Something a little different tonight.

See if you can spot the subtle difference.

Some of you might have heard of Khan Academy. It’s a rather marvelous website that got started when its founder, Salman Khan, made some videos to help his young cousins with their studies.

The kids loved them, so Khan made more, and more, until it snowballed into an amazing website with dozens of contributors creating hundreds of hours of engaging videos on every subject known to humanity.

They even have a motto for their movement to make education not just free but awesome for everybody : You Can Learn Anything!

I signed up for said website, and hence I get its newsletter. The latest newsletter had a rather attention grabbing deadline: “Why I Will Never Tell My Son He’s Smart”.

Sounds pretty awful, doesn’t it? Like some kind of testosterone laden Dragon Mother bullshit. But that is not the sort of thing that fits with my image of Khan Academy, and so I read on.

Turns out, what the author means is that he reserves his highest praise not for when his children excel at things they are good at, but when they apply themselves to something that does not come easily to them and, through perseverance, improve themselves in that area.

In other words, you get the most praise not for turning an A into an A+, but for turning a C into a B.

Once I got over the shock of this novel idea, I realizes what a profoundly superior scheme that is. Learning to overcome obstacles is one of the most live-improving skills a person can have. To someone who is confident that they can overcome obstacles, the world is at their command. They are not stuck in the rut of trying to only do the things they are good at. They can go wherever they want in life without having to worry about whether it requires something they are “good” at.

From this point of view, the very concept of aptitudes comes into question. Perseverance is the meta-aptitude that unlocks all the rest. If you learn that you can learn whatever you need to learn to accomplish your goals, then you are unstoppable.

That’s why you have so many stories of successful entrepreneurs who dropped out of high school. They realized that if they just applied themselves, they didn’t need to be the smartest or the most gifted.

They were the most persistent, and that’s why they the high school dropouts ended up rich and powerful while the straight A students ended up working for them.

If I had been educated like that, it would have vastly improved my character. One of my main problems as a kid (a problem, I admit, a lot of people would have loved to have) was that it was all too easy. The schoolwork offered no challenge to me, and so I never had to learn to overcome difficulties because for me, there were no difficulties.

Being unable to challenge your gifted students does not merely leave them bored. It leaves them weak.

Admittedly, getting me to try things that did not come naturally to me would have been difficult. I was ferociously stubborn and could out-think my teachers ten times over. It would have taken someone with a very strong will and oodles of patience to convince me to just keep trying at things I found difficult, like arts and crafts, or gym, until I got it right.

Jesus, I was a difficult kid.

Still, the point remains that I could have benefited greatly from an obstacle based education. It would have both challenged me and led me to develop that all important perseverance muscle that I lack to this very day.

I have a lot of trouble sticking with things, and following through on them. I give up things far, far too easily. The moment something becomes tricky or scary or work, I tend to give up. This is especially true if it is something that will only benefit myself, or that only involves myself.

If it involves others, then my strong desire not to let them down and to do my part will keep me motivated. But if it’s just me? Well, who does my giving up hurt? Only me.

And honestly, who cares about me? Not me.

And it’s not just me. I have seen the same sort of weakness of spirit in dozens of my fellow intellectually gifted people. People who have oodles of intelligence and therefore oodles of potential, but there is some vital ingredient missing between them and the things they theoretically can do, and so they end up lost in society’s wastelands.

People with excellent marks that lead to brilliant academic degrees…. only to have them give up faced with even the thought of competing with many similar people for scarce slots in a master’s program. People with amazing programming skills who nevertheless can’t keep a job doing it, or even finish their own projects, because they flee at the slightest sign of pressure. Even people with full doctorates who end up as Starbucks baristas because they can’t face the scramble for professorships.

What is this malaise? It’s more than a lack of confidence. It might seem like you have to be a tower of confidence to overcome these obstacles, but you don’t.

You just have to keep going. You just have to have faith that you will make it there as long as you don’t give up. And you get this faith by overcoming obstacles.

Start slow. Start with something that isn’t very important that only seems sort of hard. Once you overcome that, try for something a little tougher. Work that perseverance muscle just a little bit each day, till it is strong and powerful and you are no longer locked in the box of being only able to do what comes easily to you.

There is a world of possibilities out there. Name it, and you can have it. You just have to hang in there and not immediately give up in favour of something more immediately rewarding.

