The Rabbit HoleModify

2025-07-10 21:40:45

Key Takeaways

1. What paralyzed me was that I believed I didn’t deserve a future. Just like my parents’ life of impermanence, I was renting a life rather than making concrete plans for one.
2. I am sure, though, that my situation allowed me to take risks in business that would daunt others. My motivation to succeed was never counted in dollars. It was simply to count as a person in the eyes of others.
3. Serendipity, my lifelong lodestar, had made its first appearance. From being a complete nonentity, the lowest training-wheel employee of a talent agency, I was going to be the assistant to the programming head of one of the three national networks.
4. I experienced a perfect example of the difference in the three networks on my first morning at ABC. I walked into the building and into the elevator, where an ordinary-looking man of no physical or sartorial distinction stuck out his hand and said, “Hello, I’m Leonard Goldenson.” He was the founder and chairman. I shook his hand and shyly said, “I’m your newest employee.” He smiled and said “Welcome!” and up we went in the elevator. Together! The elegant and suave William S. Paley, CBS’s chairman, would never have introduced himself to a new employee in the public elevator, because Paley had his own private elevator. Also, he was a time-honored snob and would have looked at my unruly suit and bad shoes and wondered what the hell I was doing in his classic Eero Saarinen building. At NBC, I would never have been greeted by Robert Sarnoff, its leader at the time and son of the founder, David Sarnoff. I would have quivered in the ornate lobby of the grand RCA Building, wondering which of the fifteen elevators I was supposed to take.
5. One of the many wonderful things at ABC was that if you wanted responsibility, you could simply take it.
6. In that negotiation, I found out something about myself that has surprised me ever since. I actually love confrontation. Arguing principles forcefully, loudly, and passionately was becoming the definition of me. As long as I wasn’t arguing “self,” I was fearless.
7. The one person I never got my way with was the über-powerful chairman of MCA, the wildly feared then “king” of Hollywood, Lew Wasserman. I’d known him since I was eleven years old as the father of my schoolmate Lynne. He’d intimidated me then and forever since. The only time I ever tried to negotiate with him, he wouldn’t give an inch, not even a fraction of an inch. I first approached him in business when I was twenty-five and buying a package of films from his Universal studio. I went to his office and said, ever so tentatively, that given we were buying sixty-four units at $600,000 each, couldn’t you just cut one unit from that sixty-four? Two beats. He stared. He said, “No.” Nothing more. Just no. Silence. The stare. And I folded like the cheapest tent. But as I got up to go, dejectedly knowing the fool that I was, he walked me out and, in that very quiet voice of his, said, “Next time you try this, be fully prepared to call the whole deal off if you don’t get what you asked for. Because, otherwise, you never will.” Out I went as the door closed silently behind me. It was the best lesson in negotiating and has stayed with me ever after.
8. Those two principles—never done before and never done quite this way—have always got me going. If ideas don’t have qualities of either I’m just not very engaged. Without my ferocious curiosity and focus aroused, I’m just like the next dullard.
9. One dumb step in front of the other, making mistakes, bouncing off the walls, course-correcting as we went along, head down. That was my process and… over time Process became my one true mantra.
10. The very best way to learn to be a manager is to start something from zero, where each granular step in creating the next job teaches you every task. Managing top-down is exceptionally challenging if you haven’t had the experience of managing from the bottom up.
11. Any really solid story idea that could be explained in a declarative sentence qualified as a MOW. Judging a good idea from a bad idea is completely instinctual, and only effective if you can keep your instincts clean, not cluttered or corroded. The daily drip of cynicism that this business generates in carloads has to be constantly exorcised. It helps if you have broad avenues of mainstream, general interests. But those instincts have to be kept pure, not influenced by anything other than the idea—not by who the director is going to be, or by who the leading actor is going to be, or by relationships, or by anything other than the single qualification: Is this a good idea?
12. Instinct is what I prize. Not research or data. Those who try to apply metrics to these basic decisions waste a huge amount of time and money.
13. Sometimes the staff would ask, “Is it commercial?” and I would brutalize them, because rather than using their instincts, they were trying to predict the public’s appetite, which I said then and say now, over and over again, simply isn’t possible. Neither is using research to help make decisions. No amount of research on ideas is worth the paper (or computer screen) it’s printed on. Data can tell you what has happened, not what can or will happen. Data is often harmful to instinct, and I believe this to be true for making not only creative decisions but many business decisions.
