Author: David Janner

In my opinion, the education system is extremely flawed. If not flawed, at least the focal point is wrong and our kids are missing out on invaluable tools for life.

So, on the fly, these are the things I think should be added to the school curriculum.

Or perhaps someone can start an after school school which teaches kids the following skills.

Interpersonal Skills

When I was at school, there was absolutely nothing devoted to interpersonal skills.

Interestingly, in medical school, we DID have interpersonal skills woven into our curriculum, because obviously someone woke up to the fact that being personable and compassionate as a doctor is a pretty important skill which patients value highly.

There should be lessons on empathic communication.

There should be lessons on how to attract and communicate with the opposite sex (how to attract your life partner, could there be something more important and empowering to teach???)

There should be lessons on how to sell (oh, selling is such an important skill) and the psychology behind sales.

There should be lessons on how to handle conflict and to be assertive – to express your opinion and make yourself heard.

There should be lessons on relationships, setting realistic expectations and communication within a relationship.  How to find a life partner.

There should be lessons on leadership and how to work together as a team (these days more and more I believe we rely on teams rather than individuals… I like a section from Sutherland’s book on Scrum where he gave an example of a teacher who introduced students to Scrum and eventually got them to work together using the Scrum framework in his lessons…)

Money Skills

There should be lessons about how money works, because it becomes such an important thing in our lives.

That means teaching kids about the basics of economics, inflation, investing and pensions.  Not in a dry and boring theoretical way, but in a practical way, the bare essentials that kids need in order to grow up to adults who understand how to protect their financial future.

I remember we had as some extra-curricular activity a stock market investing game with make believe money.  But I think as part of the curriculum kids should invest with REAL money, there is no better way to learn, even if it is a tiny amount.

There should be lessons about mortgages (which barely any adults understand) and analysis done on whether it is better to own a home or rent and buy investment property.

Meditation and Self Reflection

We need to teach our kids mindfulness and meditation, so that they can experience more clarity in life.

We need to teach kids how to keep a journal which enables self-reflection and self-improvement.

Get kids to start a practice of gratitude (one of the only proven methods to increase well being).

We should teach kids about the fundamentals of well being and positive psychology.

We need to teach and mentor our kids in goal setting and visualization, the types of things that elite athletes are taught we should make available to everyone.  They should have personal coaches who help them develop and explore their own unique interests, develop their personal goals and achieve their own unique potential.

I also think kids should have their own websites and blog as a way to connect with other like minded kids and develop an online presence.

Business & Entrepreneurship

We need to teach our kids about business – finding needs and meeting them.  I believe there is little that is more useful. Business is creativity, it is an engine of economic growth.  While not everyone may go on to start their own business I think the skills that they learn here will benefit them in whatever they do in life.

They shouldn’t learn theory. They should go out and start businesses and be mentored in the process.  They should hear from entrepreneurs who have started businesses in different fields.  They should learn from each other and their own successes and failures.  They should learn to take small, hedged bets and carry out lots of experiments until they find success.  They should learn to talk to potential customers, to work out their needs and desires, and then together with the customers to develop products to meet these needs and desired.

Learning Skills

We should teach kids how to learn.

How to find journal articles and work out what scientific research has to say on a subject.

How to find books, courses, etc on given topics (there is so much information out there, they only need to know how to access it).

Independence and Curiosity

Most of all, I think we should foster their own independence, curiosity and their own uniqueness.

They should be mentored to find things they are curious about and take on the necessary self-motivated learning.

I think if someone cracks this, they will go on to make a lot of money.  If you like this as a business idea, take this and try it out.  I think it will make you rich and make the world a better place.

Who knows, maybe I will do something about this one day… After all, I am curious about it…

Follow your passion is common and fucked up advice.  The unfortunate but realistic state of affairs is that most people don’t know what their passion is.  Imagine how frustrating it can be when talking heads preach to follow something that you don’t know what it is or where it is leading.

There is an audio book I listened to recently, which while I found it quite painful to listen to with its airy fairy wafting, did give one golden nugget of advice which I want to pass on to you.

