This is Sesame Street for Adults
Level 3: Master of the Mundane
Dear Future Guardian,
I've been writing for The Guardian Academy now for a couple of years, and working even longer to integrate the foundational principles and philosophies which make up all of our work here (into my own life).
One of the repeated lessons that I've observed in myself and in others ...
Is that we've all experienced these lessons before. Possibly many times in our lives.
And yet,
We've all failed to fully understand these lessons, fully integrate and follow these lessons and ideas our entire life until this point.
It's not our fault ... that goes back to the whole dynamic where our culture, society, and upbringing pile a ton of stuff on top of us and then our work now as adults is to chip away at all that we are not, etc ...
Which inevitably starts to reveal the truth of these fundamentals.
There's a little story that gets passed around the events and the calls (usually by Nic).
At one event earlier this year (not a TGA event), Lance Armstrong showed up. He was being interviewed by Joe Polish. Joe asked him if he could teach his younger self one thing, what would it be ... and Lance answered that his younger self would not have listened.
I've observed this in myself as well.
I can look back many years and see that the principles and philosophies I acknowledge and follow now are things I heard many times in many forms over the years.
I just didn't listen.
Or I couldn't hear. Maybe I had too much that was not me covering it all up.
Now as I look at my children growing up, I'm noticing ...
These lessons are old.
They are fundamental. (They are principles after all)
They are often taught to us in different forms at a very young age.
But for whatever reason ...
As we grow older, we disregard them. We think less of them. They are just lessons for kids. It's not that simple. It's not that easy.
I realized the other day,
The Guardian Academy is actually just Sesame Street for grown ups.
So,
I'm going to show you why and how that is ...
Maybe you too can see that everything we talk about in TGA, is something you've known for a very long time.
TGA is Sesame Street
Some quick context. Sesame Street is put together as like a series of little sketches and stories. Each character tends to get their own style of sketch and lessons are taught through each of them.
Our youngest is just about 2, so he loves it. We also tend to watch the show in pieces, not always entire episodes, as the individual segments watch just fine on their own.
So I'm going to travel through some of these segments and connect the dots on the lessons taught to kids which are principally the same as lessons taught in The Guardian Academy.
It should be noted that MOST OF the lessons are often B messages. But you don't need to hear "Raise the Floor" to integrate the principled essence of what that means to you (as adults, having the logical construction helps clear away the chaff and assign that specific understanding to our lives).
Stop and Think.
I've actually talked about this one before (which gave me the realization that there were a lot more lessons woven throughout Sesame Street which are in The Guardian Academy).
This one is all about Cookie Monster. Typically he's some kind of "super hero" with a team of Cookies backing him up. They are often trying to stop an evil mastermind, but sometimes they are just trying to save someone else.
Cookie Monster himself represents a sort of reckless or sometimes mindless consumption and self interest. He just wants cookies. He wants all the cookies, and sometimes he will - at least initially - value cookies over his relationships (though in those cases, he learns the lesson and changes by the end).
In these Stop and Think segments, we learn about the evil guy who needs to be stopped or the person who needs to be saved, and then Cookie Monster immediately starts to rush in and do stuff ...
Only, his Cookie squad stops him.
"Wait Cookie Monster! You have to STOP ... and think... before you do something."
How many times in The Guardian Academy have we talked about restraint, slowing down, and making decisions better. It's fundamental to our human nature to rush and seek the most immediate thing which our monkey mind desires ... but to master The Champions Mind1, we must STOP and THINK.
One of the things we do with the space created by slowing down and thinking is to use prompts to help us figuring things out and make better decisions (see Get Better at Applying TGA principles2).
Feelings Come and Feelings Go
This lesson repeats itself through different segments, but shows up most frequently for stories with Elmo.
There's one episode in particular which starts off with Elmo just feeling really down on himself. He starts talking to one of the adults, who sees that he's having an off day, and Elmo says he just feels really down ...
Oscar the grouch naturally shows up and says Elmo is turning into a grouch.
Cue an amusing little segment where Elmo goes through a series of tests with Oscar, who in turn is trying to convince Elmo that he is now also a grouch.
All the while the adult is trying to tell Elmo that this is not him, he's just having a bad day (and that's alright).
Eventually it comes to a head with Elmo taking up residence in Oscar's can, and then realizing how silly it all seems.
He learns that "feelings come and feelings go", and making decisions while you are in a height of feeling does not reflect who you truly are or who you really want.