14. Out of my blunt nature came my most defining aspect of management: I encouraged and insisted upon extreme argument in every creative area. It was loud and it was something of a free-for-all, and every voice got attention if that voice had passion. I was like a bandleader conducting lots of dissonant instruments clanging together. But if you listened, really listened to this cacophony, out would come, after exhaustion and sometimes late into the night, the refinement of an idea into something actionable. I called it “creative conflict,” and since then I’ve prized it as the best process for decision-making.
15. It’s a lot harder to come in on top of an organization than at the bottom if you want to know how a company actually works. And I’m no good unless I understand everything down to the smallest molecule.
16. Instinct, which I prize almost above all else, doesn’t work very well for me in abstruse matters. I have to get to the core DNA on any matter, its logical essence, before I can add anything of value. For me this takes a lot of time, often to the irritation of faster thinkers. But when it does crystallize, I can’t be deterred.
17. I came to understand that denial—refusing to accept an ad that didn’t jump off the page and resonate—was the only thing that mattered. I’ve always believed that if you push people past their endurance, good things come. Rarely does a great ad or a great TV spot appear on the first try, and when it does it’s clear instantly and you don’t have to talk around it. What I call “torturing the process” works. Saying “It’s okay” or “It’ll do” is repellent. Never compromise.
18. I hadn’t been able to compartmentalize, I wouldn’t have survived. When all the dots are against you, the only way out is to not connect them.
19. I’d learned many times before that I tend to fail first before I succeed. I need to make mistakes and then course-correct as fast as possible, one dumb step to the next less dumb step.
20. I had become so fed up with the way Paramount operated that I began to pick people from the lower ranks who hadn’t yet gotten inculcated into the egoistical methods of Yablans and Evans. I built up a group of young executives who understood my mantra: “What’s the idea?” After that, they began to grasp how necessary it was to tear that idea up and down and yank it every way imaginable to find its essence, to see if it could survive such a tough Socratic process. If it could, we’d take the next step, and if not we’d abandon it.
21. This is where I found a principle that is bedrock for me. The clock starts ticking the moment you’re made aware of the incident. From that second, you’re responsible for actions taken (or not), as well as the consequences of those actions.
22. At Paramount, we had almost no politics; we operated in a classic top-down structure with an absolute clarity of roles and responsibilities. Without organizational ambiguity there’s little internal political behavior.
23. Maybe it’s a simplistic formula, but it works: Give them responsibilities before they are considered ready. Drop them in the deep end and see who struggles and who survives. Keep promoting those who survive.
24. It’s far better to be discounted than to be seen as anyone’s sure thing.
25. I’ve never thought in terms of goals. Yes, if you want to be a doctor, you’ve got to get a license; a lawyer’s got to pass the bar. But if you’re in the entertainment business, setting an absolute goal such as “I want to be head of a studio” is antithetical to ever getting there. One of the things about the executive side of the entertainment business is that you don’t really need to know anything to prosper. You need smarts, mostly of a particular street kind, but what you truly need are instincts and willfulness. It’s that alchemy that makes for a significant career. Having specific goals on that path forward are often detriments. Better to just take opportunities whenever they come and not overplot.
26. Have a very poor memory for the details of being mistreated.
27. There was a little video monitor on the set that showed the number of calls coming in when a product was offered for sale. The vertical lines representing the calls rose during the period of the sales pitch, and then, when it ended, they subsided. I was thunderstruck. To me, those calls were like watching waves coming to shore. I thought, Screens don’t have to be just for narrative, for telling stories. Screens can interact with consumers—that was the epiphany. It was clunky and rudimentary and I had no clear idea how to turn that revelation into action, but it sat there for a while warming up on the back plate of my brain.
28. Shipping the next day was a big part of the appeal—instant gratification.
29. Tisch, without a pause, snapped back: “I don’t get into contests, and I don’t look at what might have been.”
30. Like almost everything in my life, iteration—one dumb step in front of the other, course-correcting as you go—is the only process I’m any good at. I’m best building things from scratch. I’ve learned I’m not a very good shepherd of things already built.

