"Big Brain" Trips & Discovering What Lights Up Your Child

In this issue: Nurturing your kids' creativity, encouraging their interests and sharing something old and something new.

"Helping parents raise money-smart kids."

3 Ideas to Share & Save
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Hello, friends!

I'm excited to share this week's ideas with you.

So let's dive right in!

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"Big Brain" Trips: Richard Feynman, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum physics, was one of America's great twentieth-century intellects. He played a key role at Los Alamos as a member of The Manhattan Project, and his stunningly simple demonstration before an investigating committee exposed stonewalling NASA executives and revealed what caused the Challenger space shuttle to explode after launch in 1986.

Feynman's dad fostered his curiosity early, emphasizing an idea that echoes what we examined last week — knowing about versus just knowing.

Similarly, podcast guest Courtney Fulmer discusses nurturing a child's natural creativity with the following travel concept. (Feynman even came up in our conversation!)

I'm probably not telling you anything you don't know when I say the more our kids are exposed to the world, the more they make sense of it. Still, I share these videos because I appreciate essential reminders, and I hope you do, too.

Now back to Feynman, who taught one of the most famous courses on physics at Caltech, here in my backyard. His book based on his lectures, Six Easy Pieces, is a wonderful work that makes complex topics accessible. Ironically, Feynman was also adamant that real learning happened outside the classroom — through personal experience. (Sound familiar? 😉) Upon second thought, thinking about Feynman's father's advice, perhaps this stance wasn't so ironic.

"Very few people can simply watch an instructional video or hear something explained and then know, backward and forward, how to do it. Most of us actually have to do something several times in order to truly learn."

—Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, The Daily Stoic

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Lights Up: Josh Waitzkin was a chess prodigy and the subject of Searching for Bobby Fischer, a film starring Sir Ben Kingsley as his coach and Joe Mantegna as his father.

Waitzkin's real dad was instrumental in his son's progress, following the timeless advice podcast guest Jon Acuff shared with us several weeks ago about leaning into what lights up our children.

Being a chess prodigy is remarkable, but you might be surprised that Waitzkin later became an international Tai Chi champion. As it turns out, what lights him up goes beyond chess. So while Waitzkin wasn't a Tai Chi prodigy, he leveraged the love of learning gained during his chess days to achieve success in an entirely different realm.

I'm grateful Waitzkin's father supported and encouraged his son's initial interest because Waitzkin's excellent book, The Art of Learning, inspired my own. In the following passage, you'll hear more than an echo of what we often discuss here (bold emphasis mine).

"While a fixation on results is certainly unhealthy, short-term goals can be useful developmental tools if they are balanced within a nurturing long-term philosophy. Too much sheltering from results can be stunting. The road to success is not easy or else everyone would be the greatest at what they do — we need to be psychologically prepared to face the unavoidable challenges along our way, and when it comes down to it, the only way to learn how to swim is by getting in the water."

Our money-smart journeys begin with short-term experiences like setting and saving for goals, trying out "the waiting period" and circling back with our kids to reflect on purchases they've made. While in the long term, we want to encourage them to develop those essential habits we discussed last week.

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Weekly Wisdom: This week I want to share something new and something old.

First, here's some modern wisdom from podcast guest Chelsea Brennan.