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Hey, this is Sharan Trivatsa. Welcome back to the Business School podcast. In this episode, I'm going to teach you how to raise decent kids. Now, this may probably be one of my most vulnerable episodes because I'm going to share with you the exact playbook that my wife and I have thought about on how to raise decent kids. I hope this is helpful to you. I'm going to break it down step by step, starting right now. One thing is for certain, just because it's tried and true doesn't mean it's working right now. So the big question is this. Where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and the exact how to. How to grow your business, how to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth. That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharan Srivatha, and welcome to Business School. If I were really good at marketing, I would have actually titled this podcast how to Raise Great Kids. And I would have gotten a whole lot of good comments and a whole lot of virality and a whole lot of hate simultaneously because, like, who the heck is this guy telling me what to do? But if you are a parent and you are raising children right now, I want to tell you about the one thing that I've learned that has completely changed how I and my wife raise our children. And. And this may be the. Probably the best piece of advice I could give you because it's my own learning and only I can give you this information. So let me tell you the story and I will give you the five key lessons that I've learned in this process. The story is, me and a few of my friends were hanging out and our children were there. And one of my friends started saying things like, hey, you kids have it so easy. You know, when you. And when my dad and I were younger, we had to work so much harder for all the things we need to get. You guys have so easy. You just lay back and you play video games and you jump in the pool and you get new clothes and you have fancy shoes and you can go on trips and you fly first class. And he goes, you guys have it so easy. And as I sat there, it kind of irked me because I didn't quite know why. Then I realized that, yeah, many of our kids do have it easy. But if you think about it right, we think that the reason we are good, we think that the reason we succeeded is because we went through hard things. And I think that is Correct. When you go through hard things, you learn this innate skill of doing hard things. And when you do that, other things don't seem as hard, so you're able to conquer them, right? There's no person who got successful because of a silver spoon in their mouth. They went through and did hard things. Now, the hard things that possibly you and I were given as parents, that maybe you had a struggling childhood, maybe you grew up with not a lot of money, maybe you had a tough, you know, household with parenting, maybe you had to walk three miles to get to school, maybe you didn't get a lot of resources, maybe you didn't have a good school, maybe you didn't have great teachers, maybe you didn't, you know, have a lot of job opportunity, Maybe you didn't go to college, maybe you didn't go to high school, maybe you were not good at. At sports, maybe you didn't get picked on, whatever. Like you had to go through hard things, right? Now, if you think about it, so did I. Now, wishing those hard things on our children is dumb. I see parents saying, hey, I went through this hard thing. I went through not having money, so I'm going to get my kids to not have money either. Well, I think that's just absolutely stupid. And let me tell you why. Because I realized that when my wife and I decided to have children, we made one promise to ourselves, and that was to give our children a better life than we had. So we worked extra hard to give our children a better life than we had. So think about the dichotomy in what we're saying, right? On one hand, we know that doing the hard things that we went through is what made us decently successful. But we also make this promise to ourselves that we went through all of these hard things and these hardships, and we don't want our children to go through that. So we want to give our children a better life than we had. Those two kind of views and values can't exist together. Let me say it again. You went through hard things. Therefore, you want your children to go through hard things that you went through. And at the same time, you tell, you know, you as a parent are like, man, I want my children to not go through the struggles that I. That I went through. Those two are in conflict. Now. You have one of two choices. You can either choose to not let those two be in conflict, and you can say, hey, I went through hard things. I. My children are going to go to hard things, period. End of story. That's okay, or you can say, hey, I'm going to give my children a better life. Either way, there's only one constant, and that constant is doing hard things. It was what makes you successful. Doing hard things teaches you how to overcome hard things. And life is full of hard things, because if you did the easy things, you would get the easy result. And the easy result does not involve success, because everyone can do the easy result. And that's the hard part. So the question here is, what are the hard things? How do parents of today, who, me, you, or your friends listening to this, are thinking, wait a minute, I have a decent life. I want to give my children a decent life. I don't want them to go through the trials and the hardships that I went through. How do I make them do hard things? And that's the answer I'm going to give you. Today I look at life in five buckets, and my job is to provide my children opportunities to do hard things. And internally, as a family, we talk about doing hard things. But what is a hard thing? What are the hard things that you can make your children do? Why should you deprive them of money or finances or opportunity, or make them do chores or whatever? Like, is there another way to make them do hard things? And I want to give you five ways. Way number one is to make them learn. Learning is very hard to do because you have to accept that you're a beginner at something. And when you accept that you're not good at something, you realize that there's a lot of humility there and you realize there's a big gap. And now how you fill that gap of actually going from zero knowledge to some knowledge, zero skill to some skill, zero capability. Some capability is a big leap. There's two things that happen there. Thing number one is it allows you to take a everlasting