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To my grandchildren: how you can lead a happy and fulfilled life

A few weeks ago, my daughter asked me to write a letter to her children, my grandchildren, laying out what it will take for them to lead a happy and fulfilled life. Here’s what I came up with:

My dear grandchildren, all three of you are delightful young characters. Each of you is different, with your own characters and personalities, your own natural strengths, and areas where you are much less comfortable. You are lucky to have wonderful parents, who know how to get the best out of you. And they are lucky that you take advantage of all they have to offer you.

As you make your way through your teenage years, like all teenagers there’s so much exploring you do. Some of it fills you with anxiety, and setbacks occur. And some fills you with excitement, as your achievements give you the confidence to continue being bold and courageous. In among these it’s very impressive to see you are with those who have been playing leadership roles.

Who knows what each of you will end up doing after you go through your studies and enter the workplace? Any by the way there’s no rush to decide. Keep up the great variety of learning experiences you are going through, from the academic to the sport, music, dancing, community work, travel and others.

So what advice can I give you? Alongside all the skills you are getting hold of, so significant is how you behave – with yourself and with everyone around you. Those who do well in life, who feel comfortable interacting with other human beings, of whatever age, occupation, nationality and so on, will always be way ahead of those who find it harder to do so. It may be because they are shy, perhaps because they prefer to just get on with doing tasks quietly on their own, but for whatever reason they’ll really be missing out.

So what kind of behaviour is helpful, and what is unhelpful? You already know a lot about this, from your own experiences. So think about what has worked well for you, what has not… and why. This within the family, with school and other friends, and beyond. What lessons have you learned? How have you got better? Where can you still improve?

I remember quite some years ago when your mother and I were with you two brothers in London, and as we were walking along the street you started nagging each other. As I was watching you I decided to help you stop. Here’s how I suggested you go about it.

Each of us has a sense of whether we are “OK” or “Not OK”. What does that mean? If I think I am “OK”, I feel comfortable with myself and don’t need to go around making others feel uncomfortable. But that is if I also think that you are “OK”. And surely between the two of you, both are very much so – as the years since then have shown you to fully accept.

The next bit, which works together with this, is you get on with those who are younger or older, more senior or more junior – as it is between you elder and younger brothers. Do the older and more senior ones treat the younger or more junior ones, as “parents” treat “children”? Or, never mind these differences, do they treat them as just another good person?

The way this can be described is that they behave neither as “parents” (never mind “stern parents”) nor as children (never mind “naughty children”), but as “adults” – sober, mature characters who have good conversations that lead to good results.

The “So what?” of this behaviour should be that everyone ends up in a good place. To put it simply, they get to “Win-Win”. This is what emotional intelligence is all about, a vital skill to develop. If you do, then people will be attracted to you – you will be a great team member, and a great leader of teams. And if you don’t, as many do not, you will find it very much harder to live a happy and fulfilled life.

I also wrote about the need to be humble, while enjoying one’s competencies. I urged them to be curious, asking questions and not just spouting their own views. I’m happy my grandchildren have a strong sense of humour and enjoy plenty of laughter. Where there is this lightness, it so reinforces emotional intelligence, making it much easier to work and play together.

I asked my grandchildren to think about it all, to chat with each other, and to get back to me. The way it worked out was that my daughter read my letter to each of her children separately, and this led to good conversations between them. As I hope it does between you and relevant relatives.

Upward appraisal Dan

I recently came across this short note from my son Dan at the time he was in America at college in around 1990. Even though we weren’t then living together, he wrote, he felt my presence around in his head, and this in the form of good memories of long talks, lectures, skits and jokes over dinner. He went on to say that the things he had learned from me have given him more real-life information and a way of clear thinking and problem-solving than any college course or person ever could.

Why did I decide to share with you what he wrote to me all those years ago? It’s because it occurred to me that he was offering me what one might call an “upward appraisal”. My performance as a father was top of the scale, he reckoned, in both the closeness and warmth of our relationship and in my helping him to develop as a young man.

