The Question We Should Be Asking Kids
This billionaire was asked the same question by her father each week. And other stories about how our approach to stress makes our children either stronger or weaker.
Hello Bar-setters,
Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx and youngest self-made female billionaire, often shares that her father asked her and her brother the same question at the dinner table every week:
“What did you fail at this week?”
She credits this question for helping her reframe her approach to challenges, learning, and failure.
The lesson was clear: failure is not something to avoid—it’s essential for growth. It’s training for persistence.
Contrast that with the message children too often receive today. We teach them to focus on their disadvantages and expect adults to accommodate every discomfort. Instead of building willpower, we reinforce fragility.
This is rooted in decades of faulty psychology which goes all the way back to the disastrous self-esteem movement (see Chapter 4 of my book).
Dr. Alia Crum has conducted some amazing research at Stanford, which show the way our beliefs about stress shapes how stress impacts us. She’s found that:
If you educate people on the negative effects of stress, then stress tends to harm them.
But if you educate them about the benefits of stress—how it energizes, enhances focus, and promotes growth—they usually realize those benefits with few of the negative consequences of stress. Stress is almost all positive. And there is more…
High-stress people who believe that too much stress is harmful are more likely to die at a younger age than high-stress people who believe stress mostly benefits them. In fact, high-stress people who embrace stress tend to live longer than low stress people. No wonder every president since Nixon has lived past age 90.
Choosing the Right Story
The quality of our lives is shaped less by what happens to us than by the story we tell ourselves about what happens.
Kyle Maynard, born with congenital amputation, grew up with a grandmother who asked him to reach into a jar he could barely manage. He spent hours failing, then finally succeeding. Today, he’s climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, written a bestselling book, and credits those small, repeated exposures to failure for his resilience.
He tells a story of how his grandmother helped him learn resilience:
“My Grandma Betty had this dark green jar she used to ask me to get sugar out of, except the catch was, as an amputee, I used both arms to grip things, and I could only fit one arm inside the jar. I’d sit there for hours, repeatedly failing to balance the scoop on my one arm. I’d get it right to the edge then lose it. After 50 more tries, I’d get it back near the top before I’d lose it again. Eventually, and sometimes to my surprise, I’d succeed. It not only helped with my dexterity and focus, but it also helped build my will.”
These anecdotes reveal a truth that all successful, happy people absorb. Resistance leads to strength. Setbacks and challenges are essential if we wish to grow stronger. This is as true for our mindset as it is for our bodies.
Neuroscientists like Andrew Huberman note that a part of the brain called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC) grows stronger when we persist through failure. By training this brain structure is we develop the capacity to endure difficulty and thrive under challenge. We develop the capacity to do the hard things that make us capable of living a good life. As such, we must intentionally train and help our children to train the aMCC by consistent exposure to struggle and discomfort. Whether a regiment of workouts, cold plunges, or math problems, consistent progressive overload is essential.
But whether we and our kids are made stronger or weaker by adversity is mostly determined by our beliefs—by our attitude and how we perceive events.
Programmed for Mental Fragility
Unfortunately, our culture increasingly tells young people the opposite. Among parents and in schools, the dominant instinct is to shield students from discomfort rather than to equip them to overcome it.
I saw this firsthand after Covid lockdowns, when my high school held a faculty meeting about student anxiety. Teachers were asked to brainstorm strategies, but nearly every suggestion boiled down to:
Be more accommodating
Lean into every excuse
Fixate on the injustice of every hardship
No one offered evidence-based approaches—just vague calls for empathy and allowing every struggle to be an excuse to lower the bar. This approach was almost certain to make the problem worse.
Why Accommodation Can Exacerbate Issues.
The most common mental health issues facing modern kids is anxiety.
But the research on anxiety is clear: avoidance makes it worse.
I know this from my own struggle with Pure O (a form of OCD). The turning point came when I stopped trying to flee my anxious thoughts and instead faced them directly.
That’s also the basis of the highly successful SPACE program (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions). It doesn’t treat kids—it treats parents. In SPACE parents meet with therapists who teach them to stop accommodating anxiety and instead help their children face it gradually.
Exposure, not avoidance, is the antidote.
The Navy SEALs, elite athletes, great entrepreneurs—all are forged by confronting difficulty, not by being protected from it. Yet our institutions increasingly normalize fragility.
If we want to raise resilient kids, we need to recover the wisdom of Sara Blakely’s dad, Kyle Maynard’s grandmother, and Dr. Alia Crum’s research:
Teach kids to fail forward.
Teach them to rewrite their story so they are the hero, not the victim.
Teach them that stress is not a disease but a tool—a natural physiological response that allows them to perform better.
Resilient people, resilient families, and resilient societies aren’t created by eliminating discomfort. They’re created by facing it.
Thank you for reading and sharing!
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Shane