They say baseball is the most difficult sport and hitting a major league pitcher the most difficult task in sports. With less than a second to react to a pitch, a hitter often must guess in advance what's coming based on a series of recent and past experiences and then execute. Even when hitters know what's coming they can't always get a hit, never mind make contact.
In teaching or writing about financial education I constantly feel like I'm swinging at curveballs that the catcher has already told me are coming, but to no avail. I know what approach doesn't work (the approach most authors have taken of presenting the material in textbook-like fashion with bold print words and no kids or animals). The search for what does work, on the other hand, has eluded me.
The authors of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much recommend not teaching someone something till they know the students will have to use it. They find short-term memory to be stronger than long-term.
Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers: The Story of Success finds that someone doesn't attain the proficiency of an expert until they've logged 10,000 hours in a subject or career. Here, repeated experience is king.
The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right by Atul Gawande proclaims that checklists are the answer to complicated problem solving.
We do not all have the time, the interest, nor the opportunities to all become financial advisors for five years. Nor does cramming before April 15th going to help us do better on our taxes every year. Checklists are certainly helpful, but when we don't know exactly what makes up a credit score or what creditors/lenders are looking for, they cannot assure success.
How then do you teach the subject so that it sticks? As I wrote about in my last post, Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, found a light at the end of the tunnel in:
Subjects' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.
This is very helpful and easily adopted. And this is why the children's content I will most likely produce in the coming months will neither look, nor smell like financial education. Rather, it will use comedy to display the biases and heuristics we all use unknowingly everyday to our own detriment.
Batter up. Digging in.
