What 12 year olds taught me

This week I got to have an amazing experience. I volunteered with a bunch of kids. Not just any kids… Wild kids. We took them sailing the Baltic Sea for a week on a massive 3 mast boat.

I got to join a group of 20 kids who are part of a Basketball After School Activity called Baskidball. They come from all sorts of backgrounds; migrants from Syria and Afghanistan, kids who grew up homeless, victims of intense bullying… and kids who just like basketball.

They were all rowdy, chaotic, and packed with Wisdom. I learned 2 big lessons; 1. Everything is fun (if you make it fun), 2. We learn what we are taught.

Everything is fun

I hate doing the dishes. As a matter of fact, only vacuuming is worse. Some of them did this stuff with a smile on their face, and made it fun for themselves. That shifted my frame from; “this is a chore,” to “why is this interesting?“

Maybe it goes to the addage of enjoying the process. Whatever it is… they had it down.

We learn what we are taught

Some of these kids came from circumstances that were nothing short of brutal. But, when they saw that they were capable of steering the boat, climbing a mast, or pulling up a sail, they lit up. As soon as they relearned their limits, they began to exceed them

Book - The Man who Solved the Markets

On a boat you have a lot of time to read. I finished The Man who Solved the Markets, which is about the mathematician who launched the Quant revolution in finance.

Jim Simons took data from places it wasn’t traditionally used and tried to examine the whole system. No one was using Hidden Markov Models and building an understanding of a market a as a system. He looked at the problem differently.

This made me think, where else could this apply? Where are we ignoring numbers, or text data to help make better decisions.

Movie - Oppenheimer

I’ve recommended the General and the Genius (book) before. The Oppenheimer movie really was excellent. I don’t like movies, but had to see this one and it didn’t disappoint.