would be so much better and and analogy recently I did was we were going somewhere my whole family and I sort of lied a little bit and said we had to beat the airport sooner than we did and we got to the airport and I just handed the rain I we stepped inside the front door and I said okay okay, what do we do? Where do we go next?

Because my kids are so used to me dragging them through the airport and telling them where to go and what to take out of their pockets and when to do it. I realized, wow, there isn't going to be this like magic moment in whatever age they first have to fly by themselves that they just know how to do it because they have been watching. They've been letting me do all the work. So letting them have that experience, it took forever to get through the airport. And it was so frustrating for me to keep my mouth shut. But it's a little bit like that first love experience.

I can't download that information to their brain. I just have to let them go through it. No, I remember I was just saying. I'm frustrating for me as an adult. I just want to be able to, and for my students, when I'm teaching them Latin, oh my gosh, this would go so much faster for all of us if they would just be able to like,

biosmosis suck up all of the knowledge that I'm trying to hand out to them, but that's just not how it works. I remember I was, I was probably in college. I was supposed to go meet someone in a hotel and you know, like I get there and they're like, you know, I'm in room 909 or something and I said, what floor is that on?

And it was because even though I'd stayed in dozens or hundreds of hotels in my life, it had never been forced for somebody, hit the button on the elevator for me, somebody told them, and he always went, what floor we were on. It's a minuscule connection that, you know, sort of once you get, you know, you never forget.

But it was like, oh, no one, no one, I've never, even up in, you know, 18 years old, I've never actually been responsible enough for myself to have to know how to get from the lobby of the hotel to the room we're in. You know, it's an embarrassing moment at the same time. But I'm forced to learn that at 18 when I could have learned it at 11. And so, yeah, I think there's this concept of snow plow parenting to me sort of encapsulates

the universe that a lot of kids live in that just the path has been cleared for them perpetually and consistently almost since they were born. There's a great discussion of this very concept at the beginning of Michael Thompson, who's one of my favorite writers about boys. He wrote a book called Home Sick and Happy about sort of why campus such a magical experience for kids and why they learn so much when they're there. And in the introduction, he talks about when he's out speaking to parents about, you know, parenting issues and boys and kids in general. he asks the adults in the room to think of a moment when they really learned something that they were proud of,

like when they really accomplished something amazing. And then he has them really think about that moment, put themselves in that moment, and then ask them to raise their hand if their parents were there when that incredible learning happened. And he said hardly anyone ever raises their hands. Because for me, it was, I had to go pick up my parents at,

I was living in Italy at the time. I think I was 20, 21, something like that. And I had to go get my parents at the airport in Rome and I lived a train, a couple trains away, and there was a strike and the trains were running. And yet I managed to get to the airport all by myself during this strike to get my parents on time. And it was a, the sense of pride I felt over being able to problem solve at a time like

that was for me, it was a very personal experience. And of course, they weren't there because they would have fixed it. They would have, you know, ordered up some way to get there. And, you know, those, those moments are really, really important for kids. And we have to be able to step back and let them have those moments so that, you know, when they're, as I just turned 50, I still remember, I still feel such great pride in that moment.

And I wouldn't have that if someone had fixed it for me. You know, you have that instinct where something goes wrong and you're like, I should call my dad. My dad will help me with this. I wonder how much of that is, is like, do they actually have that much experience in this thing, or do they have confidence in their judgment,

which is actually something anyone can have, right? There actually is no right or wrong way to sort of take your car to the shop or do this or that, but what that sort of dad energy is is often confidence or authority. And we so lack it in ourselves that we sort of want it in another person. And I mean, it's not a bad thing to continue to be helped by our father. But but I think oftentimes that dependency on it is due to a kind of a lack of confidence or or actually I would love to shift the language because I think that the word confidence is a word

I try not to use that often only because I think the word competence is a lot more important when you're talking about parenting anyway because competence and confidence are really different and it comes down to it comes down unfortunately to the self-esteem movement, I think, where we hope more than anything that our kids feel confident in themselves. And so we pump them up and we tell them how capable they are and how they can do anything they want to do and be anything they want to be. And aren't they so talented?

But the research is really clear that when we tell kids these things like you're so smart, you're so talented, you can do anything blah, blah, blah, blah, especially for kids with really low self-esteem, that that sort of talk in order to boost their confidence doesn't actually do that. It actually lowers their self-esteem because for kids, when they're struggling, if they're being told that that should not be their experience, that they are so gifted, so talented, so creative, so perfect, whatever, that then their reality doesn't match what people are saying their reality should be. And so I try to put more emphasis on the word competence, which is confidence based

on actual experience, trying something, screwing it up, trying it again, that kind of thing. So this idea that, you know, confidence is great. And I want my kids to have confidence too, but confidence is really more about optimism, I think. Whereas competence is a solid footing understanding that, okay, I have done something similar to this. I can apply that knowledge to this new arena. And I can probably, you know, I've figured out how to go places

on trains before. I know how to use a cab. I probably, my Italians not very good, but I've done a couple of these things and I can probably put them together to figure out a new way to get to that airport. And that's competence, not just confidence. And I think we need to move towards the competence idea

in order to help kids feel like they can problem solve. No, I'll buy that. When I use the word confidence, I really mean I'm thinking actually, yeah, in the sense of competence. And like, you know, Marie Forleo has this phrase, everything is figure outable. It's like, do you have confidence? Because like, think about it, it's on your first book. You had confidence that you could do it, even though there's evidence you could do it. But you had what your confidence is is in.

