Helping your child to achieve greatness

In our society and throughout history, we’ve admired people who have achieved greatness. We respect their tremendous talents and achievements, and we are grateful to them for the contributions they have made to humanity.  Many of these people were born with extraordinary abilities, but many achieved greatness through good old-fashioned grit and hard work

As parents and teachers, we are always looking for the potential in children and trying to nurture that potential.  We all want to help the children under our care achieve greatness. The question is how we can do this. We can start by looking at those who have achieved greatness, see what they can teach us and use them as role models.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, talks about the difference between a job, a career and a calling. Great people don’t just work jobs or pursue careers; they’re guided by callings. A calling is taking on a cause that’s bigger than yourself for the benefit of others. Gandhi thought the people of India should rule themselves and worked to peacefully obtain India’s independence from England. Abraham Lincoln believed that a country dedicated to the principles of freedom and equality should not have millions of its people as slaves and worked to free them. Even today, we see great people taking on great causes.  Decades ago, Elon Musk saw the dangers of global warming and started Tesla to wean people off fossil fuels. His reason for starting SpaceX is the belief that people should colonize other planets as this can ensure the survival of the human race should an extinction level event such as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs ever happen to earth.

How do we help our children find a calling? Bezos offers an important guideline. He says we should ask ourselves what we will be proud of when we look back at our lives when we are 80. He says we’ll be grateful for our gifts (our talents or things we’ve received), but we’ll be proud of our achievements. The calling should be personal and central to who we are. As a child of modest means and raised by a single parent, I was fortunate to receive a full scholarship to attend Phillips Exeter Academy, a very prestigious private high school. There, I not only received a terrific education, but I was impressed by how the students believed they were destined for success. I graduated, wanting all children around the world to have that quality of education and feel empowered that they, too, could achieve anything they wanted in life.

The calling should be big. Recently, I heard Lily Meola sing a song she wrote called “Daydream.” One of the lines in the song says that if your dream doesn’t scare the heck out of you, it’s not big enough. Elon Musk gave an interview in which he said that, even though he invested all the money he made from PayPal into Tesla and SpaceX, he expected to fail in his calling.  The interviewer asked why he would risk everything on something he believed he would fail at.  Musk’s reply was that the calling was so important that the attempt had to be made, even if it wasn’t successful.

Next, your need a plan to follow your calling.  This is important since a calling without a plan is just a wish. This can be very challenging. A great calling is, by definition, something that doesn’t have a proven plan.  If it did, the problem would have already been solved. If you don’t have a complete plan for achieving a great calling, and we wouldn’t expect kids to have such plans, you can follow the guidance of my first business partner and mentor, Zig Ziglar, an internationally-known author and business coach. He advises us to go as far as we can see, and when we get there, we’ll be able to see farther.  We don’t need to see the full path.  We just need a starting path.  For young people, the best starting point is personal growth.  Make yourself better before you make the world better. Learn as much as you can and find good mentors. As a 17-year-old high school graduate with the goal of helping every child in the world get a great education, I had no clue how I was going to achieve that goal. I knew that I wouldn’t achieve that goal by becoming a physicist as I had previously decided to do in high school. So, I changed my major to educational psychology, entered college and wound up getting a PhD from Yale. Along the way, I found the perfect mentor for me, Dr. Robert Abelson, an award-winning psychologist and a pioneer in the field of AI.

The next step is to follow the plan and adapt as needed. This takes dedication and persistence.  A big calling won’t be achieved overnight. First, you need to put yourself on a path to success.  The activities and people you involve yourself with must be consistent with the end result you want to achieve.  When I left Yale, I took a job in business rather than academia since businesses influence the world more than universities do. Later, I started my own R&D company, so I could set my own vision and follow it. Eventually, I started MyEdMaster so I could get more experience working directly with students and improve my ability to teach them.