What I got out of it

1. Loved hearing about Diller’s journey and the process of ‘just putting one foot in front of another’ resonates a lot.

The post Who Knew by Barry Driller appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .

2025-05-30 21:32:11

Key Takeaways

1. To play requires trust and love.
2. This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”
3. A bromide about the creative process is that an artist’s first idea is usually the best one. Ichigo was not Sam and Sadie’s first idea. It was, perhaps, their thousandth. Herein, the difficulty. Sam and Sadie both knew what they liked in a game, and they could easily tell a good game from a bad game. For Sadie, that knowledge was not necessarily helpful. Her time with Dov and her years studying games in general had made her critical of everything. She could tell you exactly what was wrong with any game, but she didn’t necessarily know how to make a great game herself. There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.
4. Other people’s parents are often a delight.
5. Sam’s grandfather had two core beliefs: (1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken. Sam believed these things as well.
6. He was such a fan. Every collaboration needs one.
7. Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met—he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know—were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before. My God, she thought, he is so easy to love.
8. Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?
9. The most important thing is finding someone you wish to play with.
10. “And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”
11. “Love you, Sammy,” Dong Hyun said. “I love you, too, Grandpa.” For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.

What I Got Out of It

1. This book reminded me that the best collaborations are built on trust, play, and the willingness to keep showing up—even when it’s hard.
   

The post Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .

2025-05-07 05:04:17

Key Takeaways

1. Make a dream come true
2. When you make it a dream come true for yourself, it’ll be a dream come true for someone else, too.
3. Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.
4. Present each new idea or improvement to the world. If multiple people are saying, “Wow! Yes! I need this! I’d be happy to pay you to do this!” then you should probably do it. But if the response is anything less, don’t pursue it.
5. Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers. Make every decision — even decisions about whether to expand the business, raise money, or promote someone — according to what’s best for your customers.
6. It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.
7. If you find even the smallest way to make people smile, they’ll remember you more for that smile than for all your other fancy business-model stuff.
8. Even if you want to be big someday, remember that you never need to act like a big boring company.
9. We all need a place to play. Kids need playgrounds and sandboxes. Musicians need an instrument. Mad scientists need a laboratory. Those of us with business ideas? We need a company. Not for the money, but because it’s our place to experiment, create, and turn thoughts into reality. We need to pursue our intrinsic motivation. We have so many interesting ideas and theories. We need to try them!

What I got out of it

1. Derek Sivers’ Anything You Want is a refreshing short read that reminds entrepreneurs to focus on happiness, generosity, and building their own perfect world, not just chasing profits.

The post Anything You Want by Derek Sivers appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .

