Aadil Mamujee

When I was in middle school, I was terrible at art. Not charmingly bad, but awful, and it didn’t matter how hard I tried. I used to undersell my effort because the outcome was so poor. My parents’ and teachers’ advice was simple: drop it and focus on the things I was good at, where I was going to get As. Trying hard at art was not going to help me get into a better school or university. So I did.

That moment captures the reward function I grew up with in Kenya, and really for a lot of kids born in the 80s. Getting all the As was the whole game. It didn’t matter if I was disruptive in class or if teachers thought I wasn’t applying myself. It didn’t matter if I was a good athlete or had a creative streak worth developing. Those things were secondary to O Level and A Level grades. Test performance was the proxy for intelligence, and intelligence was the proxy for getting into the best universities.

I think about that 12-year-old now not because dropping art ruined my life, but because the logic behind it — quit the hard thing, double down on what comes naturally, optimize for the measurable outcome — is exactly the logic I’m trying to rethink as a parent.

I’m writing this from Kenya, where I was born and raised. We brought our three kids here for three weeks: Kal is 5, Remy is 3, and Juni is not yet 1. They’re meeting extended family, hearing Swahili and Gujarati, eating food I grew up on, and exploring places I love like Naivasha.

AI is democratizing the kind of intelligence we used to measure with tests. Recall, synthesis, even many forms of school performance will matter less than they used to. If the A becomes easier for everyone, the real differentiators will shift.

We’re at the phase where these decisions are starting to matter. Kal is starting 1st grade. Remy is right behind him. Here are the convictions we’re landing on for now (loosely held).

Range First

Kal started this Kenya trip wanting to eat nothing except mangos. Two weeks in, he’s eating samosas, red snapper, and kebabs. That shift didn’t happen because we lectured him. It happened because he was here, surrounded by family enjoying the food in a context where it was normal.

That’s what range looks like in practice. Exposure to different cultures, languages, foods, sports, arts, and people. Breadth makes kids more adaptable. It gives them common ground with more kinds of people. And it helps them discover what they actually want to go deep on.

I don’t want to pick my kids’ lane at age 5. I want to show them as many lanes as possible and let them choose. That means travel, a balanced school, and saying yes to the random art class or new sport even if it doesn’t “lead anywhere.”

Go deep in the rabbit hole

Kal is obsessed with the solar system right now. He wants to know planets surface temperatures, atmospheric composition, how many moons each planet has, and why. He asked why a blue star is hotter than a red one and how supernovas and dwarf stars work.

What’s remarkable is that he can’t really read or write yet, but he can talk. LLMs let him go as deep as his curiosity takes him, conversationally and at his own pace. The depth of exploration is no longer bottlenecked by reading level or by what a teacher covers in a 30-minute lesson.

Going deep is a muscle. School gives kids breadth, but rarely lets them rabbit-hole. Our job, as parents, is to protect that curiosity and give it room.

Let them create

Kal made up his own shark and drew it the other day. It wasn’t good. He also invented his own star names. Our kids make up little games, their own rules, even their own fake language.

None of this is measurable. None of it shows up on a report card. But this is where creativity lives. Not in the art class with a rubric, but in the unstructured space where kids combine things that don’t obviously go together and see what happens.

AI can retrieve facts and generate images. What it can’t do is decide what’s worth making in the first place. Taste, originality, and the instinct to create something new will matter more as production gets cheaper.

You can’t really teach this directly. You can only protect the conditions for it. Give them unstructured time. Don’t correct the invented language. Let the shark look wrong.

Reward the effort

My parents and teachers got it backwards with art. They rewarded the outcome and dismissed the effort. The message was clear: if it doesn’t come naturally, move on.

Kal gives up easily when things are hard, especially anything physical. On this trip, we got him a swim coach. The coach made it fun, and Kal started making real progress. Then something clicked. He started practicing on his own outside the sessions. He could see himself getting better, and that progress made him want more.

That progression matters more to me than any grade he’ll ever bring home. We’re trying to make “you worked really hard on that” more common in our house than “you’re so smart.”

Grit will never be obsolete. The ability to push through the hard, unglamorous, want-to-quit phase of anything will still compound. Persistence is not getting automated.

AI does not replace humanity

A few weeks before this trip, Kal’s friend at school broke his arm. He couldn’t run around on the roof with the other kids at recess. Kal stayed with him instead of going off to play. Nobody told him to. He just did it because his friend was having a hard time.

No test scores that. No AI replaces it. The best thing we can do as parents is model it. Be kind, present and have fun together.

We are muddling through

We don’t know what the right school model is – montessori, a “traditional school”, or something that embraces AI at its core.

Success in high school may not mean “the best” college placement in 15 years. College itself may become more luxury good than necessity. The path it once guaranteed no longer exists in the same way.

These convictions — range, depth, creativity, effort, humanity — feel right today. They’ll probably evolve. The reward function changed once in my lifetime, and may change again.

The A on the test is no longer the whole game. What replaces it is still being written. Our job is to keep paying attention, keep adjusting, and maybe, unlike what I was told when I was 12, let my kids stick with the hard thing even when they suck at it.