1. You’ll Understand When You’re Older

Where it’s from: We’ve all heard this before. It’s when a parent makes a decision they maybe don’t feel comfortable explaining or able to explain at the time, but they expect that certain experiences inherent to life will eventually show you the logic.

What it means: When someone says this, it’s usually a voice of authority talking to someone they disagree with. They’re telling someone that they lack enough experience to understand why the reality of the situation is what it is — that they lack proper perspective.

They think the explanation you’re looking for requires physical, emotional or intellectual experiences, and that you don’t have those certain experiences that would help you understand (yet). Almost like a pro-athlete suddenly out of their prime and coming to grips with an impending retirement, you’ll just have to find out for yourself.

How it relates: A diverse range of experiences and acquaintances gives a person the ability to reason more effectively. People reason by taking what they know and applying it to what they’re thinking about (aka: connecting the dots). Having diverse experiences (more dots) allows you to take into account nuances that are more varied yet related, broad yet exhaustive, and small yet significant, and thus make better decisions.

That’s because you’ve seen how more factors have affected more situations than that alternate-universe-you that watches the same news network, talks to the same people and absorbs the same opinions every day. It’s true that just living life longer tends to give you more experience, but that’s only relative to you. By default you have more experience in life today than you did yesterday, but others who do more, read more, listen more, etc. have experienced more whether they’re older or not.

And this can be situational. A younger person may have more experience in one area but not another. But either way, more experience is generally better — unless you take an ignorance is bliss approach to life.

We often tend to not realize what we’ve never really learned and assume a more knowledgeable posture because of age or appearance. Or because we read a headline and it fit with the narrative in our head — we know what’s going on! But sometimes you don’t! Teaching your kids is the simplest, best test of your own knowledge.

Richard Feynman, famed physicist, had a theory that if you can’t explain it simply you don’t know it well enough. So if you can’t give your kid a general picture of what’s going on, it would probably be good for you, too, to research a more complete answer and not dismiss the conversation.

The ability to understand your environment generates all sorts of great things, from social empathy to patience to increased ingenuity and educational and professional success. In reality it can be tough to bundle up a clear picture of all the nuances at play on any given topic — particularly when dealing with children.

There are plenty of stressors and complexities in a world with increasing inequality, but we should do our best to provide truthful and comprehensive answers so that our future generations are more equipped to process (and improve) the modern world. And when we don’t know something, it’s a chance to connect. Bond over sports and fashion and science and engineering and history. It’s all interesting.

I’d also like to note the flip side of this. As adults we do (generally speaking) have more knowledge and wisdom (the dots and the lines between them), but we forget a lot too. And we don’t realize what we forget while we learn everything else.

This really comes down to time and how we perceive it. Do you we stereotype the knowledge and abilities of others because of their age? Or do we take a more active ownership over our time and use it to sharpen our understanding of things and to have good conversations with anyone, in effect gaining more time for ourselves by becoming more effective decision-makers with more diverse experiences to draw from?

We should always be open to alternate opinions, regardless of the source. It could be right and a change could be good. And keeping an open mind is the only way this book will mean anything to you, it’s intentionally broad and you’ll have to apply it to yourself in a way that make sense for you, even if it’s coming from someone younger than you.