2025-05-07 04:40:52

Key Takeaways

1. Being Chief Everything Officer is not about doing everything. It is about being prepared for everything and being willing to give everything.
2. The first is the need for a deep level of detachment. Oftentimes, entrepreneurs become emotionally attached to their original mission, and when the market is saying clearly it’s time to change, they struggle to let go of their original dream. Attachment makes change impossible. Meditation has helped me cultivate a stronger ability to detach.
3. “Prove it, then scale it” is a mantra that I love as it is simple yet powerful. It is both efficient, and effective.
4. A few principles had helped me get to this point, the foremost being: Transparency breeds trust.
5. Don’t over-engineer culture. Culture is a symptom, not a cause. A culture emerges organically, based on how a Chief Everything Officer makes decisions, communicates progress and challenges, and organizes the business. I believe it is an unconscious thing that happens. In companies, big or small, the leader sets the tone and pace, regardless if they are doing so intentionally or accidentally.
6. was very binary about it. “In a software business, there are only two activities that I value. Talking with clients or building and servicing the product. Everything else is a waste of time.”
7. Twice, I attempted to merge this group of advisors around a single table. Both times it ended in disaster. Imagine a world class footballer, a top-tier golfer, and an Olympic swimmer discussing strategy: each one a giant in their field, but each speaking different languages. I realized that their strength, their real value, was in one-on-one interactions. Their advice was like dishes on a tasting menu: best savored individually rather than mixed. Instead of building a board early on, I learned it’s better to cultivate advisors who are strong in specific areas. Think of them as solo artists rather than a band. The dynamics of such relationships are fluid; you never really know who’ll strike the right chord, when, and for how long.
8. The first was to recognize that the board is there to work for me, not the other way around. This mindset meant that I was unafraid to ask them to do things for me and the team. It also helped create a dynamic that was helpful, encouraging, and positive for me. This is not what I often hear from other CEOs, who don’t look forward to their board meetings because they put the board members in the boss’s seat.
9. The decisions I regret the most in business have been when my emotions were out of check and I had felt imbalanced. Emotional regulation is often talked about and rarely acted on.
10. My number one tool for releasing and processing my emotions has been crying. I discovered the art of crying for myself about half-way through my CEO journey. And it has stayed with me to this day. I cry at least once a week, sometimes more often. Sometimes from a place of frustration or fear, oftentimes nowadays from a place of joy and gratitude.
11. I’ve learned that true contentment and peace come from internal alignment and growth, not external achievements. I feel satisfied knowing I tried and gave it my all.

What I got out of it

1.  Chief Everything Officer is an honest, inspiring memoir that shows what it really takes to build, lead, and adapt through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship—making it a must-read for anyone carrying the weight of big dreams.

The post Chief Everything Officer by Kunal Gupta appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .

2025-04-01 01:13:27

Key Takeaways

1. When our attention is subject to mechanized appropriation, through the pervasive use of hyperpalatable stimuli? On this first view, what is at stake in our cultural moment would seem to be the conditions for the possibility of achieving a coherent self.
2. A single retinal image is certainly not adequate to the task of specifying the world, but the visual stimulus received over time by an observer in motion is adequate, Gibson argues, and so on his account the whole motivation for conceiving perception as involving inference and computation collapses. This is completely revolutionary. The brain does not have to construct a representation of the world. The world is known to us because we live and act in it, and accumulate experience.
3. We think through the body.
4. This brings up another uncanny fact about motorcycle steering: the bike goes wherever your gaze is focused. Most important, if your eyes lock on some hazard in the road, you will surely hit it.
5. Gibson’s most interesting and controversial point is that what we perceive, in everyday life, is not pure objects of the sort a disinterested observer would perceive, but rather “affordances.” The affordances of the environment are “what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.”
6. Affordances lie in the fit between an actor and his or her environment. When that relationship is mediated by a prosthetic, such as a motorcycle, it changes the field of objects that we perceive and how we perceive them.
7. For experiences to become part of the secure, sedimented foundation of a skill, they must be criticized. Other people (and the resources of language) are indispensable. Without them, your experiences are partial, and may sediment as idiosyncratic bad habits.
8. Getting things right requires triangulating with other people.
9. Imagining what could happen is an important role for the conscious mind, so it must stay involved. Being in a state of “flow” without such worries sometimes makes you feel like Superman, but it is easy to flow yourself right into the truck that has drifted into your lane around the blind curve ahead.
10. The role for the conscious mind is “alert watchfulness, without meddling.” It is “an unstable condition, which degrades all too easily into either a complete lack of watchfulness or too much involvement.”
11. The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the heteronomy of things; the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency.
12. According to Freud, this is precisely the condition of the narcissist: he treats objects as props for his fragile ego and has an uncertain grasp of them as having a reality of their own. The clearest contrast to the narcissist that I can think of is the repairman, who must subordinate himself to the broken washing machine, listen to it with patience, notice its symptoms, and then act accordingly. He cannot treat it abstractly; the kind of agency he exhibits is not at all magical.
13. The fantasy of autonomy comes at the price of impotence. With this comes fragility—that of a self that can’t tolerate conflict and frustration. And this fragility, in turn, makes us more pliable to whoever can present the most enthralling representations that save us from a direct confrontation with the world.
14. Emily Anthes writes that among traffic engineers, “in the last decade or so, a few iconoclasts have begun making roads more hazardous—narrowing them, reducing visibility, and removing curbs, center lines, guardrails, and even traffic signs and signals. These roads, research shows, are home to significantly fewer crashes and traffic fatalities.”

