You won’t be able to keep up.

Sorry, you aren’t good enough to make the team.

You will be more comfortable in the lower level class.

Conventional wisdom tells us overcoming failure and rejection builds resilience.

But what happens when the system’s subjective measure is just plain inaccurate? …like teaching kids that the difference between “brilliant” and “average” is a few points on an exam.

When we are obsessed with ranking and tracking kids based on a one-dimensional score card that is out of their sphere of influence, we may be creating more self-doubt than grit, and squelching creativity and big dreams before they have time to take hold.

Life is naturally full of opportunities to practice resilience without creating institutions that unwittingly build in rejection as a way of life, so perhaps it is time to start creating some alternatives not as isolated experiments, but for the mainstream population.

What if instead of being obsessed with hierarchy and rankings, our educational system was hell-bent on helping kids discover their passions?

What if we stopped telling kids what “level” they are and started showing them how to collaborate and appreciate individuals with a wide-range of strengths?

And what would happen if we really and truly began rewarding hard work and intellectual risk-taking instead of just giving it lip service?

We might just create a whole generation of creative innovators and world changers. And much happier, well-adjusted people too.