Peter Skillman, currently a design director at Microsoft, asked several groups of people to do the Marshmallow Challenge, where a group of people is asked to build a tall structure using 20 pieces of spaghetti, 1 meter of sticky tape, 1 meter of string, and put a piece of marshmallow on top of the structure.
He tried different groups of people: engineers, architects, businessmen, and kindergarten kids. The engineers and architects did really well. The business people did poorly. The kindergarten group performance was the best!
How did the 5–6 year old children did it? As quoted from Erika Andersen in her book “Be Bad First”, they:
Didn’t waste time on “status transactions”, that is, deciding who should lead the effort — they just started building.
Tried lots of things that ended up not working, rather than trying to just do one thing that would be “right”.
Asked for more spaghetti — not a single adult group asked for more materials.
What can we learn from them?
- Do not bother about status. If you want to do the work, then do it.
- Do not bother trying to do everything right the first time. Be comfortable with failures, because it does help you learn to be better.
- Get over your fears. If there’s no rule (like “asking more materials is forbidden”), why should you be afraid to ask away?
Andersen also added that basically children are better at being a novice, a beginner. They believe in their ability that they’ll be able to get better if they just learn how, e.g. being able to finally put on their own clothes, ride a bike, or cut with scissors. In the marshmallow challenge, their mental energy wasn’t used for worrying about being good, but instead used for synthesizing from what they already knew. The spaghetti structures built by these kids looked like animals or houses — something they already knew.
The Marshmallow Challenge is not the only child-friendly activities that we can do as an adults to unleash our inner child. The Lego Serious Play is another example. In this activity, participants are asked to “3D-print” their ideas with a limited pieces of Lego.
Despite the popularity of this exercise in many companies, some people consider such activities as infantilization or touchy-feely. The following is a quote taken from someone’s experience of making a duck with Lego pieces.
The duck is a window into your soul. Why did I assume that I had to use all the pieces? Why did I think it was a puzzle, or an IQ test? Why was I so afraid of failing? I hate to admit this, but in less than a minute, with a half-dozen plastic bricks, this woman has gutted me like a fish and laid bare my neuroses. (source)
The quote above describes how fear is formed in our subconscious. It comes from lack of responsibility in dealing with our own neuroses. That makes us accumulate more and more subconscious impulses, which many are driven by fear (hint: ego).
By rejecting such “childish” activities, we’re shown the window to our inner child who refused to grow up. The so-called professional adult life makes us forget the way we were brought into this world when we were very young. At work, adults display the opposite of what kindergarten kids do:
- Not looking out for each other. “We’re in this together” is forgotten. Instead, we’re trying to save ourselves. “Me, me, me!”
- Not willing to let others help or contribute. “I need to be in control! I can’t let mistakes happen!”
- Having fear. It comes from a sense of danger or threat to our safety or comfort coming from what others do, done, might do.
Hence, it’s ironic how we adults see ourselves as the ones who raise children to be creative human beings. In fact we need to learn from kids how we can go back to be childlike (not childish).
How do we turn our workplaces into kindergartens? See Robert Fulghum’s writing below, from his book “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”. He learned the most elemental rules of life at a Sunday school. A couple of quotes:
Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Live a balanced life — learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned — the biggest word of all — LOOK.
As the author argued, the rules above (and more) is everything this world needs. The quote above is only the parts relevant to the Marshmallow Challenge: not worrying about status because everyone shares and plays fair, not worrying about control because everyone puts things in the right places, not worrying about safety or comfort because everyone is engaged deeply in their tasks, wondering and looking.
To be like children is to view the world the way we brought in: with a heart for connections, a body for exploration, a mind for questions. Stop accumulating more theories and start practicing: to share, live in balance, experiment, and observe.
Let’s try to be children again. Find quiet moments where you can let your mind wander inside your childhood experiences. Life can be playful and disciplined at the same time. We can all be children and adults at the same time.