What I got out of it

1. The idea of affordances really resonated (what we’re paying attention to and what our skills, background, interests are) shapes what we see around us. It’s not about the theoretical, but the lived experience that shapes what we see and how we live.

The post The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .

2025-02-18 23:20:01

Key Takeaways

1. So what is it? Instead of focusing on rules, Taking Children Seriously focuses on fostering understanding. Parenting is the process of supporting a child until they understand the world well enough that they can support themselves. What is the best way to foster understanding? To provide freedom and security for a person’s creativity to discover how the world works. Rules limit freedom, and hence understanding, and therefore impair the parenting project.
2. Taking your kids seriously gives them reasons to take you seriously as well.
3. The biggest difference between our household and other households is how our kids eat, sleep, and use screens. At first glance, screens don’t seem as fundamental as food and sleep, but they are—perhaps even more so. That’s because screens are bound up with attention, which might be the most basic element of our autonomy. When we lose everything, the last thing to go is control of our attention. At the heart of adult resistance to screens seems to be the idea that adults have a right, even a duty, to control what children pay attention to. Attention is the simplest manifestation of what a person cares about, and intruding on their attention always signals that their values are less important than the intruder’s values.
4. Nearly every misconception about children in general is revealed by how adults manage children’s use of screens. All of the usual tropes are at work: kids can’t be trusted, they don’t know what’s good for them, it’s dangerous, it’s bad for them, it’s addictive, it corrupts them.
5. The truth is that when kids are pursuing their interests, they are always learning, even if adults can’t see it. Unfortunately, when it comes to adults assessing the merits of what their kids are doing, seeing is believing. When a child is constructing a jigsaw puzzle, an adult can see the physical manifestation of the child’s mind at work. The child’s mental effort is on display as she tries to connect a piece, fails, rotates it, and tries again. The adult can hear her groan when a piece isn’t fitting and sense her joy when she figures it out. But when that same child is watching a cartoon, that same adult may take the kid’s vacant look and physical activity as surefire signs that they’re watching a fertile mind turning to mush.
6. Boredom is bad for the same reasons pain is bad. Both indicate suffering. Both indicate a problem that needs solving. And neither is a virtue in its own right. We wouldn’t arbitrarily expose a child to pain with the argument that pain is an inevitable part of life that they need to “learn to deal with.” Such cruelty teaches children that, not only are we indifferent to their suffering, but they should accept their suffering as well.
7. My goal in this chapter is to show that enforcing rules on children produces so many problems that you’ll become interested in seeking an alternative. Rules-based parenting always damages children’s relationship with their parents and with themselves, and it introduces deep and persistent confusions about the world.
8. Not all of the rules in a kid’s life are obligatory, such as the rules of a game. The rules of chess or baseball are special because they have been found to be so much fun that children comply with them voluntarily, and that makes all the difference. Everyone can opt out, but they willingly engage because these rules solve problems for all parties.
9. One last type of beneficial rule is a boundary. Boundaries are rules or limitations that people voluntarily impose on themselves. When I set a boundary on myself, I am declaring how much of my own space, time, and resources I’m willing to offer others. The nice thing about boundaries is that other people, including kids, can opt out of them.
10. This is the key: doing something without the presence of enforcement or threats thereof is one of the best indicators that a person has a good understanding of what that thing is for. By forcing things, the parent is virtually guaranteeing that they can’t possibly determine whether or not their kid understands. In fact, forcing the kid to act under duress only hinders their ability to understand why the thing is worth doing in the first place.
11. In the adult world, we solve our own problems. From the most trivial to the most consequential, we are the authors of our own lives, or at least we aspire to be. Given this aspiration, it’s hard to think of a more important gift to give our children than the confidence to be the authors of their own lives, to acquire the knowledge, skills, and assertiveness to take ownership of their own affairs. And this reveals the fourth Foul of enforcing rules—it confuses kids by teaching them that there are external authorities who know the answers about how to live.
