What kids can teach us about Goal Directed futures
Our son has just celebrated his fifth birthday and although we don’t make a huge fuss about milestones (the kids get a party every second year), there’s no doubt that he is learning about desired future outcomes and goals. I doubt he is different from most kids in his ability to spot something and declare with wholesome intensity ‘Ohhh – I’m so gonna get that…’. What I enjoy is his reaction when he doesn’t in fact ‘get that’.
He just moves on. What he is learning to do is separate the desirable from the worthy and that is a clue many of us can take from kids. The REALLY desireable goals can lead to kiddie meltdown whereas the distracting short term ‘so so’ goals hold minimal emotional attachment. The lesson adults can remind themselves of, is the ability to ignore the distracting and focus on the big issue. Setting goals may require small steps to achieve a large one, but it rarely requires getting lots of small things in order to achieve a large thing.
Activity versus productivity. Kids by and large live and let live – they move easily onto the next thing at hand. As parents our key jobs might be ensuring we do NOT teach them to get hung up on the minor things that aren’t that important. Most responses kids have are learned behaviours – from the fear of the dark, phobia of spiders, and even the foods they eat, kids typically build most of their understanding based on how they see us react and act.
If they see us all frantic and impulsive that is a key attribute they learn to mimic. If they see us not plan or see us fail think about our own future, that too is a habit they learn to mimic. If they see us setting goals, working hard to overcome obstacles and importantly, showing that we are able to discern the important from the merely attractive, it is likely they’ll also mimic that approach to their own world.
Right now our son Flynn is learning about being Goal Directed. Thankfully to date, he can focus on goals that matter, not just goals that are interesting – I hope we don’t teach him ‘out of’ that approach to the world.
The link below will take you to the audio of the discussion I had with Annie Gaffney on ABC Radio Sunshine Coast the day after the Opposition released its Broadband policy. There’s been much discussion about the perceived value or otherwise, and I flag my bias here upfront: As a small business owner likely to…
Read More >In the article I link to below, Diana G Oblinger, the President of EDUCAUSE offers the Higher Ed community some insights such as this one: we’ve moved on from the Information Age and are now in the Connected Age. Such a statement will come as quite a shock for many Higher Education Institutions and policy…
Read More >In case you haven’t heard, technology is making so many jobs redundant, that only the adaptable will survive. And when I say ‘jobs redundant’ I mean across EVERY conceivable industry and level of specialisation. Robotic surgery is now so good that not only can it be done remotely, it can be done without human intervention.…
Read More >Coca Cola, Lion Nathan and Schweppes have successfully challenged the Northern territory’s compulsory container deposit recycling scheme in the Federal Court. The scheme had seen recycling rates jump by 30% in just a few months and was widely applauded by the public as the right thing to do. Despite the overwhelming public support, Coca Cola…
Read More >If you’re looking for an accelerated course in Strategic Planning and Advanced Management techniques in the Philippines in July, then TruEventUs has a two day session coming up on the 4th and 5th of June. Marcus Barber, founder of The Australian Strategic Planning Institute will facilitate this intensive program. For full details You can…
Read More >Without putting too fine a point on it, most of us pay little attention to what we ‘deposit’ in our toilets each time the body needs to exit our bodily waste. And yet with a looming phosphate shortage around the world (along with other useful components) our personal waste streams are worth billions of dollars…
Read More >As co presenter of the ‘Future Matters’ series with the National Geographic Channel back in 2004, I discussed the idea of Rapid Prototyping or 3D Printing. At that stage, 3D printers were like very large office photocopiers and the better ones had starting prices of around $150,000. I stated that in the near future, people…
Read More >In tracking shifts across the world and across industries, the rise of Crowdsourcing continues to unleash some amazing innovations in products and services. Importantly it is exposing the capability gaps that even large organisations have. Simply put, the ‘crowd’ is always going to be bigger than your business or organisation. But to tap that latent…
Read More >Allow me to flag my bias from the outset – I’m tinged green. My shade of green recognises that my actions can contribute to a cleaner or more polluted world and that overall, I’d prefer the cleaner version. There’s a huge amount of data that shows that as a species we haven’t been looking after…
Read More >The burgeoning shift in the manufacturing sector has been coming for a touch over a decade and has, I would suggest, now reached your front gate. A whole confluence of factors that include 3D printing, Crowdsourcing, home engineering and freescale Idea Generation leveraging social funding approaches means that EVERY single aspect of manufacturing as we…
Read More >