Well, as a parent I was so fortunate to have two children who never went through rebellious times, and who were trustworthy. OK, it was much to do with how we treated them, but that isn’t guaranteed to lead to happy outcomes. They were easy to support in whatever they wanted to do without us having to act as stern, curtailing parents, and we enjoyed our cheerful friendship.

The big bonus for me, as I explained when I was giving my talk at the Engage 14 event in 2017, was that my “leadership style” with Dan and his sister Amy strongly influenced how I emerged as a leader in my professional life.

So now let me ask you to what extent your children share with you how they assess the way you behave with them. Is there sufficient openness for them to identify areas where they would like you to act differently? To ask more than tell? To appreciate more than criticise? To support rather than inhibit? While for you, are you skilled at communicating to them what it would take for such changes to indeed take place? I often talk and write about the importance of exchanging offers and requests, and here’s such an important place for that to occur in, so that agreements are reached and changes for the better take place.

It might be that someone else can become involved, an uncle or a grandmother, a sibling or a non-relative, who first listens to both sides’ “appraisals” separately and then brings parent and child together. (For me, it was my Uncle Alex, my father’s elder brother.)

Sadly, as many of my readers are aware, my son Dan died in 1993, at the age of 22, so our relationship on this earth was forced to end. His spirit lives on though, and just like he told me I inspired him as he was growing up he continues to inspire me. He would have been in his fifties now, as his sister Amy also is, and so now let share how she and I sometimes interact.

The term that immediately occurs to me is “mutual mentoring”. Just like I have continued mentoring her over the decades, she and I have been relaxed about what’s become known as “inverse mentoring”, as she is permanently concerned about my wellbeing. Usually, it’s to reinforce that how I am approaching some issue is very OK, but sometimes it’s to offer an alternative perspective.

That requires some boldness, but happily Amy’s emotional intelligence is such that she knows how to express her views in ways that are least likely to simply generate pushback from this old man. The more the differences between us on a particular issue, the more we are likely to laugh about it and, well, sometimes I cave in and sometimes I hold firm.

Readers of mine also know only too well that I love what are called Adult-Adult relationships over Parent-Child ones, as these are much more likely to be constructive and solution-oriented, resulting in both being better off as a result.

Let me now therefore invite you, as a mother or a father, to reach out to your children and ask them how they feel about the way you interact with them. See what they like about your attitudes and behaviour and should continue the way they are, and what they would wish to be different. Let me also ask the sons and daughters who are reading this to reach out to your parents in a similar way.

Rebellious teenagers: generational overgeneralisations

The way people are examining Gen Z mindsets these days one would imagine that the term “rebellious teenager” was coined just the other day. But no. It came about in the Post World War II 1950s, by when a new category between childhood and adulthood had already been identified. Beyond that surely this is a timeless and global phenomenon, with a whole spectrum from the over-compliant to the over-resentful along the centuries of mankind.

For me generational generalisations have always been overstated, as are others between genders, levels of education, national and regional cultures and elsewhere. Surely, when you look back on your teenage years you relate at least somewhat to the contemporary teenage phenomenon? Weren’t you considered over-ambitious by your elders, unduly impatient to get ahead? Didn’t you enjoy music and fashion that were in ostentatious contrast to those your parents found appealing?

My generation is too old to be among the “baby boomers” who emerged following the Second World War and are renowned for their stability and structures. No, I am one of the “Silent Generation”, who apparently just did as we were told as we worked in factories and farms and were restrained conformists. Really? Me? I don’t think so. Surely I too wanted to be included and to have my voice heard. So that when it was I felt motivated and engaged and when it was not I retreated and under-performed.

Having entered the IT industry in 1967 at the launch of my career I was exposed to a sector that enjoyed much flatter and more fluid organisational pyramids than most. For with the rapid succeeding generations of technology, many disruptively replacing their predecessors, there was no room for insufficient respect downwards or excessive respect upwards. We all had to just deal with the challenges, accepting that some did so better than others.