We talk about this in terms of making choices in a valley3. Whether the feeling is good or bad, when you are peaking on an emotion, there's going to be an inevitable return as you go back to the mean. Sure we can get into nuances of "good" and "bad" emotion and how that affects things ...
But the point here is Elmo was feeling bad and started making all these changes to his life suddenly because of it. Which is not at all different from feeling really good and making a bunch of changes because of that.
Make your decisions in the cold calm light of the valley, where everything is settled.
There's another lesson in here ...
You aren't your feelings. They just exist in you.
(Oscar The Grouch embodies the character who decides they ARE their emotions)
That's straight from The Gray Wolf4.
You cant do it all alone
This is a repeat lesson that belongs to no specific segment or character. As far as I've been able to tell there's no specific segment which overtly talks about this either, it just shows up repeatedly throughout the entire show.
No one can win alone. No one can do it all themselves. And in fact in order to reveal the best of who you are as an individual, you need others.
In TGA we talk about this as "full5" or "exponential potential." And I've definitely written about the idea "nobody wins alone6."
In Sesame Street this is presented overtly as lessons on friends coming together to do greater things. Learning how to play together. Ask for help. Learn from one another, etc.
We see characters, like Elmo, discover things about themselves because they end up working together.
But is this any different?
I think when we grow up we look back on this and think that these sorts of lessons are just for kids. Learn how to be a friend. Learn how to play together, etc.
But we forget,
We forget that when we as kids are learning how to play together part of what is happening is that our best selves and uniqueness are coming out in that environment.
As an adult you can, by yourself, focus on your known potential. Focus on doing things that you know or believe you are good at or can do ...
But to reveal your full true self, your unknown and exponential potentials,
You need others.
You can't do it alone.
All those lessons about friends and working together?
They weren't about getting along,
They were about bringing the best out of you that could only come from those around you.
The Thing isn’t as important as The Outcome
This is another repeat lesson that belongs to no specific segment or character, but does show up sometimes as a theme.
In one story, many of the characters had come together to play at being superheros. They all had their own costumes and own made up powers, etc.
At one point while they were playing they decided they needed to go somewhere else.
Unfortunately ...
They couldn't decide how to get there. One wanted to fly, one wanted to ride a bike, the other wanted to walk, etc.
They were arguing about how they should travel when along comes one of the adults.
The adult naturally points out that they don't all need to travel the same way. They can each use their own method of getting where they are all going. What matters isn't how they get there, what matters is that they all just get there, and be in that place together.
It's a very basic version of Function over Form7.
What matters isn't how you do the thing, what matters is that you achieve the outcome you're looking to achieve.
It's our natural human mindset to get focused on the form of the thing, because we end up thinking that "the thing" is the important part. It's THAT thing which is going to solve my problem! And we so narrowly focus on "the thing" that we lose sight of the outcome we're actually trying to achieve and can't see the easy solution to achieving that outcome right in front of us.
Next Best Step and Raise the Floor
"Next Best Step8" is another one of those lessons that subtly works its way through much of the segments and stories in Sesame Street.
For a child it obviously makes sense. Break down what you're doing into small steps and do the next one first.
How funny that we disregard this as we grow older.
I guess as adults we think we are smarter and more capable so we don’t need to take small steps anymore.
(el oh el)
Raise the Floor9 is very similar. Raise the Floor can feel like an advanced superpower when you finally figure it out in your life as an adult. But the fundamentals of it have, again, always been there.
There's a segment where Grover (blue guy), dresses up and acts like a superhero - he actually does this a lot, but in this segment he has come upon a cow that is stuck at the top of some stairs. This cow as just got her hair done at a beauty parlor and is standing at the exit at the top of a few steps down to the sidewalk. In her words (the cows) "Cows can't walk down stairs."
So, Grover to the rescue.
Grover looks at the situation,
And funnily enough, says "ok so you're up there ... and you need to get down there ... and these steps are in the way."
(And I immediately start counting the principles ... we have a destination and a starting point, and we know the path between the two needs to be figured out, so we have a constraint, and possibly a next best step to identify)
Through the skit, Grover tries over and over to just get the cow off the steps in one fell swoop.
First, he tries to just straight up get rid of the stairs using his superpowers. Unfortunately he is not able to do that with his super power hand chop (hurts his hand in the process).
Next, Grover suggests the cow jumps over the stairs, and to make it 'safe' he brings in a trampoline for her to land on. Naturally she jumps onto the trampoline and ends up right back on the stairs where she started.
Finally, through a ... series of ridiculous circumstances, Grover accidentally makes a ramp with a board (after almost getting flattened by the cow), and all is well. The cow is able to walk down the ramp.