Along the way, you need to set milestones. As Zig Ziglar always said, don’t confuse activity with accomplishments.  When I meet my team each week, I don’t ask what they did, but what they accomplished. The most important thing, I believe, a parent can do to help their kids achieve greatness is to prepare them for setbacks and obstacles. The bigger the calling, the more of these will happen.  Some will occur because of other people. As Einstein said, great inspiration encounters violent opposition from mediocre minds.  The biggest setbacks may come from circumstances outside your control. Adults may remember exactly what they were doing when 9/11 occurred.  For me, it was looking at new office space. A few days earlier, I had met a billionaire who made a fortune in telecommunications and was in the US to set up a billion-dollar investment fund for humanitarian ventures.  I met him and the fund manager he picked to manage his portfolio. I pitched my vision of how AI could ensure that every kid in the world got a high-quality education and showed him a prototype of what I had in mind. The next day, the fund manager called to read me a letter he received from the investor.  It said to reserve $90 million to invest in my company and another $90 million to expand internationally once my business model was implemented in the US. I was looking for new office space because I was going to have to hire 1000 new employees. 9/11 changed all that.  The global financial markets collapsed, the investor lost a lot of his money, and the investment fund never happened. Needless to say, I was devastated. I went from being on the threshold of achieving my dream to losing it in a matter of days. Shortly thereafter, I was walking my dog, wondering if I should just quit my dream. Then, I realized I had no choice. My calling wasn’t just what I was doing but who I was. There was no way I could ever quit. I realized then that this is what Gandhi and King meant when they said that if a person doesn’t have a cause s/he is willing to die for, s/he isn’t fit to live.  It’s not about taking a bullet for something you believe in. It’s about following a path that without it, you are not being true to your life. It’s that conviction of being on the right path that will carry any person through the toughest times.

Based on those I’ve studied and the lessons I’ve learned in my own life, these are my recommendations to parents. First and foremost, help your kids learn who they are and what they’re good at.  One of the wisest moms I ever met told her daughter, “When you were young, I put you in every activity I could think of because I didn’t know what you would be good and what you’d love.” Help your child find something bigger than himself or herself to get involved in. To achieve greatness, your child needs to think bigger than himself or herself and has to have lots of experience facing overwhelming challenges and continuing to fight on.  Emphasize personal growth and forging ahead in the face of uncertainty. If you’re wondering what to give your kids to help them on this journey, Warren Buffett, arguably the world’s greatest investor, has some excellent advice:  give your kids enough so that they can do anything but not so much that they do nothing.

The rewards for pursuing greatness are equally great. A person can truly make a difference in the world. Best of all, to achieve greatness, one must become a better person. By pursuing greatness, a person achieves and becomes far more than s/he thought s/he could.  As Zig Ziglar so aptly put it, “What you get by achieving your goals is not as important and what you become.” For me, after following my calling faithfully for years, I feel we are on the threshold.  We have created AI-based instructional technology that has a scientific publication showing that it teaches 37% better than experienced human teachers do.  To the best of my knowledge, we are the online ones who can make that statement.  You can see a video of this software at myedmaster.com/aieducational.  We now have a team of people working to bring this to market through a fully-automated tutoring service.

At MyEdMaster, I’ve established programs to help kids achieve their own greatness. One program is our medical machine learning project. It is inspired by recent scientific research on what people can do to slow down their own aging process and improve their health and by our own research that found that middle-aged adults who followed our protocol actually grew younger biologically by 5-12 years after just 4 months on the program. Our project will take the latest research in health and longevity and use machine learning to make recommendations to people on what they can do to live longer and healthier. Students working on the project will work with a team of 25 professionals to create this product. They will help people live longer and be healthier. The work we do has been published in professional scientific journals with the kids’ names listed as authors. Students in our upcoming classes will receive shares of stock as co-founders of a new company we just established to market the product.

A second project is the one to bring to market our AI-based educational software.  Again, working with a team of professionals, students are helping by contributing to software development, math content creation, and business analytics.  The third project is our “be a published scientist” program,  where students work with me on original scientific work to make new scientific discoveries that get published in professional scientific journals. These aren’t just high school level projects. For example, we’ve conducted a series of experiments that show that a Nobel Prize winning theory of economics is wrong and have published corrections to the theory.  How many middle and high school students can make that claim? Over 200 students, conducting experiments in 6 different countries, have successfully published papers.  Many have multiple publications. Our rate of getting students into top colleges skyrocketed once this program started.

To learn more about our programs and how we can partner with you to help your child achieve greatness, please go to www.myedmaster.com or email Dr. John Leddo at john@myedmaster.com. Every child can be great.  We just have to point them in the right direction.