When I read about Millennials and GenZs in the workplace and how impatient they are with so many of their bosses, I recall clearly how early in my career I knew by leadership style would be dramatically different from that of some of my much more instruction-giving bosses, relics of earlier eras – and often former army officers from during the Second World War.

Then there’s the whole onset of digitisation, with the transformation of relationships and now living one’s life through one’s phone. But does that mean we analogue oldies are stuck back in our antiquated silos? Do I not upload these columns to LinkedIn and Facebook, and chew away at my WhatsApp messages 24/7?

And what about the consequences of Covid, leading to the acceleration of the virtual world? Did I not get aboard the Skype and the Zoom and the TEAMS buses to survive in this 2st century? Of course I did. Like everyone around me of all generations I must be ever mindful of my e-traffic, knowing I am expected to be highly responsive. It’s very challenging, yes, but there’s no choice unless I am to just retire to the village and look after my goats.

Having said all that I must accept that digital natives – and in particular my grandson Githuku – play the role of inverted mentors to me, guiding me and sorting out my sticking points. What comes to him with easy intuition is often a struggle for me, but continuous learning by doing is the name of the game, keeping calm and assuming I will find my way through.

Have I been ahead of my times as a leader? I guess so. I was fortunate in that my father led Shell’s worldwide management training division in London as I was growing up, and this exposed me to the emerging styles of collaborative and adaptive leadership. It was the norm for Shell, and it became the norm for me. I have also always been a protocolophobic, insisting on just being called Mike and wanting to just call others by their first name too.

We must accept, however, that there are still so many tut-tutting baby-boomers and others who feel quite frustrated by the attitudes and behaviours of their juniors. And much of this is to do with how these juniors have also not learned ways of dealing with them by applying emotional intelligence. That’s what’s needed on both sides, so that we all get to win-win, rather than indulging in “I’m OK – You’re not OK” tussles.

Please keep a sober perspective on all this, assuming there are enjoyable ways of coexisting and realising the benefits of each background.

In school but not learning

In my article today I’m going to share with you how Prof. Olubayi Olubayi cried on my shoulder about the terribly low pass rate for the Kenya National Examinations Council’s (KNEC’s) Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examinations. It’s been bothering him for a long time, and he has now shown me the evidence which, with his academic scrupulousness, he has been compiling.

The KCSE pass mark is C+, which is usually less than 50% of the score in a subject. Prof Olubayi has been studying the KNEC website and media reports on the issue, and here’s the sad reality: since 2016, 80% of Kenyan children fail their KCSE after twelve years of schooling, meaning only two out of ten students pass. This with the exception of 2017 and 2018, when only one out of ten passed.

“Imagine a business that manufactures products,” Prof Olubayi lamented, “but where only two out of ten are good enough to sell. How long would such a business last?” That is the situation in Kenya, despite our hugely expensive public education system. The Government spends approximately 20% of its annual budget on this broken system, with the amount allocated for 2023/2024 being Shs.628 billion.

He went on to explain that there are many reasons for this mass failure – while adding that solutions do exist. Kenya has achieved near universal school attendance, but not universal learning, which reminded me of how the difference between diversity and inclusiveness has been described: diversity shows an invitation to the party, while inclusiveness sees you being invited to dance.

Prof. Olubayi concluded that the country is funding failure, where the victims are the majority of children, inevitably resulting in lowered development potential for the country.

If you ask Kenyans, whether well-educated professionals or ordinary citizens, to guess the pass rate for KCSE – as Prof Olubayi has been consistently doing – most suggest 70% or 80%. But as we see, the reality is very different. Sadly, most of the 20% who pass went to private primary schools or academies for their foundation primary schooling of Grades 1 to 3. Almost all the children of the truly poor, who cannot afford private primary schools, simply fail after attending school for twelve years. They attend, but they do not learn.