If you are one of the lucky few who have a passion and know what it is, go ahead and embrace it.  Grab it and ride it.

But, if you are one of the many who don’t have a clear passion then the more sound advice is to follow your curiosity.  It might start out as just a little inkling.  A little nagging. Not much of an interest, but something worth of further investigation.

So, like Liz Gilbert advises in “Big Magic”, follow this curiosity.  Do some digging.  Curiosity may lead to nothing at all.  But sometimes by following your curiosity it can bloom into interest. And interest can bloom into passions.  But it is critical to let yourself explore lots of interests and see where they lead you.

I can’t agree more with this advice.

This is very much in line with my belief of how entrepreneurs should start or even grow their businesses.  Throw out little experiments.  Hedge your risk, make sure your downside is capped, but test in lots of directions.  Most will be misses, but once in a while something will meet a need in the market and then you have a business on your hands.

That’s how I started out in apps.  My first app (apart from Make App Mag) was a little novelty app.  It cost about $300 to make, maybe $500.  I framed this for myself as an educational expense.  I hadn’t gone to business school after all, I had no business in business.  So instead of investing in an online course or some fancy university MBA toilet paper, I figured I would rather invest in MAKING something and learning from the process.

I was CURIOUS.

I wanted to understand what was involved in making an app.

I didn’t care too much about the outcome (of course, secretly between you and me, I was hoping this app would hit the top charts and would make me millions… didn’t happen…)

And this curiosity grew into my current business, which I am wildly passionate about.

If you don’t care much for business, that’s OK.  Doesn’t have to be about business. Could be a hobby or a skill.

Take this 30 Day Blog Writing Challenge, for example.  I’ve been curious for a long time about writing and blogging, but haven’t done much with it.  So I set up this challenge to investigate my curiosity.  Who knows where it may lead…

So, if you don’t have a passion DON’T WORRY!

Just let yourself be curious and actually follow up on your curiosity.  That is the way to go!

And if you’re not curious about anything… Then I pity you, really I do.

For the past couple of years I’ve made it a priority to attend events related to my industry.  I guess the seed was planted by a guy I interviewed a while back when I was running Make App Mag (Benjamin Bressinton) who mentioned how unlike other “appreneurs” he would actually attend industry events with real developers.

Initially I wasn’t really sure of the value I would gain from attending these events.  One of my main goals was to push myself outside of my comfort zone (I’m quite shy, quite an introvert).

The first event(s) I attended were local.  Ofir Leitner runs the Israel Mobile Summit and I think I went to a couple of those events even as much as 3 years ago.  I don’t remember how much I got out of those events business-wise, but I do remember that I was focused on pushing myself outside my comfort zone. I think the first conference I attended, my stated goal was not to go to lectures but rather to speak and connect with as many people as possible.

And I guess I enjoyed it.  I enjoyed pushing through my naturally shy barriers.  I liked the challenge and the fact that I managed to push through my fears.  I felt like I was growing.

These first events were local and very affordable and I’m sure that wherever you are you would probably have similar opportunities.

And I guess I kind of got addicted… I still wasn’t 100% sure about the value I was getting, but I definitely felt like it wasn’t doing anything detrimental… so I kept going.

I’ve since attended GDC (Game Developer Conference) in San Francisco (twice already) and when we decided to go into the casino niche I attended several casino-specific events (GIGSE, G2E and my business partner went to ICE in London).  I’ve been to Casual Connect when it was in Tel Aviv (local to me) and most recently Carter Thomas’s (AWESOME) Bluecloud Event in Hawaii.

The cost of these events are not insignificant, but I keep going.  I’m still an introvert, that won’t event change, but I love pushing through my comfort zone, because that’s where I feel the growth occurs.

One thing these conferences are NOT about – CONTENT.  Most of the content for these types of event you can find online.  For example, Casual Connect publish ALL their content to Youtube for free (if you’re into apps, you MUST browse through their collection!).  GDC record all their lectures and put them in the GDC Vault (paid).  Through this you can get years worth of amazing content.  Don’t get me wrong, there definitely is value in the content of these events, but you don’t need to GO to these events for the content.

