Congratulate Others on their Attempts, not their Results

The secret to creating great individuals, who achieve great things:

Not just to our children, but to adults as well!

Becoming result agnostic

We cannot control the results, but we can control our effort. My theory on why people get risk averse is this:

For your whole life you’ve been congratulated for “succeeding” (results). Therefore because we become addicted to this positive feedback, we only attempt things which we know we will succeed in.

Why congratulate effort?

When you congratulate effort and attempts, then you reinforce this notion of others attempting great things, therefore individuals will become less risk averse and live more epic lives.

How to become great and do great things

The truth is this:

If you attempt truly great things, you will most likely fail.

But you might need to attempt a great thing 10,000+ times before you get a single positive result. Therefore, you encourage others by saying:

Don’t care whether you succeed or fail. Care more about how epic and great your attempts are.

With children, congratulate them on effort (hustling hard) instead of them being “smart” or “talented”. Like:

“Wow you worked so hard on that! Good job!”

Why strive towards the average and mediocre?

I think much of your morals and ethics come from your upbringing. What did your parents teach you when growing up? Did they push you hard to achieve much? Or did they not push you at all, and maybe just ignore you?

I know since I was young, I was very fortunate to be encouraged by my mom. She always encouraged me to work hard, to aspire to become successful, and to give back to the community. She set very high expectations for me, and had faith in me. She gave me the moral, ethical, and entrepreneurial framework in order to succeed— I just put in the effort and hustle.

She never said “no”to my personal interests and things I was curious about. She worked as hard to indulge my extra curricular interests and hobbies— striving to empower me as much as I could along the way. And the interesting thing was this:

She didn’t tell me what to do, nor did she have a specific “vision” for me. She simply empowered me to pursue my own interests, and gave me all the encouragement in the world. I was never afraid of failure.

And perhaps this is what we need to do to others and our children: to encourage them! To give them courage. To not scare them or tell them, “Oh be careful!”Kids aren’t dumb. They’re much smarter than we think they are, but after thousands of exposures or telling them that x, y, z is dangerous — they become meek and no longer do things which personally interest them.

Encouragement is everything!
ERIC