On January 20th 2023, the Nation ran the headline “The majority of 2022 KCSE students get low grades”. It was referring to the results that had just been officially announced by the CS Education, who stated that only 173,345 out of the 881,416 students who’d sat the Grade 12 (Form Four) national examination had passed with a C+ or above. This translates to a 20% pass rate, where C+ is the minimum Grade 12 national examination score that qualifies one to study for a degree programme at a university.

The low pass rate of only 22% for 2023 is the highest in the last 8 years. By comparison, in Mauritius – which has the best education system in Africa – the pass rate for the school certificate examination in 2022 was 78%. The pass rate in Malaysia is 55%. The percentage of students passing GCSE in the UK with a grade of C or higher was 73%, and those attaining a grade of A or A+ was 26% – which is higher than those passing with a C+ or higher in Kenya. In France, the pass rate for the baccalaureate is usually around 80%.

It is for these reasons that in 2012 Prof Olubayi created Kiwimbi, an NGO learning centre focused on interventions to raise the pass rates in primary and secondary schools in Kenya.

There they use the “Teach at the Right Level” (TaRL) method of the Indian NGO Pratham, in combination with “spaced-repetition”, a learning technique typically performed with flashcards, and they are obtaining excellent results. In the 2023 KCPE results one of the primary schools next to Kiwimbi in Amagoro had more than half the students score more than 300 points – a performance as good as that of our best private primary schools. The same methods are being deployed elsewhere in rural western Kenya, with similarly encouraging results in secondary schools.

Other interventions include persuading principals of selected boarding schools to respect the science of learning by allowing students to sleep for 8 hours, removing calculators, promoting general reading, and tutoring students in small groups.

Learn more about how kiwimbi operates and the impact it has been achieving by going to their website, www.kiwimbi.org. And beyond just browsing it, how can you help it to go to scale in its mission of transforming our pass rates? Surely together we can do so much better.

My son Dan and me, 30 years on

Dan and me in front of his Land Rover in Malawi, 1989

Tomorrow it will be 30 years since my son Dan was killed in Somalia at the age of 22. Dan was a Reuters photojournalist there and he, along with Hos Maina, Anthony Macharia and Hansi Kraus, was attacked with sticks and stones by an angry mob infuriated by the bombing from an American helicopter of a house in Mogadishu where a number of Somali leaders were meeting.

Yes, we knew Dan was operating in dangerous territory, but just as he was confident of his ability to thrive there, we too were hopeful that he would come to no harm.

He was having the time of his life, not only seeing his photos featured prominently in leading global newspapers and magazines — including a double-page spread in Newsweek — but also enjoying selling his T-shirts and postcards, and later a whole book of his photos to diplomats, American soldiers and others.

Dan also ventured into parts of Mogadishu where no one else dared go, including having fun with children, earning the nickname “The Mayor of Mogadishu”.

Dan was one of the media people on the beach who witnessed the cautious landing of the American troops, which became a source of ridicule.

Then, suddenly, this wonderful young man was gone. Who knows how his life would have unfolded had he remained with us?

What would he be up to now in his early 50s? I sometimes idly speculate about that, but mainly I keep focused on how he had been living and hardly on the tragic circumstances of his death.

These days it is not uncommon for funerals to be the “celebration of life” of the person who passed away, and this is how we remembered Dan at his service – which we held at Corner Baridi behind the Ngong Hills, on the land of the Maasai family whom Dan had been helping.

From then I have continued celebrating my son’s life, and the great influence he has had on me — and others — through his vibrant and positive inspiration.

After Dan died, I sought a way to immortalise the essence of Dan by developing the character of young people — something both he and I were active in our own ways.

What emerged was The Dan Eldon Place Of Tomorrow, The DEPOT, which we launched in 1994 as a centre for outdoor experiential learning for youth and evolved into broader management consulting.