And your second book is just as hard, because it's starting with a blank page again. But you have a sense, you have knowledge and evidence-based sense that although this problem is really hard, there is a solution you will be able to find it. And that's what I think you need to go through the world with the sense that I have. And I love that.

Yes, I absolutely love that. But I would also much rather feel the way I felt going into my second book saying, not only do I know that I have the capability of doing it, but I've had the opportunity to screw it up and figure out what I did wrong. And therefore now have the capability of doing it, but I've had the opportunity to screw it up and figure out what I did wrong, and therefore now have the knowledge to go into this other book that for me was harder to write,

but understanding that I had that capability sort of under my belt. So I love, I mean, if you look at my career trajectory, the joke among my parents and even my husband has been that I have this habit of talking myself into jobs that I'm absolutely not qualified to do, but I just have this optimism that I could figure it out. And I've been able to do that. But what's really fun is to do something that's really, really hard and challenging in other ways,

but at least understand that you've had the opportunity to screw that up and figure it out and get it right. No, that makes sense. All right. So last question, because you teased this book that you're in the copy editing phase, tell us a little bit about it and what we should look forward to. So I've been so fortunate. The last, so I'm not teaching right now because I just lost my teaching job a little while ago because I was teaching in an inpatient rehab for adolescents, a drug and alcohol rehab for adolescents. And unfortunately, the rehab realized they were losing so much money on treating, treating kids that they, I had the opportunity to teach kids in rehab. And I was, I'm in recovery again myself. I just hit seven years of recovery from alcoholism.

And thank you. And it's, so for a long time, I didn't know, there's that sophomore thing, like, what the heck am I going to do now? How am I ever going to match? Gift of failure has been selling really well since it came out five years ago. And how am I going to, what, the honor of them, I'm going to do next. And sort of, I played around for like two years with various ideas

about what I could do and what I could write, I even submitted stuff to my agent. She's like, eh, not quite. You're almost there. And then I just had this sort of flash as I was driving to a talk somewhere to write about preventing substance abuse in kids. And because that covers so much of what I've done as a teacher and there's stuff in there about social emotional learning and there's stuff in there about early intervention for learning issues and early intervention for all sorts of other things. And it's still very memory for me because I have two kids who have this genetic legacy of substance abuse in our family going back

bajillion generations. They're fully loaded with those genes. And how can I do the best thing for my students and for my kids moving forward to control the things we can and let go of the things we can't and the evidence-based solutions to make sure that our kids are sort of as addiction resistant as possible. And it was such a delight to write. It was just, I had to learn a lot,

which is always fun for me. I mean, being a journalist, my job was to find something I was really interested in and learn as much as possible about it and read every single study I could find and then translate it for people who don't want to read those studies. And that's that really is my happy place. So writing this book, the addiction andoculation

has very much been just such a pleasure. And I knew from, for a fact, from the very beginning that I was going to write this book, even if my editor didn't have any interest in it, I planned ahead for that. So it was the best books to write because it was great. It was great. Not doing it for a business reason. Yeah.

Because you have to write it. Oh, I went through all this in areas. I'm ahead. In fact, my agent said, look, if you're going to write this book no matter what, let's go out with a full proposal. Like, let's be ready to go to other publishers if your editor doesn't want it, because, you know, substance abuse is a hard category. And I even realized, and I have a friend who's really successful in self publishing, and I'm like, great, you know, if I can't sell this book, I'm still writing it, and I'm

going to self-pub it, because it was that important to me. It sort of felt like the thing I was supposed to be writing. Beautiful. Well, I can't wait to read in. Hopefully you'll send it to me very soon. Absolutely. The copy editing process is a pain in the butt. I have figured out I am a really habitual overuser of commas. That's good to know about myself, I suppose.

Jessica, thanks very much. You're so welcome. We invite you to check out our newest course, The Stoic Parent. To give you tools and support that you need to become the parent you want to be, it's ten actionable, practical meditations and prescriptive commandments for parenting. Rules you can live by and teach by for as long as you are lucky to have this job. So check out dailyStoic.com slash parenting. So check out dailystoic.com slash parenting. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily stoic early and ad free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with

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