I was at a Denny’s a week ago (what can I say, I’m a sucker for a Grand Slam) and as usual, my laptop was on my table with my Verizon JetPack Hotspot riding sidecar.  After my older waitress plopped down my All-American Slam, she looked at my JetPack/Laptop combo like it was a Leprechaun and said, “What’s that?”

I explained what it did, and she ooohed and ahhhed like I just told her where to find a pot of gold.

“I’ve never been good with any of that technology stuff, but my ten year old granddaughter?  Well, she might as well work for NASA!  I don’t know how she learned how to do all that texting and shopping-of-the-photos stuff.”

“I think you mean photo-shop.”

“I guess, but why do you have to shop for photos that you took yourself?  And are they expensive?”

Oh, grandma, I thought.

The truth is, I know exactly how her granddaughter learned all that stuff.

See, the cool thing about kids?  They’re not afraid to break things.  They don’t know how much things cost, of where they’re from, or if they are irreplaceable.  So when they are exposed to new things . . . like technology or a new language . . . or art . . . they’re not afraid to “break it,” . . . or to put it in other non-childlike words, they’re not afraid to $@%# it up.

And that’s how they learn so fast.  Because their ignorance makes them fearless.

As adults, we need to remember what it was like to learn as a little kid.  We put so much pressure on ourselves to make sure everything we do is perfect . . . because we’re afraid of failure or embarrassment or both.  I remember teaching my parents how to use a computer, and they were so afraid to hit a wrong key, that they didn’t want to press one.  I had to slap my hands on the keyboard like an angry gorilla to show them no matter what button they pushed, the computer was not going to explode.  There was nothing they could do to break it.

Now imagine if we produced like a kid, wrote like a kid, acted like a kid . . . we’d not only learn faster and more efficiently, but we’d take greater risks, and achieve a heck of a lot more.

Sure, we’d “break” things every once in awhile, but, frankly, that’s when the real fun begins.

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