Does that sound silly?
How many times have you looked at a goal you wanted to achieve, maybe considered where you are now, and then just lept for it?
Did you bounce back to where you started?
Sounds awfully familiar doesn't it.
You don’t need to do it all and have it all now, you just gotta do a little bit better. The cow didn’t need to leap off the steps, she just needed tinier steps to take.
Morning Routine
There's an episode which involves Elmo and Abby (Elmo's magical fairy friend) and their talking basketball friend, where it's all about morning routines.
The song is one of those that'll stick in your head for days.
"Wake up, potty time, eat and brush" (insert catchy beat, over and over)
The premise of this little story is that Elmo and Abby are trying to play ball, but their ball is their friend (a talking ball) who is late showing up. They ultimately find out that she isn't even ready to come out and play. She (the ball) admits that some days she can't ever seem to get herself going.
Elmo points out that what she really needs is a good morning routine, so she can prepare herself and then be more consistently ready to have fun!
To me it sounds an awful lot like preparation and readiness.
Which is a key component of the first couple hours after you wake up in The Champions Perfect Day10.
Now, Sesame Street obviously doesn't integrate or intimate the biological details of why Champions Perfect Day is so powerful to understand, or exactly why that early part of preparation is so important ...
But damn I look back on this and think that I must have learned about morning routines to prepare myself for the day when I was this young and then just disregarded it as boring adult crap all the way until I found Champions Perfect Day ...
And now I have a morning routine (it's a bit more ... evolved ... than 'wake up, potty time, eat and brush').
But it's all there.
ITS ALL THERE PEOPLE.
Presence
This is one that appears throughout episodes, but is perhaps the most hidden or B-messagy lesson.
A good example is an episode where Elmo needs to take a bath.
It starts off with one of the adults who is baby sitting Elmo pokes her head out the window at Elmo playing outside and says "it's your bath time."
Of course, Elmo does not want to take a bath, he wants to keep playing.
And thus ensues a wild chase through various silly scenarios where he avoids taking a bath, until finally in conversation with Ernie, Elmo says he doesn't want a bath he wants to have fun, and Ernie points out you can have fun in a bath, and all is well.
What's happening - subtextually - is that when Elmo finds out he needs to take a bath, he immediately starts living in the past and the future. He's both imagining the future in the bath where he isn't having fun anymore AND he's imagining the past where he was just having fun.
He wants to hold onto that past and avoid the future imagined.
Yet, if he just realized that the present moment is always now and whatever you make it out to be ... you can have fun in it regardless of what you are doing.
As long as you are present.
In TGA, presence is also pretty much always a b-message. Though I certainly write about it directly when possible. The reason being is I find a lot of our human resistance to change and uncertainty happens when we end up living in the future and the past instead of the now.
We narrow our vision by imagining a future we don't want to experience, and we blind ourselves by focusing on the past. Mix the two you can you can't even see what's happening right here and now in front of you.
All the while, the real answer to having the life you want IS focusing on the next little step that you can take in the now.
It's always you, it's always here, it's always now.
TGA, Sesame Street, What's the Difference?
I suppose I could make a whole thorough dissertation outlining every lesson of Sesame Street, and I'm certain that they'd all map back to these principles ...
Heck, there's an entire Elmo specific segment where they demonstrate that learning is DOING, wherein Elmo learns by looking up some new thing, and then taking action to apply the information and thus learning.11
TGA really is just fundamental principles for living a good life and figuring out how to get what you want out of it.
Obviously, Sesame Street is a show for children and overtly talks about things like counting numbers, the colors of the rainbow, learning about dinosaurs, how plants grow, being friends, etc. And The Guardian Academy is not teaching you about rainbows. We talk about identifying constraints towards your goals in order to give you the tools to make the life you desire as certain as possible, to remove suffering from yourself and others, and in general be a better adult.
But underneath all of the lessons in either instance are things deeply fundamental which are as true when we learned them as kids as they are now.
Lessons that we all start learning at a young age ... but which then at some point along the way, get buried by expectations, other people's regrets, and external ideas about who you should be and what you should do.
We stop being able to hear ourselves.
We forget who we really are.
And then we get lost in the fog trying to stumble our way forward.
So this all begs the question ...
IF THIS is Sesame Street ...
What character are you?
Be Useful. Be Present. Love the Journey.
Joseph Robertson, CMO The Guardian Academy
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Love this. A reminder that your becoming lies in being more of what you’ve always been.