12. And I’m not saying it’s easy or that we should expect 100 percent success in safely preserving our kids’ autonomy. I’m saying it is an achievable ideal worth striving for, not just in select areas but in every domain of life. And when preserving autonomy is a top priority, not only can we get quite good at it, but our kids become more open to trusting our input. When they know we are not trying to take control and demote them to a minor role in their own lives, they are more open to our suggestions.
13. Enforced rules are manipulative falsehoods about the world.
14. I resolved that, no matter what, I would never turn my kids away if they wanted to “help out around the house.” Even if it slows me down or creates a lot more work overall, involving them voluntarily is an opportunity for them to learn to value things like cleaning and repairing.
15. Discipline and Punishment We never do either. The closest I’ll get is with our six-year-old when I tell her that aggravating her younger siblings makes work for me. Rather than discipline, this is more of an appeal to her to be more understanding and forgiving. One peculiarity I’ve noticed is how difficult it is to convey to a child the idea of being understanding, of giving others some slack or the benefit of the doubt. It’s interesting that such a crucial concept is so difficult to put into words that a child can understand. At first, I thought this was a deficiency of language, but now I think it shows how the norms of civility are really quite subtle. Discipline and punishment run roughshod over these subtleties and make it that much more difficult for children to discover them. Discipline and punishment, and coercion in general, never get kids to do anything. Instead, they raise the costs of doing something else. There are many ways to raise the costs of pursuing alternatives, from simple beatings or threats of beatings, to shaming, withholding possessions or denying privileges, or sequestering them to listen to lectures. If a person does something because alternatives are made too unpleasant, they tend to do the bare minimum in order to obtain relief. They do it to satisfy the disciplinarian, not themselves. The resulting learning is thin, based on a performance, and only loosely connected with other knowledge. Discipline and punishment show us what Taking Children Seriously is not. Rather than raising costs to get a certain behavior, Taking Children Seriously lowers costs to get understanding. Specifically, costs are lowered in order to open up freedom for curiosity to search for and discover knowledge, and knowledge that works forms an understanding. Parents are cost reducers and freedom promoters.
16. Yes, it’s important to be able to handle boredom, but only if you understand why-–for instance, if you understand that it’s a sign of respect to sit and listen to an older person tell stories that you’re not interested in. But if a kid doesn’t understand that, then being bored in front of Grandpa just makes the kid resentful of visiting Grandpa, which is the opposite of respect. For the same reason, we never make our kids greet extended family. Forced greetings and the like disrupt the growth of bonds that create intimacy with others. Similarly, forced thank-yous for gifts and forced apologies for mishaps like spilled food or broken tchotchkes disrupt the discovery of the subtleties of expressing gratitude and regret by contaminating the process with shame, fear, and embarrassment.
17. My role as parent is as guide and protector, not manager. To support my daughter’s discovery and eventual mastery of the world, it’s at least as important that I avoid making her feel nervous, afraid, and bad about herself as it is to teach her.
18. Improvement requires error correction, and error correction requires error detection. Many strategies for softening or eliminating rules merely obscure their coercive nature, allowing them to persist under the radar. Fortunately, there is a simple test to check if a rule-reducing strategy still contains coercion or not, and that is to switch the roles from you and your child to you and your partner or spouse.

What I got out of it

1. Definitely didn’t agree with everything Aaron shared, but it definitely made me think about certain frustrations and fights I’ve had with my girls and how they likely weren’t necessary. Fundamentally, thinking about your kids as adults and giving them freedom and autonomy to learn on their own resonates a lot for me.

The post The Sovereign Child by Aaron Stupple appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .