During his inaugural speech in 2009, President Obama referenced a passage from the Bible I’ve never liked much: 1st Corinthians Chapter 13, verse 11. It reads:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

The verse always sounded preachy to me (well, it’s the Bible afterall). Like some bitter old guy telling the kids to get off his lawn.

I guess I’ve never much liked the idea of being a “grown up”. It always seemed grown ups had too much perspective than was good for them. That growing up somehow meant life had beat you into submission. And reality had set in.

But something about that verse as cited in the President’s speech has stuck with me. And as I’ve spent the last two holiday weeks home with my kids, I’ve begun to appreciate the difference between “growing up” and putting away childish things.

Look, I love my kids. Crazy about them in fact. And they’re amazing, wonderful, brilliant, smarter than yours blah blah blah. But watching them over the holidays has highlighted for me some of the “childish” attributes that they will need to grow out of.

I believe some of these “childish” attributes continue to hold back many adults from becoming the best version of themselves, and should be put away.

Here are a few I saw:

Kids Need to Be Told What to Do- Every morning, after the kids had finished breakfast, we would set aside an hour or so to pick up the house. Rooms were assigned, jobs were handed out and they went to work.

Inevitably, we would walk into an area where a kid had finished their job quickly and had begun to wander around. Sometimes the wandering led them back to us. Sometimes it lead them to staring blankly out the window. Inevitably, it led to them asking us what they should do next.

Some children know how to spot problems and go fix them, but most little kids need to be told what to do. As a parent, it gets frustrating to have to tell them what to do all the time.

Now, imagine how frustrating it must be for a boss or co-founder to have to be telling a full grown adult to do the same. 

Kids Worry About What Others Kids Think: My son and I had let our hair go a little bit heading into the holidays. After months with no haircuts our shaggy heads were getting pretty out of control. Despite our collective resistance, AMR sent us to the barder. As we walked back to the car, he grabbed my hand, pulled in close and started to cry. When I asked what was bothering him. He said he was worried that his friends would make fun of his cleaned up look. He was really worried about what they thought.

Funny thing happened tho. The day after he got his cut, a friend came over to play. The kid didn’t say a thing about his hair.

Kids spend a lot of energy worrying what others will think. So they change their behavior to what’s expected of them or what they think others want them to do. It’s something kids stumble through on their way to finding who they really are. Put away the fear of others thoughts and get on with being you.

Kids Waste Time- I didn’t have the stomach to run this experiment during out break, but I would wager that if I let my them sit in front of the TV or play video games all day, they would. I don’t think they would have any problem idling away for days on end.

I’m sure there are developmental theories on this, but the read I get from my kids is that they really don’t have a sense for time. And why should they. They have their whole lives in front of them. Adults don’t.

I’m all for finding down time or time to unwind, but adults shouldn’t just waste time.

Kids Taddle- Josie’s hitting me! Max is breathing on me! Kalli’s hogging the WiiMote! Come visit the Roberts compound for a day and this is what you’ll hear. Sometimes the kids genuinely need us to intervene when they’re attempts to change the other’s behavior fails.

But, most of the time they’re either trying to get the other person in trouble or too bullheaded to fix the problem themselves. So they rely on someone else to fix it for them. 

Kids can count on parents fixing problems for them. Adults can’t.

Kids Babble- Language is new to kids. They’re still figuring out how to use it to express themselves.

To explore this new medium they practice it. A lot. And it’s fun to watch them as they try to connect thoughts into sentences. Or, as they add new words to their lexicon (often with comical results). Given the opportunity, my kids will talk forever. One particularly chatty 4 yr old, can go on for hours on the subject of princesses alone (trust me, I’ve experienced this first hand).

It’s cute for kids to babble on and on talking about themselves and their interests. It’s not cute in adults.

I still don’t much like the idea of being a “grown up”, but I’ve come to appreciate the need to put away these types of childish things.

And I’ll be working towards doing just that in 2012. Happy New Year y’all.

After a year of trying to be consistent in posting something here every day I’m finally at a loss for words.

It’s been an amazing year on BRYCE DOT VC for me.

The ideas this place has helped me unlock, the dots this place has helped me connect and the doors this place has opened for me have been unexpected and, at times, amazing.

When I started posting in earnest, I would often worry about why I was doing this.

There are a lot of reasons investors do this stuff- spread their ideas or to build their brand or their audience or their profile or something.

That I felt compelled to post for none of those reasons nagged at me for the better part of the year.

Then I started to see all of these wonderful things falling out of it. From improved clarity of thought to new friends and enemies to new opportunities for potfolio companies to entirely new investments. Many of the best things that happend to me in 2011 were somehow connected to something posted here.

So I stopped worrying about why. And that’s made all the difference.

With my last post of the year I just wanted to say how grateful I am for any of you still following along here despite my typos, poor grammar, bad punctuation and lack of spellchecking. Whether you found this through twitter, techmeme, tumblr or some other avenue, all of your retweets, reblogs or comments are appreciated and seen and they have made my 2011.

Thanks.

Back in 2010 Peter Thiel announced a controversial program called the “20 Under 20”. The plan was to make grants to 20 kids 20 years old or younger to stop out of school. The aim of the program was to not only to spot young and restless talent early on, but highlight what Peter believed was a growing bubble in education. 

In an interview he did with Sarah Lacy he says:

A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.

It’s actually worse than a bad mortgage. You have to get rid of the future you wanted to pay off all the debt from the fancy school that was supposed to give you that future.

What I found interesting at the time, was how Sarah led into her piece on the program:

Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you.

And it did.

The web lit up.

Educators we aghast, college grads were split and a conversation that hadn’t reached our tech community began. At the time, my reaction to the actual program was mixed but my reaction to the underlying message of an education bubble was enlightening.

I finished school with no student loans. I had to work fulltime to do so, but I’d never had to factor that debt load into any risk calculations when it came to my career. So, I’ve never thought that much about it. Then Peter announced this program and I started tuning into the conversation around education much more closely. As the #occupy movement emerged, and stories poured in at wearethe99percent I started to see broader narrative forming around the crippling debt load being carried by so many as a result of their education. And as an investor, I started watching emergent trends in education much more closely.

Fast forward to today and what was once an uninteresting and underfunded category, Education, is now considered one of the hottest. “Education presents the most exciting opportunity for many investors in 2012” reads the headline on the top VC investment trends for the coming year. 

That’s not to say Peter had everything to do with that shift (Sal Khan, among others, have had much to do with it too). But, by being provocative, Peter cast a spotlight and elevated a conversation on a problem that needs to be addressed. 

There’s power in being provocative. As one of my favorite tech provocateurs, Julian Bleecker, recently said:

Provocations are good for the soul. They force one to look at the world a bit differently. We’re largely conservative beings – change is hard to imagine and even harder to suffer through. It disrupts our routines. Provocations are like lenses that turn the world upside down, if only for a moment, in order to see what could be, or how things could be different.

He’s right.

Sometimes viewing the world upside down may end up only causing us to pause and reevaluate a held belief. Other times, we may find we’ve been flipped the wrong way all along and readjust.

Either way, I’m glad there are people like Julian and Peter stirring the pot. 

We need more of them.

One of the more thought provoking pieces I’ve read recently comes from Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, who sketches out a methodology for shaping a digital representation of ourselves:

Suppose you wanted to create your own digital ghost to live for eternity in the Internet and maybe do some haunting. What would that look like?

You’d start now, backing up everything that happens on your computer to the so-called cloud (storage on the Internet). You’d run a program in the background that monitors your Facebook changes and all of your email conversations. Together with your photos, your resume, and all of your shopping and entertainment preferences, the program running in the cloud could piece together an avatar of you. 

From your photos, the program in the cloud could create a 30-year old version of you that never ages. The program would know how you speak, based on your email and other writing. It would know all of your preferences, your passions, your hot buttons, your finances, the identities of your friends and family, and anything else that flows through your computer.

That’s all possible with current technology. Now let’s say we extend this to your phone. In the near future, every conversation you make could optionally be saved to the cloud too, as well as all of your GPS locations, your web searches on your phone, your pictures and more. From your saved voice conversations your avatar would get its voice. With today’s technology, your digital ghost would sound robotic. In time, as technology improves, your ghost’s voice would be indistinguishable from your living self.

The data trails we’re leaving around the web can seem vapid and ethereal, but they’re very real fragments of ourselves. Piecing them together into AI like ghosts isn’t all that far off. As Bradley Horowitz from Google notes, they’re already on it. With Android, Chrome, Maps, Voice, YouTube they’re able to track where we go, what we browse, what we watch, with whom we communicate, even what we sound like:

The opportunity here is for Google to start recognizing people. When we know who you are, your interests, and who you know—if you let us know that—we can transform all of your activities for the better.

From personalized search results to eternal life (sorry, Peter Thiel, it’s weirder than you thought) we’re just starting to scratch the surface for the types of applications that can be built on top of these piles of personal data. 

I’ve never really believed in ghosts before, but I think I do now.