Our ethos at The DEPOT reflects how Dan expected his life to unfold and also how I live mine. It is to “have a good time doing good things”, and looking back on our years together I know we reinforced each other in this regard.

There are two thoughts I, therefore, wish to leave you with. The first is that when a close relative passes away, yes it is a time to grieve, to feel sad about the loss of a wonderful person whom you loved dearly.

After my son was killed in Mogadishu, my mind naturally brooded on what happened then — and not least on the American helicopter that I learned hovered above the scene where he was being beaten to death and only landed to pick up his body.

But it turned out that I found it possible to instruct myself to switch away from all that and to focus on his wonderful life rather than on his awful death: on his delightful sense of humour, his artistic talent, his great sense of curiosity and adventure, his spirit of helping others.

From time to time when I talk with someone who has recently lost a close relative, I encourage them to write about the person, perhaps including through poetry, to celebrate their life and the relationship they enjoyed with them.

But also so the memories of the person and what they shared with them can be preserved. And finally, to act as therapy.

My second thought is to encourage all to assume that having a good time is absolutely compatible with doing good things.

Too many believe that doing good things in one’s work, important things, cannot be with a light touch. Not true, as Dan and I have found.

On the contrary, if you are enjoying what you are doing, and helping others to do so, much better outcomes will prevail.

All of us lose loved ones, and at whatever age they pass away we grieve. But pause to also celebrate their lives, and to reflect on how they have uplifted you.

Obama the “Adult”

In my last article I analysed Donald Trump’s ego state, describing him as a deeply insecure man who was formed by his unhappy childhood where he was bullied by his domineering father and neglected by his absent mother. Trump’s “I’m OK, You’re not OK” behaviour, I wrote, masks his “I’m not OK, You’re OK” interior; while his “controlling parent” style of leadership, always seeking to win at the expense of others, is actually that of a spoilt child.

This was in the context of Eric Berne’s and Thomas Harris’s Transactional Analysis frameworks, and now, as Trump’s successor has just been inaugurated, I wish to carry out a similar dive into the ego state of his predecessor, Barrack Obama. What a dramatic contrast! We’ve enjoyed many opportunities to observe and admire President Obama in action, and my respect for him has been greatly reinforced as I read his wonderful 706-page autobiography A Promised Land over the holidays.

In it Obama reveals himself as having the healthiest of ego states. At the family level he is a nurturing parent to his children, while from when they were young he has respected and reinforced the “adult” in them as he replied to their questions and listened to their views. He is also at ease playing with them as child-to-child. As for his relationship with his wife Michelle it is clearly one of adult-adult rather than parent-child. Between them all a sense of “I’m OK, You’re OK” prevails, leading to win-win all round – true role models for a happy family life.

What about Obama as the leader of America, the most powerful man in the world? What struck me repeatedly in the book was how solution-oriented this extraordinary man is, always working to develop a better America and a better world. But without being unrealistically Utopian, without allowing the best to be the enemy of the good. As he learned more about domestic and international politics, he accepted that he was dealing largely with politicians for whom life is all about manoeuvring through zero-sum games rather than win-win ones.

He writes with utmost self-awareness, honesty and humility (not least when sharing his feelings that he was not really worthy of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize), but his straightforward and balanced assessments of his life in the White House speak very much of an “I’m OK” self-esteem, coupled with a “You’re OK” mindset towards those around him in the White House. At all times he is “the adult in the room”, and yet refreshingly “the child within” is alive, as he jokes and plays basketball with his staff and – not least when most needed – lightens the atmosphere.

The epitome of emotional intelligence, he knows when to separate how he feels from how he behaves when dealing with those who have behaved irresponsibly and whom he would like to hammer but appreciates it won’t help resolve an issue or protect a challenging relationship. But when needed he does reveal his “stern parent”… also knowing how to help a subsequent healing.

