Smash Notes
Stefan Weitz on the importance of travel, relationships, and the pursuit of happiness.
How do you teach a child to learn a new language? You don't! Instead, you get her excited about learning, and one day she does it herself. The she goes to Yale. Stefan Weitz is the founder of Jetson Seasonal Probiotics and today he explains how to be a great dad, how to encourage and empower your kids, how international travel is the best thing you could…
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Notes
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We can encourage our kids to ask the question beyond the obvious, ask the next question.
Even something as mundane as a nail polish application video on YouTube can turn out to be a lesson on fluid-dynamics, if you keep trying to figure out why things exist, and how they work.
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Stefan is the most passionate, and conflicted about, with helping his daughter to live a happy life. He wants to provide her with scaffolding that allows her to make the decisions that will ultimately make her happiest.
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Anyone can be happy and fulfilled in life, if they can make their own choices. To do that, however, one has set themselves up for success early on, by making choices that open doors, and enable optionality. If you make choices that prune your optionality, that inevitably makes it harder to make your own choices down the line.
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Stefan Weitz told Geek at Sea that a fulfilled life for his daughter means joy plus meaning, not a living alone. A mime in Paris might get by, he said, but he could not see who it helped. An NGO job in Africa, delivering water and cutting waterborne disease for about $16,000 a year, would leave the place better than she found it. He tries to build that ambition by lecturing, and he knows lecturing is a weak tool. He studies people who left the old path of grades, college, and a job, including Jeremy Johnson in Los Angeles and Kathryn Minshew of The Muse, and turns their choices into stories he wishes he had heard at 13.
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Stefan has spent a lot of time trying to understand what set his wealthy and successful friends apart, and so far he has concluded that having access to a very strong network of connections is the key. Those networks can be very strong and fruitful, and powerful, and the choices we make early in life is what helps us to build these networks early on, leading to faster growth at every next time.
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Of course, but the amount of of either persistence or luck or timing you have to have to achieve high level of impact without a strong network is a lot higher than if you do have those connections.
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From Stefan's observations, friends who did not have a strong network to rely on have been able to create a large impact on the world, but it took risks, and a lot of failures. They were scrapy, and took on crazy ideas no one else wanted to do. They put it all on the line.
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To survive it without getting divorced, you have to have a partner that is all in with you on a lifestyle that you want to live. You might also need to explain to your kids that sometimes life is going to be fun, and sometimes it won't. Make the best of the time you have together.
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So many kids these days are influenced by the YouTube generation, which makes it seem like success and meaning in life is attained through selfies on Instagram.
One way to counteract this is by getting kids connected with groups and organizations that model different behavior. For example, Stefan's daughter attends UN women's rights organization for young people's, where she can be surrounded by and inspired by women who have a greater purpose in life.
Furthermore, parents themselves can model correct behavior. Who you admire, talk about, read about, and interact with, all those things would have a profound influence on what your kids end up doing. Be the change you want to see.
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As classroom grow in size, teachers need better tools to keep up with their students' progress. Stefan is on the board of Summit Public Schools, a non profit that is giving teachers the tools to track student performance, and to adjust immediately. This technology gives teachers superpowers.
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