Why I Want Your Kid to Have Misfortunes
The common thread among great people, lessons from trees mysteriously falling over, and how our perceptions determine whether events help or harm us.
Hello, good people!
Of all the feedback I get from people who read my book, one quote comes up more than anything else. This one seems to hit everyone’s radar. It comes from Supreme Court Justice John Roberts in a commencement speech to his son’s graduating class. Looking out on a sea of budding young adults, Justice Roberts said:
From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time, so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.
Boom! Roberts packs a lot of wisdom into this little paragraph. Let’s dig deeper into the two major ideas:
#1: Resistance is Necessary
In the 1980’s and 90’s, scientists created a closed ecological system they called Biosphere 2. It was basically like a rainforest in a bubble where they could observe an ecological system completely set apart from human society. There was some talk that this would be a model that could someday be used to colonize Mars. But then, the trees started falling over.
The problem with these trees was that, in reconstructing a natural environment, the scientists had forgotten one crucial component. Wind.
Without wind, the trees never developed tougher bark or a strong root system. Trees, like all living organisms, depend on stress to stimulate a reciprocal strengthening effect. Our children are no different. If they aren’t given frequent exposure to resistance, they’ll never develop the calluses, confidence, and character they need for life.
Roberts makes this point very clear. Our children aren’t only capable of dealing with adversity, they NEED adversity. They need pain. They need misfortune. They need to be responsible for overcoming a number of unfair, difficult, and seemingly “pointless” hardships, because these experiences give them the capacity to become good people and to live good lives.
A lot of labels have been used to describe the last few generations of parents. Helicopter parents. Bulldozer parents. Snowplow parents. All of these refer to the tendency for parents to hover by their kids removing obstacles, pains, and inconveniences.
Such impulses are understandable. We love our kids and, more than any time before, we have the capacity to keep children safe and comfortable most of the time. The problem is, if we protect our kids from life, they will remain a shell of themselves. They will live with less depth and purpose. They will have worse relationships, less persistence, and a lower threshold for pursuing the mildly uncomfortable experiences that would transform their lives and expand their possibilities.
Our greatest challenges unlock our greatest potential. This is a consistent theme among the stories of great people. Indulge me:
Colin O’Brady was the first man to complete a solo walk across Antarctica. He was, also, part of the first team to row across the Drake Passage. He claims that he would never have had the persistence and inclination to pursue these records if he hadn’t had an accident where 25% of his body was severely burned. That terrible experience taught him the amazing power of his mind and it ignited a deep desire to live more fully.
Kyle Maynard was born with arms that end at his elbows and legs that end at his knees. Despite these impediments, he’s gone on to climb Mount Kilamanjaro and Mount Aconcagua, and to become an Espy Award-winning mixed martial artist. None of that would have been possible, however, if his parents allowed him the excuses that most other parents would allow. When Kyle was two, his parents decided that he needed to start feeding himself. As Maynard explained, his parents realized that in order for him to be able to live a full life, he needed to start figuring out how to conduct daily activities on his own. They realized that, as unfair as his circumstance might seem, it would only become worse if he were allowed to use his disability as an excuse.
Similarly, 2003 survey of Great Britain’s 69,000 self-made millionaires found that about 40% were dyslexic (that is four times the national average). A naive reading might prompt parents to hope for dyslexia in much the same way that baseball-crazed fathers hope for left-handedness. But dyslexia doesn’t provide any direct advantages. The struggles of dyslexia are just prompts to greater ingenuity and tenacity—traits that make becoming a millionaire possible.
Sara Blakely, the creator of Spanx, became the youngest female billionaire in 2012. When she was 16, she watched as her friend was hit by a car and killed. She was distraught and overwhelmed. To make matters worse, her parents were getting a divorce. In the midst of all this, her father gave her Wayne Dyer’s book, How to Be a No Limit Person. As she explained, most 16 year olds would have never read a book like that. But she was in so much pain that she did. And it set her on an entirely new trajectory.
This theme can be found in almost every success story. It likely exists in your own life. I’ve written many times that I’d be a shell of myself if it hadn’t been for the all-encompassing anxiety disorder that I had to learn to overcome.
If you can, try to notice and highlight this theme for your children.
Because exposure to hardship does not guarantee growth. This is the second, crucial idea from Justice Roberts’ quote…
#2: Are You Being Forged or Fractured?
The second big idea is completely encapsulated in the last line of that quote:
… whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.
As Roberts alludes to, even the most tenaciously bulldozerish parent will not be able to prevent all emotional and physical strife. These are inevitable components of life.
Misfortune is coming for us all. But we might not all get the benefits that come from those misfortunes. What allows us to benefit from misfortunes is whether or not we have the ability to see the message in our misfortunes.
Let’s break this down step by step:
Misfortune is inevitable.
Misfortune is what unlocks greater capacity and purpose, so the fact that it is inevitable is a good thing.
But, if you have the wrong mindset about your misfortunes, you usually miss all the lessons and amplify the harm.
Your mindset is what dictates whether each misfortune will benefit you or degrade you in the long run.
The Take Home Message
As parents and educators, we have to be able to prioritize our children’s long term capacity over their short term comfort.
We have to have a higher ideal of the type of person we want to create in order to rival our inclination to overprovide, overprotect, and solve challenges for our kids.
Even more, we have to help our students understand the tremendous power of their mind. We all have so much more capability than we know. And our beliefs tend to dictate whether we ever sniff that capability or not.
Thank you for reading today and sharing with any kindred spirits.
If you, like me, are a bit obsessed with mindset, I think you’ll love this post from May of last year:
And this amazing post from my friend
(whose Perennial Meditations is a phenomenal daily read!):
Carry the fire!
Shane