Obama remains overwhelmingly calm – certainly externally and usually internally – always looking for ways to move a situation forward. Whatever decisions he makes, whatever the outcome, he fully appreciates that he will inevitably receive damning criticism from all and sundry, however ill-informed or ill-motivated. He will be accused of having done too much or too little, too soon or too late, but he takes it all in his stride, accepting that never mind not being able to please all the people all the time, as President of the United States you can hardly ever please anyone.

But he does his best, knowing that nothing will work out fully as intended, that there will always be unintended consequences, and hoping that the long term positive outcomes will somehow eventually speak for themselves.

By contrast to Trump, whose father played such a crucial role in his dysfunctional development, Obama had no relationship with his father. It was his anthropologist mother and her mother who were the dominant figures in forming the Barrack we know. He was exposed to multiple countries, cultures and religions from an early age and they nurtured the healthiest of values and aspirations in the boy.

I cannot end this article without imploring you to read Obama’s autobiography. It will inspire and uplift you, leaving you filled with admiration for how he coped with the scale, complexity and variety of challenges that a US president must handle 24/7. No wonder Trump failed as miserably as he did. And no wonder Obama’s legacy lives on.

Mike Eldon is chairman of management consultancy The DEPOT, and co-founder of the Institute for Responsible Leadership. [email protected]

 www.mike-eldon.com

Analysing impact of spoilt child in Trump

As I have written in several previous articles in this column – the most recent of which was my opening one for 2012 – in much of what I do I refer to the pioneering Transactional Analysis work of Eric Berne, which he laid out in his 1964 book, Games People Play. I am also inspired by Thomas Harris, whose 1967 book I’m OK-You’re OK built on Berne’s thinking.

Berne analysed social interactions – or “transactions” as he described them – to determine our “ego state”, and he built on this to help us understand how we behave and hence to do so more positively. The three ego states he identified are “parent”, “child” and “adult”, noting that how these are manifested in each of us is largely a function of our early childhood experiences.

We all display aspects of these three states. Some are positive – like the nurturing or caring “parent” in us, or the spontaneous, fun-loving “child”; and some are negative – like the controlling or neglectful “parent”, or the irresponsible “child”. And then there is the ‘adult” within – the sober, rational, mature part of us.

As I wrote in an earlier column, Transactional Analysis also divides us humans into four categories, relating to how, generally, we feel about ourselves and about others. The first is “I’m not OK, You’re OK”. This is how we are born, utterly dependent on our mothers. And it is in this mindset where a vast majority of the world’s population exists until they die. The second state is “I’m OK, You’re not OK”, and you can guess the other two: “I’m not OK, You’re not OK”; and finally “I’m OK, You’re OK”.

Aligned with each of these options comes an expectation regarding winning and losing. So for instance the insecure “I’m not OK, You’re OK” character foresees a life of “lose-win”, while the confident, optimistic “I’m OK, You’re OK” one assumes they can indulge in give-and-take negotiating that leads to “win-win”.

Now let me come to why I am returning to these frameworks for my opening column of 2021. It’s because of how I have been observing the behaviour of Donald Trump, which I have been doing ever since, out of sheer curiosity, I attended one of his campaign rallies back in 2016.

To the casual observer Trump displays an extreme “I’m OK, You’re not OK” ego state, always expecting to win, no matter how, while enjoying seeing others lose at his expense. And he is the stern, controlling “parent”, while all around him are dependent “children” – either compliant or terrible. Yes?

Well yes and no. However much he behaves as “I’m OK, You’re not OK”, it is merely a cover for how he feels and who he really is.

So how does he feel, and who is he? Sad to say, the outgoing POTUS is a desperately insecure soul, as was so vividly confirmed by his niece Mary Trump in her book about him, Too Much and Never Enough. Deep down he’s an “I’m not OK, You’re OK” character, now acting the spoilt child rather than the parent; the villain complaining he is the victim.

Trump’s niece, a psychologist by profession, explains her uncle’s development by telling us about his controlling father – who, she wrote, had no real human feeling and treated his children with contempt; while Trump’s mother was largely absent from his life. His deep-seated insecurities created in him “a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s soaked it in,” Mary Trump explains.

