Yesterday I picked up my phone to send a message. It was blocked.
“Try again in 15 minutes,” the screen read.
Ugh. Toddlers.
They never give up.
I’m not sure if it was my three-year old or my two-year old; it most certainly wasn’t my two-month year old. The first two, however, are constantly trying to hack my phone. They want in, and they try to crack the passcode often.
I don’t even know how many times you have to get the password wrong before it deactivates for 15 minutes — a lot.
They’re tenacious little things.
Tenacious.
I recently attended New Frontiers, a three day conference that gathers entrepreneurs, investors, policy experts and government decision-makers together to discuss how to create global impact from New Zealand.
One of the speakers, Naval Ravikant, a well-known investor and entrepreneur, spoke about some of the fundamental challenges and opportunities in education and how we might approach them through technology.
The main opportunity is not educating our children, but in teaching adults how to learn again.
If we give kids tools (tablets, computers, devices, etc.), they are extremely capable of figuring them out. Yet when we give adults the same tools, they aren’t nearly as capable of playing with them and fumbling up the learning curve as little kids do.
This made me think of my little ones always trying to get into my phone. From observing that process I’ve seen that:
- They keep trying new combinations
- They fail fast
- They don’t get upset with each additional failure
- They still have fun interacting with the device even in its locked state (it vibrates, screen changes colour, etc.). It’s the act of interacting, experimenting and learning which seems to be fun, and not just the desired outcome of getting in.
Sound like a formula us adults could apply to learn a new skill?
My kids constantly remind me that it’s OK to fail, and that I should be pushing the edges of my current skills and knowledge. They will never crack my phone if they stay within their comfort zone and shy away from experimentation. Although they haven’t experienced the magic yet, I’m sure they are close.
