Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

by Manoush Zomorodi

To steer children into becoming players who don’t use games to escape real life but instead become more confident, focused, social, and creative problem solvers, there is one thing no parent should ever do. “Do not shame your children about the games they play,” she said. That means never saying things such as “Stop wasting your time and do something real.” Trivializing a kid’s favorite video game will not get him or her to stop playing. It will only serve to “develop that escapist mind-set” by reinforcing the idea that their interests don’t matter and that games don’t have a connection with the real world. Instead, engage with children by asking questions about the game. How you play it. What’s hard. What’s cool. How they’ve gotten better at the game. You know, the basics. They’ll probably roll their eyes at you, but McGonigal said, “That conversation alone can really transform a young person in terms of their ability to bring all of these gameful strengths to school, to sports, to their personal relationships, and to themselves.”

With all games, she recommends helping children make the connection between what they do on-screen and real life by—sigh—quizzing them. Yes, add this to your modern parenting repertoire. She counsels parents to ask their kids what they have gotten better at since they began playing a game. However, the important aspect to this question is to get at the abstract skills. So if your daughter answers, “I got better at slinging this bird,” or your son says, “I’m really good at using this kind of power-up,” you have to dig deeper. Push them to move past the concrete tasks and get into the larger skills behind them—such as “I found trying different strategies helps with this level.”

TAN’S TEN-SECOND MEDITATION PRACTICE Here’s a brief exercise Tan crafted to prove that meditation can be as quick and useful as a Google search. This one is geared to upping your kindness quotient (which Tan says makes you happier). 1. Bring a person into your mind, preferably someone you care about. 2. Think I wish for this person to be happy. 3. Maintain the thought for three breaths, in and out. 4. Do this every day to turn your wish for other people’s happiness into a habit … that will bring you happiness, too.

In order to consume information, you need to pay attention, or as Tan put it, “The currency of information is attention.”