8 Takeaway Tips from Can You Help Me Give a Sh*t?

The top 8 strategies for parents and educators to use if they want to help teens build the kind of motivation that lasts

1/9/20242 min read

three men laughing while looking in the laptop inside room
three men laughing while looking in the laptop inside room

Whether you've read the book ad are seeking to refresh your memory, or are wondering what the most important strategies are before you pick it up, below is a tl;dr of top tips from the book. You can also get an easy-to-print version for your fridge or desk on the resources page.

  1. Connect first and last. Neither you nor the teens you care about will be able to build lasting motivation without good relationships.

  2. Be a model. Diagnose your own motivation to build up your energy and model it for teens. (See this resource for help with this).

  3. Help them take the wheel - but don't leave the car just yet! Teens need to scaffold into adulthood. That means they need to exercise their growing abilities to make real choices and experience the real results, good and bad, of those choices, while still getting the support they need to feel confident.

  4. Remember relevance can happen in a range of ways. Long-term goals, hands-on activities, connecting to interests, and challenging teens to think deeply about meaningful topics are always to make learning feel more relevant.

  5. Think carefully about when and how to use external rewards. External rewards, like praise, money, food, or screen time, can be effective for short-term bursts of motivation to plow through boring but necessary tasks. However, overusing them not only erodes their effectiveness, it also can block people from developing more internal sources of reward, like pride in helping someone, in a hard job well done, or in making progress toward a meaningful goal.

  6. Explore new possibilities. Having a wide variety of experiences is far more likely to spark long-term goals than direct pressure to engage in goal setting. Break out of ruts - meet new people, do new activities, and leverage the power of boredom without easy fixes (e.g. not getting to just jump on a screen) to spark creativity and a desire to explore.

  7. Build confidence in the ability to learn. You can help build student confidence by pointing out where they got better at something when they worked at it – but this will be ignored if it's disingenuous. Start with yourself and check where you've inadvertently reinforced ideas that talent is fixed rather than learned.

  8. Talk about the effects of screens (especially gaming and social media) early and often. Engage teens' inclination to rebel by pulling back the curtain on the ways companies use psychology to hook and manipulate people so they can make more money. Model auditing your own screen use so teens' sensitivity to hypocrisy isn’t triggered.