Learn to hang on.

I will be with you, learning too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So what is the average world citizen to do against the heart of darkness?

You have to be willing to sacrifice some of your innocence in order to remain open to believing that humanity’s dark side knows no bound, and that where the conditions for evil exist, it will inevitably occur. Like an open wound becoming infected, the body politic is always vulnerable to the temptations and dark desires of those given power without an equal degree of accountability.

That sort of morally compromising position can exist anywhere, at any level of society. It can be as simple as a single parent abusing their child with nobody around to witness it, or as complex as as entire world governments being beholden to the rich and powerful because they have accepted so much cash and favours from them.

Thus is our human instinct for reciprocity, the desire to do good things for people who have done good things to us, twisted to serve the amoral desires of the rich and powerful.

Luckily, most of this sacrifice of innocence has been done for us. It was not an easy task and the job is not yet completely, but we have all had to learn about things like domestic abuse, genocide, people who prey on children, wretched poverty, and dozens of other ways in which life is nothing like the Ozzie and Harriet worldview that now seems hopelessly childish.

We are an older but wiser people in today’s world.

Along with the willingness to sacrifice a portion of one’s innocence, the darkness also requires a dedication to tight vigilance of those who wish to fight it. We must be able to direct our attention to those in power and let them know that they are being watched and no longer operate under a cloak of darkness.

Keeping our eyes on those in power is not easy. The first thing anyone does with power is use it to make sure they get to keep their power, and that inevitably leads to hiding what they do from all prying eyes, including those of the people who are explicitly tasked with keeping them in line. Power, as we all know, goes to people’s heads, and people who were perfectly normal citizens before they got power can turn into paranoid tyrants in a shockingly short amount of time.

They have power, and thus, the means to hide what they do with it. But we the people have time, patience, intelligence, and most of all, numbers.

It doesn’t take a huge percentage of us to track everything those in power do. And there are many ways to deduce what is not explicitly revealed. If we are willing to tear ourselves away from all the wondrous distractions the corporate world has provided for us to fixate upon and just spare a little time to scrutinize those in power who are NOT celebrities, we could bring much needed accountability to the power structures of the world.

And then, there is the issue of whistleblowers.

The world desperately needs whistleblowers. A lot of times, it is only those people on the inside who are willing to, in effect, defect to the outside world who can take down large and well organized evil. Often it is only those inside the operation but considered too unimportant to bother keeping secrets from who are in a position to take the giant down from the inside.

But I do not claim that becoming a whistleblower is easy. This is why there are so few of them. Often, it means sacrificing your entire current life, including your financial stability and your safety, just to speak up for a moral principle. It means leaving behind the world you knew and entering a colder, harsher, more anxious one where people in power are using every means at their disposal to discredit, degrade, and destroy you. You have to be willing to turn on all your co-workers and your boss, not to mention the organization that has been paying you for however many years. You have to be willing to shoot your arrow at the giant’s eyes, and flee before he falls, leaving everyone else you know at work to their own devices.

None of that is easy, especially if you have obligations outside yourself, like a spouse, children, elderly grandparents,and so forth and so on. Sure, you might find the corruption and abuse you see all around you intolerable, but what about them? What right to you have to disrupt their lives?

The only solution to this that I can see is if someone with wealth and power of their own takes up the cause of protecting and supporting the brave whistleblowers who are willing to step out into the cold. Someone with enough power of their own to face down all the other rich and powerful people who want the whistleblower’s head on a platter and will call them a class traitor to their face for sheltering them.

So in a way, the rich person must become a whistleblower themselves.

We can bring accountability to these out of control moral imbeciles who we have somehow allowed to access the lever of power, but it will cost us. It will cost us our time, our addicting distractions, our attention, our lifestyles, and maybe even our jobs.

But we are legion, and they are a tiny minority who only wield the power they do because the systems to keep them in check have been allowed by weak and corrupt leadership to be eroded away to nothing.

We the people are still in charge, if only we unite against them. No regime in history has ever been able to stay in power if the people unite against them in sufficient numbers. The politicians and governments of the world need to be told, in no uncertain terms, that they can only survive if they rein in the rich and power and restore law and order to the top income tier.

Only then will we take back our democracy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.