Ep 180: Can Shortcuts Lead Teens to Success?

Marcus Du Sautoy, mathematician and author of Thinking Better, shares how laziness and the wish for a shortcut can actually push our teens to come up with creative and time-saving innovations. If you've enjoyed Talking to Teens, we'd love if you could leave us a five-star rating, and if you have time, a review!  Full show notes

Hard work is essential to success…right? If we want teens to thrive they have to hustle, grind and work laboriously to achieve perfect SAT scores or a spot on the basketball team. We condemn teen laziness, hoping that kids will understand the value of blood sweat and tears. For goodness sake, how will they ever get anywhere in life if they’re not spending hours with their chemistry textbooks or practicing their free throws all afternoon?

But maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. Perhaps there’s some merit to taking the easy way out–so long as it’s clever! If teens can find ways to get to the same result without all the effort, they might just stumble upon a great discovery. This week, we’re talking all about shortcuts and laziness, and why these things may not be as bad as we assume! Sometimes, figuring out a way around hard work can lead to some seriously innovative thinking.

Joining us this week is Marcus Du Sautoy, author of Thinking Better: The Art of the Shortcut in Math and Life. Marcus is a brilliant mathematician and the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. His books and regular media appearances have done wonders to spark public interest in science and mathematics!

This week, Marcus and I are talking all about shortcuts–and how they can make our teens lives’ easier. We’re also discussing why laziness is underrated, and how collaboration might just save the future of the human race.

The Power of Shortcuts We tend to encourage teens to avoid cutting corners. We hope that if they struggle and toil and do it the hard way, they’ll learn to be disciplined, and they’ll realize that nothing in life comes easy. And while Marcus agrees that hard work is often necessary to achieve great things, sometimes shortcuts can help. If we come up with clever ways around problems, we can save ourselves time–or even make exciting new discoveries.

Marcus explains that finding a shortcut starts with identifying promising patterns. He uses the inventors of Google as an example. The patterns they saw in computer data allowed them to create a shortcut for searching the entire web! Great musicians are able to discover patterns within music–to the point where they don’t even need to read the notes on the paper to create good tunes. If teens can take a close look at the data of their workout routine or college applications, they might be able to find a shortcut that maximizes results.

Sometimes, however, it feels like a shortcut defeats the point!  When you step out of the house to take a hike, you’re in it for the journey, not the destination. Marcus explains that this kind of hard work is defined as “praxis”, or work done simply for the enjoyment of the process. We can still often benefit from shortcuts in these pursuits though, Marcus explains. When we’re ready to take that hike, it’s nice to still be able to drive up to the trailhead! In the episode, Marcus and I talk more about finding shortcuts, and where teens can apply them to make their lives easier.

We might see shortcuts as a teen’s excuse to be lazy…but Marcus believes laziness isn’t so bad either! 

Is Laziness Good For Teens? As a species, humans have always condemned laziness, even including it among the seven deadly sins! But Marcus thinks there might be some benefits to being lazy every once in a while. Taking some time to lie around can often allow us to ponder our surroundings and come up with outside-the-box ideas. Laziness can also push us to find new and interesting shortcuts. Babe Ruth famously hated running around the bases…and learned to hit home runs so that he wouldn’t have to.

Marcus and I discuss how being lazy for the long haul might actually take some work up front. If teens want to figure out ways to make their lives easier, they may have to spend some time building something. For example, outlining an essay may seem like an effortful extra step, but can make writing the paper much faster–so teens can relax sooner! In the episode, Marcus explains how the construction of a tunnel through the alps took nearly seventeen years, but now only takes seventeen minutes to travel through.

In our interview, Marcus and I discuss some fascinatingly relevant research about chess players. When chess champions underwent brain scans, the results were surprising. The researchers expected that scans of their brains would light up, showing these players using their brain to the max. Instead, these players used less of their brain to play chess, instead relying on intuitive ways of thinking to figure out each move. Sometimes, less is more…and we don’t always have to be fighting laziness, says Marcus.

To find shortcuts that make life easier, we’ve often got to apply a different perspective. Marcus and I discuss how these new perspectives can come from working with people who are totally different from us!

Collaboration is Critical

Have you ever found yourself at a loss for solving a problem, until a friend provides you with a wise new solution that you never would have thought of yourself? In our interview, Marcus explains his vision for a world that thrives off this kind of collaboration. In this world, people from different backgrounds with different experiences and perspectives come together to find solutions for humanity’s most complicated problems. Taking the language of another discipline like music or English and applying it to math is one of the ways Marcus has come across remarkable mathematical discoveries!

Some problems, like climate change, suffer from having only one set of people behind the solution, says Marcus. Climate scientists need the help of psychologists, politicians, and marketers to help people change their behavior and move towards sustainable practices. Biologists, chemists, and health care experts need to weigh in and assess the true results of this gigantic threat. With the help of engineers and financiers, we can create and assemble technology that can slow the tide of global warming. Without all these perspectives, we would be hopeless against the challenge!

To Marcus, this lack of cross-collaboration is one of the biggest issues with our schools today. We compartmentalize science, English, math and history in schools, leading teens to believe these things are totally separate. The reality is that the intersections between these subjects is where some of the most interesting learning happens! If we want kids to be excited about academics–especially science and math–showing them interesting and different applications of each subject is a good place to start.

In the Episode… Marcus’s brilliant mathematical mind makes for a richly informative and entertaining episode this week! On top of the topics discussed above we also cover:How math and music are connectedWhy perfectionism is a “killer of success”How teens can find a college major they loveWhy practice is essential in math and lifeI was struck with a new-found love and respect for shortcuts after speaking with Marcus and I hope you enjoy our talk as much as I did—listening to podcasts are pe...