kind of beginner student mindset and says that you probably don't know all the thing all the time, but if you actually put in the effort, if you actually put in the work, if you actually got a coach, if you actually paid attention, you will do better, you will get better. And that winning of the learning is very hard to do, but when you actually get it, you prove to yourself that you did the thing and you learned the thing. There's nothing that we can do to teach our children something like, our children have to learn how to ride a bike themselves. They have to fall and learn how to ride a bike. They have to learn how to do math. They have to learn how to run they have to learn how to play sports, they have to learn how to, how to memorize things, they have to learn new languages. We can help them, we can teach them, we can get them tutoring, but they have to go from 0 to 1. Learning is a very hard thing. And getting our children to do more learning, I found, is a good thing. So I will just talk about what I do and you can do whatever you want. Number one, I get my children to learn. And the more opportunities I put them in for learning, the more I realize that they can adopt this beginner mindset in anything in their life. They have the humility, but they also have the courage that they can learn anything. And that is a superpower, right? That's number one, learning. Number two, focus. What do I mean by focus? Not just to focus on doing something, but focusing on things for a long period of time. Today's TikTok ification of the world has completely degenerated our ability to stay focused in any possible way on any single thing for any long amount of time. I hate it. I will tell you right now, I hate it when my children get iPad time and screen time, when all they do is just swipe and look at these short form videos. And then right after they're done doing that for the first 10 minutes, I can't even talk to them because they're so snappy and they're so, like easily irritable. I actually have to let it go for a while for them to calm down and their brain to reset, which is why I let them watch long form video, I let them watch long movies, I let them read long books. But when I say focused, I want to teach my kids and put themselves, put them in a position where they can focus for a long period of time. For example, my daughter Lara does this, you know, math program outside of school. It was her choice. But sometimes she hates it, sometimes she likes it. But the what we do is every Sunday I, you know, my wife or I sit down with her and she does math for three hours. Now the interesting part there is that that is probably the longest amount of time she focuses on one thing. Teaching people to focus is a really, really important thing. If I could, you know, flip the switch and give my team one skill, it would be extending the amount of time they can focus on a certain thing. So number two is teaching my children how to do hard things is to get them to focus for a long period of time and putting stakes around that. Like if she doesn't finish her math homework, then she's got to, like, have a tough conversation with her after school, math program, whatever, right? And so that focus has now created the ability for her to know that, hey, yeah, I can focus her three hours to do the thing. So, number one, learn. Number two, focus for a long period of time. Number three, my best friend in the world, Leila Hermosian, has this quote which she says, you know, fuck your mood, follow the plan. Like, f your mood, follow the plan. I really like that. F your mood, follow the plan. Because a lot of times we have made a plan on something and then suddenly we don't want to. We don't do it because we don't feel like it. I'll give you an example. My kids know that they have to, I don't know, clean their room, right? And so they will come home and say, well, mom, I know, I know I have to clean my room, but can I just watch, you know, one show and then I'll clean my room? Or let me just finish watching the tv, Let me just finish playing this game and then I'll take the trash out, or let me just do blank first, which is essentially an excuse, and then I'll do the thing that I don't want to do, right? And that is a really great opportunity to teach this, teach people how to follow the plan. Because when a commitment has been made, the mood, right, we have to teach our children to do hard things. And the hard thing is for them to have mind over matter. Their mood right now is not to do a thing, but how can we get them to realize that they have more control over their mood and they can figure out what to do. Now, they may whine and complain, but they will still make the decision to do the thing. And so a lot of times I don't actually turn around and say, no, Neil, no Laura, my children to go do the thing. I just ask, hey, what do you think is the right thing to do? What is the commitment that you made? I make them realize and I make them make the choice of doing the thing. Now, they know that if they don't do the thing, they're going to disappoint me. I'm not raising the stakes. I'm just making them make the decision. Because if it's forced upon you, it's not a choice. But when they have to, like, say, here's my mood. My mood is to not want to do the thing. But now I'm going to go override my mood to go do the thing that actually teaches me that I can do Hard things. So number three is to f your mood, but follow the plan. Number four is to teach them delayed gratification. If I could deliver any skill to the greatest entrepreneurs in the world, my team, my family, my children, it is this idea of impulse control which is just delayed gratification. And what is delay gratification? Sure, it's like following the plan. But more importantly, can you do things today that you know that you're not going to see the win of the things today, Right? And most of us like, if you want six pack abs, you know that if you just intermittent fast for three weeks, you're not going to get six back abs. But those three weeks are so painful. And you're like, man, I look in the mirror and I'm not getting any abs. There's no delayed gratification. You're not willing to wait for this to eventually happen. And us teaching our children delayed gratification is a hard thing. And I want to teach my children as much delayed gratification as I can. If I can teach my children impulse control, saying they want the thing to happen right now. They want to pass the marshmallow test. You know, if you probably heard the Harvard marshmallow test, which is they put kids in a room and they put a marshmallow in a cup in front