Years ago, I was driving with my son, Blake. He was 7 years old at the time and was silent throughout the ride. When I asked him what he was thinking about, he gave me an answer typical of a silent 7-year-old.
“I dunno.”
Looking at him, though, I knew this was a “whiteboard moment” — one of those times when your child’s mind is open to infinite possibilities and indelible etchings of new ideas. I waited a bit to pique his interest, and said: “You know that wrench you used recently? I would like you to think of a way to make a tool that tightens bolts faster than a wrench.” I could see in his eyes that he was engaged and thinking. Then, I continued: “Blake, you’re thinking about this problem in your mind. I’d like you to come up with two more problems on your own that you’d like to solve.”
When he went to bed each night, I asked him to pick a problem and think about it — and then to think about it again when he woke up in the morning. I’d frequently ask him about the problems he was working on. With each solution, we celebrated. Blake would then refill his “problem reservoir” of three problems with a new one. In this way, he always had three problems swirling in the back of his mind, and he was able to pull one out to think about it at any time.
Blake learned that when you keep a problem to solve (what we call a “PTS”) in mind and let it linger in your subconscious, the answer presents itself at unexpected moments. This usually happens when the right stimulus takes you by surprise and you have an aha! moment — when you see a billboard, watch a movie, or have an exploratory conversation with a friend, for example.
Ten years later, Blake fell asleep thinking about nuclear radiation and cancer. His PTS involved using radiation to improve the treatment of the disease. In his senior year of high school, Blake and a friend won the global Intel ISEF Gordon E. Moore Award — out of 7 million high school students around the world — for a simulated cancer treatment they created.
Encouraging an Inventive Mindset
Kids are innately curious. However, that curiosity is often stripped away with rote learning or a lack of developed critical-thinking skills. Some schools — such as ones following the Montessori Method of Education — promote curiosity, but not everyone has access to these educational tracks. As we look at what it means to invent the future, our children need to have skills for invention and creation.
It’s possible to develop skills in children that maintain, reinforce, motivate, and extend their curiosity and confidence in innovating. As parents, we need to provide children with structure and encouragement to cultivate their curiosity. This is when invention becomes possible.
Once more children learn how to approach life with an inventor’s mindset — constantly searching for problems and their solutions — they’ll make an impact not just on their communities, but also on the world.
A Little Curiosity Never Hurt
Many educational systems and classes rely on memorization and empty recitation of answersor formulas. Memorization does have its benefits. But those learning methods tend to snuff out natural curiosity by not allowing children to explore on their own.
The good thing, though, is that parents can wire their kids’ minds to manage and think about problems. (As an added benefit, they’ll develop confidence along the way.) You can give your children the tools they need to explore problems by helping them learn how to carefully define a PTS.
This is necessary before searching for a solution: We often don’t clearly define our PTS. In worse cases, we actually focus on solving the wrong problem because we’re so focused on its symptoms. If your kids constantly squabble with one another in the morning before school, for instance, you might initially consider the PTS to be a problem with conflict management. Think deeper, though, and you might find that your kids simply aren’t getting enough sleep — leaving them irritable after waking up.
To ensure our children can also identify the right problems, we should teach kids to take a deep mental dive into each PTS. They should eventually be able to define its main tenets, which makes finding a solution much more simple.
Thankfully, technology has also made finding our PTS infinitely easier. Today, we’re no longer asking whatproblems to solve — we’re asking whichproblems to solve. We’re overloaded with information. So as fathers, we also need to help our children be picky about which problems they want to dive into.
Here are three things fathers can teach their children to help them choose which problems to solve — and gain an inventor’s mindset:
1. Help them develop a problem reservoir.Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Hedy Lamarr, Alexander Graham Bell, and Leonardo da Vinci were all prolific inventors. The keyword here is “prolific.” Inventing is a numbers game: The more you invent, the more likely you’ll succeed. Not all inventions are winners. So to be prolific, you’ll need a reservoir of problems that you continue to refill.This reservoir builds up to the aha! moment. When your kids least expect it, they’ll make a connection to a solution after seeing a billboard, flipping through a magazine, clicking through websites, or talking with friends — all because they’re continually working on it.
2. Teach them to reflect on novel ideas. When your kids are exposed to ideas that are trulynovel — ones that cause a “wow, that’s cool” reaction — let them revel in those ideas. Why? Because that novelty can stimulate breakthroughs in what might appear to be unrelated areas.
Here’s a great example: Mick Pearce, an architect from Zimbabwe, designed an award-winning building that uses biomimicry to cut energy use. By reflecting on the novel idea of how termites create mounds, it sent him down the rabbit hole of biomimicry. Pearce didn’t reinvent the wheel, so to speak, but this serendipitous connection showed him an entirely different way of building a skyscraper.
After children find an idea they like and discuss what’s novel about it, show them how to abstract it. In other words, find what makes it cool in the most general sense. You can encourage them to think counterintuitively to open up new ways of thinking.
Learning to ride a bike, for instance, means counterintuitively turning your handlebars into the side where you’re falling. Depending on the age of your child, you might have to explain this concept differently. You can take the idea of doing the opposite of what feels natural and have him or her think about what else this applies to.
For example, you’ll impress people with your knowledge more by asking questions, rather than stating what you know. You’ll become more proficient in typing when you look at your screen instead of your keyboard. You’ll increase reading, learning, and retention rates when you read the title and the beginning and last paragraphs of book chapters first, even if it might seem inefficient.
Encourage your kids to take the abstraction out of novelty the moment they start thinking about an idea. Then, they can connect the novel idea to each of the problems in their reservoir to see how it can help solve them. The skill of abstracting a novel idea and then applying that abstraction to any problem — even one that seems unrelated — will yield incredible breakthroughs and innovations.
3. Create spaces where they can think deeply.Be sure to create environments where your kids can concentrate deeply on thoughts or problems. You can make them aware of the benefits of working in distraction-free spaces.
For example, phones can be nearby — but you don’t want the continuous interruptions if you’re exploring a problem. Phones have done so much to advance our society, but their constant presence can cut down on cognitive capacity. By temporarily removing distractions such as these, thinkers can dive deeper into their questions and curiosities.
Whether you want to encourage your kids to become the next great inventors or just want to help foster their innate curiosity, this will help you establish an environment where they can explore. Through an inventor’s mindset, they’ll be able to channel that energy in a highly productive way for the rest of their lives.
The more your children think about and solve problems on their own, the more self-reliant they’ll be. Soon, they’ll be primed to take on the world’s challenges in a heartbeat.
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Photo: IStock