I'm not going to lie, time feels different for me at TKS.
Not only because my working schedule is different, but because time seems to fly by without you even noticing. Students started the challenge last week and are already down to the final two weeks to get things done. The decks are due next Friday!! It felt like we were just saying groups had 3 weeks and now the challenge is already entering its final leg. As you read this, students have just over 8 days to finish their submissions.
If you're not careful, these opportunities will pass you by.
Challenge season gives students the opportunity to practice adjusting their priorities for short periods of time. For the remaining time, the challenge should be the students' priority. And yet, as you expect with ambitious students, they are all looking to take on more at the same time as the challenge. Why can’t they stay focused?
I was recently a guest mentor at Startup Weekend here in Calgary. I spoke with several groups and founding teams set on solving different problems they were experiencing. The weekend event is only ~48 hours and so everyone is forced to prioritize their progress that weekend over other things. Some groups opt to stay late and even meet when the facilities close. And yet none of them were talking about anything else. They weren't thinking about starting a second company because they were building their first.
When students have 2-3 weeks for their challenge it can sound like a ton of time. It's an order of magnitude longer than the hackathons they might be used to. And yet, it's also not enough time. So why do students feel compelled to take on more when they are presented with the opportunity of a lifetime? Why are they still worried about new extracurriculars or other challenges at the same time?
Perhaps I’ll try to answer that another time.1
A cause for celebration
Let's get personal for a minute.
Close your eyes and imagine you're in a competition. How does that feel?
For me, I can feel the adrenaline start to flow. My heart is racing. I get anxious and even a little excited.
Now close your eyes and imagine being celebrated. How does that feel?
I find it hard not to smile at the thought. A bit ironic given what I wrote before but it's human to enjoy appreciation. Not only do you feel better being celebrated, but you probably get a similar effect celebrating others. If you've ever given someone a gift they loved, try to remember how that made you feel. Pretty good, right?
At TKS, the environment can feel naturally competitive. You're surrounded by high-potential, ambitious students who are used to competing with their peers. But that's not the environment we want to foster. We are centered on personal growth and development; the only competition you have is with who you were yesterday.
The opportunities students have right now, working with these leading organizations, are largely a result of how past students have performed. They paved the way for the current students. And so as a group we want to give everyone the best shot at success and create more opportunities for future students. Within the challenge, this means sharing resources and insights with other teams.
TKS students are all teenagers; they are used to being underestimated and dismissed by the adult population. And so instead of trying to prove themselves individually, we see all TKS successes as a win for teenagers as a whole. Win by win, students are proving that it's possible to make a global impact regardless of age.
Celebrating and helping one another requires shifting your mindset from one of scarcity to one of abundance. What I noticed while working with organizations around the world is that people who hoard information are often insecure. They see the information as the only thing they have to offer, so if they no longer have that, what's left? I feel I can say this confidently because I was once one of those people.
But a funny thing happens when you start to share your knowledge more widely. You actually get smarter. You get more information and learn from others who are able to build off your knowledge. You can have more fruitful discussions. I once wrote about the idea of being short-term selfless, and long-term selfish. Sharing information is about being selfless in the short-term and helping others because you know, long term, it will come back to benefit yourself and others.
Having a scarcity mindset means you believe there is limited information to go around and you're playing a zero-sum game. When you get more, I get less. But shifting to an abundance mindset is about growing the pie. When you get more, we all get more.
And celebrating others, our mindset of the week, is in many ways a perfect embodiment of the abundance mindset. There is not a limited supply of praise or support to go around.
🙌🏼 This week, find someone in your life who deserves celebrating and lift them up. 🙌🏼
Great questions are the key to knowledge
I think of questions in two categories:
those you ask others
those you ask of yourself
I want to talk about the first kind today.
One of the secrets of the universe is that if you have good questions, you hold the power.
“A vital question, a creative question, rivets our attention. All the creative power of our minds is focused on the question. Knowledge emerges in response to these compelling questions. They open us to new worlds.”
Verna Allee, The Knowledge Evolution
If questions are so important, we should spend more time getting better at asking them. We'll focus more on creating a good question instead of asking it. The best tip I have for you there is: to be silent and listen. Leave space for the other party to actually think and answer, wracking their brain and not just blurting out the first thing that comes to mind.
Navid, one of the founders of TKS, has said questions are like keys. They have the ability to unlock knowledge hidden in people's brains.
The right questions help guide and direct the answerer toward the information they might even forget they have. If you ask someone to "tell you everything they know" about a topic, that's a very hard thing to grasp. If you instead ask a series of intentional, well-crafted questions, you can extract a lot more information than they knew was there. If you’re looking for a great resource on asking better questions, check out this essay on powerful questions.
Let’s say you wanted to learn about someone’s experience as a first-time founder. Instead of asking “what was it like for you to start the company?”, some pointed questions might be:
How did you make decisions quickly as a small team?
When did you know you needed to hire your first X?
What do investors expect from you that you have a hard time delivering?
How did you find people who were aligned with your mission? What did you ask them?
Asking great questions was something I was obsessed with at Versett. One year at one annual retreat we spent a 2-hour session going deep into the art of great questions. My own team spent an inordinate amount of time leveling up on questions. Whenever we were designing interviews or studies, probing different problems, I would push the team with questions so we could sharpen our original questions further.
Why are you asking me that? What is your intention with that question → Sometimes we ask questions in very roundabout ways that don't get us closer to the answer. Start with your intention and what you hope to learn and work backward from there.
What do you think my answer will be? → We can often guess the first, shallow answer that someone will give. Occasionally we will be surprised, but it's not to have an expectation. Use that guess to refine the question and dig deeper. Have a follow-up question prepared to push into their shallow response.
What will you do with that information? → When we enter interview/survey mode, we start by listing out many questions. How often do we stop and think about how we will use the answer? In a world where respondents have limited time and attention, we want to focus on our most impactful questions only.
I'll add a caveat: great discussions are about discovery and not validation. That means leaning into the uncertainty of where the conversation will take you and following your curiosity, instead of just sticking to the script.
It’s hard to ask questions without your own preconceived notions, but Starlee Kine gave a great talk at XOXO Festival in 2016 and it still sticks with me. She used to host a podcast called Mystery Show where she would attempt to solve mysteries that people in her community gave her. Her secret to chasing down mysteries was to have earnest conversations and avoid having the answer in her mind ahead of time. Instead of trying to get the answers she wanted, she let the conversation go where it wanted to and uncovered insights and secrets that wouldn't have come out otherwise.
Be open to conversations taking an unexpected turn.
If you're interested in the types of questions you ask yourself or the world, I recommend this comic. After you do, send me an email if you want to talk more about this. Include one of the questions you're collecting and orienting your life around.2
So to you, I ask: if you could meet the person you admire most in the world, what would you ask them?
✌🏼
I think modern students are experiencing some sort of FOMO pandemic
I actually ran an exercise on this during my TKS interview process based on an activity we did in Building a Second Brain years ago (and later Write of Passage).
"That means leaning into the uncertainty of where the conversation will take you and following your curiosity, instead of just sticking to the script."
Your quote above describes the hesitation many public educators feel. Often teachers are not comfortable with uncertainty in the classroom and thus students are being held to "the script." Comfort with uncertainty and embracing curiosity is the path forward for both students and educators in the public system; I am just not sure how we get there.
I honestly would love to know your answers to the last few questions lol