Friday Feels: Throwing Your Toys

My 2-year-old daughter is crazy smart.

I think you should be your kid's biggest fan and place they go for encouragement in a world that will perpetually point out their flaws.

But part of being a parent is also about being honest.

And I can honestly say my kid has growth opportunities in the skill of patience.

Part of me gets proud watching how bossy and direct she can be - those are traits I don't think we celebrate enough in little girls.

But patience piece is something we have to work on.

Because she's so smart she will figure out 90% of most toys or games pretty quickly. It's the last 10% that is her perpetual struggle.

Some kids are wired to sit and focus and figure out the details - not my girl. She tends to rely on mastering the first 90% very quickly and when she hits that roadblock from 90-100% she'll just throw the toy across the room and fixate her energy on another option that bolsters her ego.

It's a vicious cycle.

And while I tend to encourage her to try again and be patient with herself it's usually a losing battle.

But if I'm being vulnerable, I see me in her.

I was the kid that could get an A- pretty easily. I had a knack for picking up things quickly, reading situations, gathering obvious context and synthesizing into quick success.

It was getting from 90-100% that was always the hard part for me. It required deep focus and careful consideration and I was often lacked the patience it takes to master those final details.

So when I see her hurl her toys at the wall and shout in frustration part of me wants to say, "I feel you, girl."

I love trying new things at work. I love the speed of fast acceleration and the invigorating sense of pride that comes with early praise for my impressive progress.

When the inevitable grind sets in I tend to lose focus and want to hurl my laptop at the wall.

I often like to masquerade this weakness as a strength. I say things like "I'm a builder, not a maintainer" or things like "I am focused more on the big picture."

The reality is that there is a scared little boy inside who is frustrated that he can't figure something out quickly and feels like a failure for not getting what others around him seem to do with ease.

And the difference between being an adult versus a toddler is that no one expects my toddler to be at 100%. The world has collectively decided they are learning and growing.

But the expectation of learning is not woven into our collective consciousness of what it means to be an adult.

How often do we talk at work about people giving 110% (or even higher) to something? Last I checked 100% is all that's even possible and that would mean ever fiber of your being was focused on work. At the very best this is unrealistic, at the very worst it's toxic.

We build frameworks to reward those that can exceed or greatly exceed what's expected but the struggle to get from 90-100% is seen as somehow subpar.

This creates a choice. Either you're going to live with the frustration of learning hard things or chunk the toy at the wall and try something else that you know you can master.

This encourages a careers of change, not necessarily careers of growth. The game we've built in many companies is best played by figuring out the lane that relies on what you have already mastered versus spending time working on those parts of you that you best keep quiet - for fear of looking like a failure.

And I start to wonder...

What would my relationship with learning new, hard things look like if I focused on what I could gain over a longer time horizon versus what I would lose in the short-term.

The truth is that to open yourself up to learn is the opposite of playing it safe.

Your pride, ego and even the very real possibility that others may lose confidence in you while you go through the process of wrestling with a new toy, unable to master it quite yet.

But then I start to wonder, how would my relationship to learning shift if I saw potential failure as the beginning of mastery?

Who would I be a year from now if I walked over the wall, picked up the toy I threw and forced myself to sit with it and figure it out?

And what if I did all of this not out of fear of failure, but for love of building that future version of me?

Take care of each other, mi gente.

Jeremiah