Like me, I suppose that you too have come across such characters – maybe another politician, maybe a boss or a relative. Needless to say the more extreme the case the less chance there is that they can be helped to reach a better balance within themselves and with others. But for those with more moderate such tendencies I have found that once the three frameworks are laid out for them an “aha moment” arises, enabling them to transform their previous self-defeating behaviour, treating it as the unwanted baggage it is and enabling them to enter a new and more fulfilled existence.

Before I close, let me wish you an “adult”, “I’m OK, You’re OK”, “win-win” new year – and preview that in my next column I will be gazing at Trump’s predecessor through my Transactional Analysis lens.

It’s wise to accept that you don’t have all the answers

As my readers are aware I am a great advocate for emotional intelligence, in which context I often talk about how we are sometimes challenged to separate how we feel from how we behave. This allows us to act in ways that keep our interactions and relationships positive, by finding the strength to overcome feelings such as anger and hurt, embarrassment and inhibition.

So this recent post on Adam Grant’s LinkedIn page caught my eye: “A core skill of emotional intelligence is treating your feelings as a rough draft. Like art, emotions are works in progress. It rarely serves you well to frame your first sketch. As you gain perspective, you can revise what you feel. Sometimes you even start over from scratch.”

Wise words for those of us who take pride in just “saying what we think”, in “being straightforward”.

So who is Adam Grant? He is an American psychologist and author, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who was made a tenured professor at the amazingly young age of 28.

I was first made aware of Prof Grant by my daughter, after he spoke to the parents and teachers at her children’s school in California where she is a board member, and after which she sent me a recording of his presentation on how to develop a next generation of creatives.

His first advice was to go easy on rules. Rather, share guidelines based on values, recognising those who abide by them and act as role models for them. Indeed the youngsters should be encouraged to challenge existing rules and guidelines, but of course in a respectful and constructive way.

Next he is against specialisation, in either the arts or the sciences – noting that some of the most prominent Nobel Prize winners in the sciences indulged in painting, piano playing, poetry writing and other artistic sidelines. Recognise those who, like the Nobel heroes, excel at creative problem solving in multiple fields.

Both teachers and parents should readily admit that they don’t have all the answers, and they should be encouraged to ask advice from the children, who in turn should feel free to speak up without fear of being unduly criticised. Neither the elders nor the young ones should be afraid to push back, on the understanding that we are all “work in progress”. At home as in school, it’s OK for children to be exposed to and to participate in disagreements, away from the notion that the parent/teacher is “always right”. Being exposed to civil discussion is good for the emotional development and wellbeing of the children.

Grant also asked the parents and teachers to pay attention to how they display their values through their behaviour, both with each other and with the children. And in commenting to their children about their behaviour they should talk about values, nurturing and reinforcing behaviour that is moral, generous and caring.

“Ask your children whom they helped today, how they acted as helpers,” I heard Grant propose. “And get them to reflect on what kind of persons they are; what they did that was creative in the last few days; what made them happy.”

Finally, he cautioned parents and teachers to neither be too soft – which would spoil the children; nor too hard, which would make them feel inadequate and ashamed. Yes, there should be high expectations, and where the children fall short that should not be ignored. But not at the expense of recognising their successes and strengths.

Much of this is incorporated in Grant’s best-selling 2016 book, Originals, which I couldn’t recommend more strongly. For in it he goes much further in explaining how the way we are treated when we are young determines how we develop when we become adults – what kind of activity we seek and enjoy, and how successful and fulfilled we become.

Above all he focuses on what it takes to be bold enough to challenge the status quo, to be a non-conformist creative and to speak up, to stick with your new ideas … and so to be one of the “originals” about whom he writes and whom he celebrates in his book.

Malcolm Gladwell, whose book Talking to Strangers I wrote about some months ago, is one of my favourite thinkers… and I am not surprised that Grant is one of his.