of them and they say, hey, if you don't touch this marshmallow, if you eat it, you don't get any more marshmallows. But if you wait for five minutes and when I come back, I will give you two marshmallows. Now, there was a very small percentage of the population that actually was able to wait. And those there was a high correlation between those that were able to wait and their massive success in life is because there's this innate trait of you teach delayed gratification, you know, that you can delay getting that joy, getting that success, getting that, you know, that, that dopamine hit. And any opportunity that I get to teach my children delayed gratification, I try to do that. And the way to do that is to actually teach them how to reward themselves right now, right? So one of the things that I teach my kids to reward themselves is to track. So for example, let's say I'll tell you what happened. My daughter wanted to get some help, like starting a YouTube channel. And I said to her, hey, I will help you if you're committed to starting a YouTube channel, but what you need to do is you need to post 30 videos in 30 days. I just wanted to see if she was committed. My daughter Laura is 10 years old. You know what? She posted 30 videos in 30 days without my knowledge, without my help, without my, you know, any inkling of me doing anything. She just took that. She took the delayed gratification. And at the end of that, I would of course give her everything that she wanted because we made the choice. And she saw that if she did that thing over and over and over and over again, she would learn the thing in 30. She delayed gratification for 30 days to get what she wanted. Right now I know that I'm starting to teach her how to do hard things. And last but not least, this is the emotional story that I'll share with you is don't quit teaching them not to quit. And this is the most painful thing. When you have the choice that you can make, when you have the means, you can say, ah, just quit. Don't do that anymore. And I'll give you an example. A few years ago, my son was playing club soccer. And he's a really good kid. Like, he may not be the best soccer player on the. He probably was not the best soccer player on the team at that time. He was probably, I don't know, out of 12 people on the roster, he was probably number eight or nine. So definitely in the bottom quartile. But he was probably the nicest kid on the roster. And the coach treated him so poorly. I mean, to the point where I even had the coach. I talked to the coach, I was like, hey, it looks like you and my son are not getting along. If you have something against him, like, what can he do to improve? What can he do to make this process better for you? And the coach was just downright mean. He was terr. And I would say, probably the worst coach I've ever. Either me or anyone that I've ever seen work with and in, in. In my entire life. But we had made a commitment to the team. And every like three days, three nights a week, I would drive my son to soccer practice. On the way there, he would say nothing. On the way back, he would cry. And I would come home every time and talk to my wife saying, hey, let's pull him out of this, let's pull him out of this. There's no reason. I can't. I personally can't see him do that. But my wife and I agreed that it was one season. It was, you know, 90 days, it was three months. And he needed to stick it out to learn and not to quit. Now, should we have done better? Maybe did we talk about it. Yes. Did we come to a collective agreement as a family for all the other reasons that. Because you're probably judging, saying, oh, I would have done differently, it's not your call. I'm telling you my story where my wife and I agreed that him going through that will make him realize how not to quit. And I will tell you, my son today, he will make references to that team. He's like, hey, this is not even hard. If I could stay on that team for 90 days, I can do anything. The fact that he learned that and he made that the point of how he learned not to quit was a really powerful thing. So if you want to raise decent kids, make them do hard things. Number one, make them learn. Give them opportunities to learn more things, to go from 0 to 1. Make them learn a skill, make them learn a capability. Because when they learn hard things. I'm sorry, when they learn things, they do a hard thing, and that's a really good thing for them. Number two, help them focus for longer periods of time because that is a skill that they can never, ever replace. Number three, F their mood, Follow the plan if they want to. If they can figure out how to self regulate themselves and manage their moods and override their current emotions, they will win. Number four, teach them delayed gratification. Set up things where they can delay their gratification. Just say, hey, if you do this today, I'll give you something tonight. Hey, if you do this for this week, I'll give you something this weekend. Hey, if you do this over next 30 days, I'll get you something then. Whatever they want. What I do is whatever my children ask me for, I just put it. I just put some friction between now and then to delay the gratification. And number five, put them in every possible position to teach him not to quit. Because when you teach them not to quit, you realize that not giving up is the most heroic thing you can do. I really hope this is helpful to you. I didn't have any notes. I just wanted to give you the framework of how me and my wife are raising our children. And maybe some of this is interesting to you overall. If you are a parent, feel free to drop me a line saying that this was interesting to you. If you think that other parents would hear this, please screenshot this and share it. But if I could wipe out all my, possibly all my podcast episodes, I could probably just. This may just live on because this is probably more important than anything else that we do. So if you like this screenshot, this and tag me and I can make more like this for you. Hey, this is Sharon. I have an awesome free gift for you just for listening to the podcast. As you may know, I've got a chance to build two billion dollar companies the hard way. So if you like this episode, you will love getting the exact playbooks from those wins. It's on my sub stack called My Next Billion. It has the exact frameworks I wish someone had given me when I was figuring it all out. Now you get the real lessons from the trenches as I go for a three peat and build the Next billion. So everything's free at My Next Billion dot com. Please check it out. My nextbillion dot com.