What have I found most valuable?  Without a doubt, meeting like minded people, making friends and having FUN.  For me, THAT is the goal of attending these events (and I have an inkling that you might be well served by adopting that attitude).

Personally, I don’t have many (any?) entrepreneurial friends back home, apart from my biz partner who is also a good friend.

And I CRAVE that connection, expanding my circle of friends, meeting like-minded people who are on the same path.  There is some psychic connection which binds us.  And I have been sorely missing it.

So I push myself at these events to say “hi” to people I think might be interesting, to connect and potentially make friends.  I’ve made friends from these events which I deeply value and through some of these connections and conversations my business has changed and grown and only benefited.

The parts of the events that I find most beneficial are those which foster inter-personal connections.  For example, in Carter’s event we had a kind of “side / time filler” exercise which was to turn to the people sitting with you at your table and asking them what they need help with and telling them what areas you think you can potentially help them with.   This got a discussion going and opened us up.  This “side” exercise was pretty much the highlight of the event for me (at least the “structured” part of the event).

In GDC, as a tip for other game developers, they have “Round table” sessions which aren’t recorded and are a more informal sharing of knowledge.  I went to a few of those and they were all great, but there was one round table, the “Producer” round table, which absolutely smashed the ball out of the park for me.

They structured the event as a “Lean Coffee” exercise on the topic of “How to improve developer efficiency”.  Before entering the room, participants were given a number, which corresponded to a group in the room (each group was about 10 people strong).  There was some initial warm up exercise and then our group facilitator split us into pairs, where we were supposed to discuss the 1 or 2 things that we found from our experience was most impactful on improving developer efficiency.  Each pair then presented 2 of the best ideas back to the group and posted a post-it note for each idea on the “TO DO” column of a Kanban board.

After each pair was done adding their ideas to the board, each group member got 3 stickers which they could use to “vote” on the ideas on the board (you could put all 3 stickers on one idea or spread them around, up to you).  The 5 top ideas with the most votes were then moved to the “IN PROGRESS” column of the Kanban board.

The next part of the exercise was called “5 by 5”, where we were to discuss each of these ideas for 5 minutes.  At the end of each 5 minute block we did a quick thumbs up / thumbs down vote for whether to continue discussing the idea or to move on to the next topic (in my group the consensus was always to move on).

In final part of the exercise, each group decided on the one or two top ideas that they wanted to present back to the whole room.

Continuous improvement at scale "A-ha" moments from day 3 of #productionlevelup #GDC16 Thanks for sharing! pic.twitter.com/dIlm6d92iQ

— Juliet Nuzzo (@Riot_Razor) March 18, 2016

This exercise was SO powerful.  Instead of having one guy get up and share his own subjective experience, (which has value, don’t get me wrong), we got the collective distilled experience of a group of 100 so industry leading Producers.  Guys from big companies (like Blizzard, Epic Games) and smaller companies.

And apart from the raw collective group information, this got us all talking. Instead of sitting in a lecture with a couple of hundred other anonymous people, we were forced to talk to other guys in our industry, potentially make friends and interesting new connections.  And it was FUN!

So, GO to events and conferences where you might find like-minded people.  SPEAK to people and within the events I think you should try to avoid lectures and rather go to interactive events where possible, especially if the content is available online.  Go to the PARTIES and have fun! Go with the main aim to have FUN, without expecting much else.  Through speaking to people see who you naturally gravitate and connect to. Where you feel that spark try and continue the conversation.  Sit down with these guys for coffee, go out to a party together, have dinner and maybe set a time to speak after the conference.

I hope this helps you.

In summary, GO to events. SPEAK to people. Have FUN.  And you might be surprised at the twists and turns your life and business take as a result.

I’m writing this on the plane on the (long…) way back from Hawaii.  The people I met there were so incredible… I am just abuzz with joy and a (somewhat) satiated craving to meet people who are sharing the journey together with me, which only leaves me wanting more!  People who have seen through the illusion of the matrix.  Honestly, everyone who I had a conversation with there (and I tried to speak to everyone, although didn’t quite manage)… well I actually can’t even describe the feeling. Just GO.