How to win in the 21st Century - make your kids Discon-Net

I am a blackberry addict. I am connected to the net. I am in touch with my customers, clients, business partners, shareholders, directors, auditors, lawyers, merchant bankers and friends 24-7. That sounds cool but I don't think so. Firstly, only the poor need to work. Secondly, I am born pre-Internet, which means I live in a time when there is no jacking in. I live in a time when there is no sms, no cellphone, no google, no i-chat, no facebook, no Starhub TV recorder, no iPod.. In short, no endless distractions. This means I have, by a simple fluke, was lucky to be born in a time when I am allowed to read books, to appreciate words, to love poems and to be astounded by mathematics and to worship the romance of science.

I had dinner with Dr Alec, a russia-born, Red-Amy trained entrepreneur and he told me it was almost a crime back then in Russia if you don't do well in Mathematics. The teachers don't teach you the formula. You had to figure it out. You had to explain in Russian why a triangle has interior angles that equal 180 degrees. You had to walk the same path as what the great mathematicians did and then they explained the formula. All these requires time and concentration. You can't figure out the beauty of so many things if your ears are plugged into the iPod, your fingers busy texting your friends, your eyes glued to the screen in which some mindless Facebook game asked you to fertilize some virtual land so that you are ranked Supremo Farmer.

This is the challenge all educators and for that matter, all humans with net access have to face. How to jack out and experience the world as it is. How to mess up with a real human being and say sorry? How to smell a scammer out to con your investments? How to defend your rights if some bully truly trespasses against you and believe me, in the 21st Century, you don't offer the other cheek. How to connect, contract and collaborate? And it is not click, click, click and type a "hehe" and you get away winning. That happens in the virtual battlefield but the arena of life requires guts, sweat, blood, grit, focus and lots of help from mentors, friends and colleagues. And a bit of luck!

Another thing about avoiding distraction is you need to spend X hours of your life to master something. I think it was Malcolm Gladwell who spoke about the minimum 10,000 hours (correct me if inaccurate) before you can be deemed competent at something. That's like 4-5 years duration, assuming you spend 5-6 hours a day mastering that particular skill set. Imagine your kids' are master of facebook and mega-ultra Lord in World of Warcraft. And they will look cool flipping out their shiny Macbooks at Starbucks... Trust me, they WON'T own a chain of Starbucks in the future, or invent a new cloud computing technology...you will be lucky if they don't ask for money to hang out at their 30s.

So start jacking out today and make your children Discon-Net. Oh yes.. And this is my perfect excuse why I have been out of sync in my facebook :-) I rest my case.

And I invented this word "Discon-Net". You saw it here first. Go out and live a productive real life!

Harold Fock
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld