Eileen Gu: Multipotentialite Olympian
🚫 Who Refused To Niche Down!
Mirabel from Encanto is a multipotentialite.
She was born without a single gift.
Every person in the Madrigal family gets a magical door. A special power.
They are specialists.
Except Mirabel.
She gets no door. She’s a generalist in a specialist world.
A multi-talented misfit.
Of course, everything changes when the magic crumbles.
Mirabel saves the day.
The specialist society we have lived in since the Industrial Revolution is beginning to crumble.
Our kids are growing up in an AI world where specialist roles are disappearing fast.
AI replaces linear sequential thinking.
The good news? Our brains don’t think this way.
Our divergent thinking blends disparate concepts into weird new ideas that should not work. But they do.
We’re all Mirabel.
But we must learn to leverage this thinking.
Eileen Gu has mastered this.
Eileen Gu is a Multipotentialite
Born to a single mum, a Chinese immigrant and former speed skater. She falls in love with skiing.
But Eileen’s also academically gifted.
Every academic told her skiing was a distraction. Every skiing coach told her she was too academic and couldn’t do both.
Both sides told her to pick a lane.
And you know how much we hate being told what to do, right?
Today, she’s the most decorated freestyle skier in Olympic history. 3 golds and 3 silvers across two Winter Olympics.
Stanford student studying International Relations with a passion for quantum physics. Catwalk model. Multimillionaire entrepreneur.
Age 22.
She didn’t niche down. She didn’t squeeze herself into a tiny box.
Obviously, she’s very gifted.
But gifted kids underperform all the time.
What makes Eileen different is how she leverages her divergent thinking brain.
She puts her success down to neuroplasticity. She’s trained her brain to move toward discomfort and stress, whereas most of us train our brains to avoid it by doomscrolling.
Her main creative source is journaling and metacognition…thinking about her thinking.
“You can control what you think. You can control how you think and therefore you can control who you are.
And especially as a young person, with neuroplasticity on my side, I can literally become exactly who I want to be.” — Eileen Gu
Here’s the science behind why her approach works. And why doomscrolling is training your child’s brain to do the exact opposite. 👇
👆 Join over 1.7 million people and watch this 2-minute viral video. A neuroscientist breaks down exactly how she does it. Genuinely brilliant.
Neuroplasticity. Simpler than it sounds.
Imagine walking through long grass. Same path. Every single day.
Nothing at first. Then, slowly, a clear trail appears.
That’s your brain. Repetition carves the path. The path becomes your identity.
But here’s what most of our kids are training their brains to do instead.
Every time our kids feel stress or anxiety, they reach for their phone and watch brain rot. Doomscrolling is an easy way to numb out the stress and anxiety of living in an overstimulating society.
Our kids are training their brains to be unproductive.
They consume more. They create less.
And slowly, that becomes who they are.
So we built something to get kids to consume less and create more
Amy, my life partner, and I designed Future Proof for our highly sensitive daughter Chloe.
We’re teaching Chloe to consume less and create more. To start and finish her creative projects. To be resilient and adaptable.
To give her the creative business skills not taught in classrooms.
We can’t predict the future of AI. But we can prepare Chloe for it.
We’re doing this with monthly, mini creative business cohorts led by creative experts.
Wrapped around gently, gamified daily gratitude journaling and healthy dopamine with cash prizes
The peer-reviewed research shows gratitude journaling builds resilience, positivity and mental wellbeing in pre-teens and teens.
The whole thing gently trains kids to move toward challenges instead of away from them.
Stress action instead of stress avoidance.
If you want your 10-16-year-old kid, nieces or nephews to try it out, we’d love to host you.
7-day free trial. £49 a month after that. Cancel anytime.
P.S. Just to be a tease.
Cohort 1: How to become a fashion designer.
The first tutor is a friend/ client of mine.
A celebrity fashion designer and former lecturer at the London School of Fashion who has created bespoke designs for Lady Gaga, Madonna, Sabrina Carpenter, Gwen Stefani and Dua Lipa, amongst many others.
Her work has graced the cover of Vogue, Rolling Stone Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, etc etc
Five weeks. The kids walk away with a completed project, a new skill and the pride and confidence of starting and finishing.
New cohort and new skills added monthly.
That’s all the info for now.
Peace Out ✌️