Ben Smith

Founder, Treign Up Academy | Building The School of the Future
Learning & Behavior Science x Faith & Fatherhood × AI × Sports Performance

[Ben Smith @TreignUpBen]

One thing you can do this week:

Identify one place where you're removing weight from your child. A struggle you're solving for them. A discomfort you're engineering away.

Let them carry it.
Give them language for why it matters.
When they want to quit, ask: 'Why did you start?'

Toughness isn't built by adding more pressure. It's built when a kid bears something heavy, understands why, and chooses to stay.

That's the whole framework. That's the week.

[Ben Smith @TreignUpBen]

Same weight lands on two kids.

One has no idea why they're carrying it.
The other knows exactly what it's for.

Same weight. Different outcome.
Purpose is the variable.

[Ben Smith @TreignUpBen]

Three ingredients for toughness. Remove any one and it breaks.

1. Real weight — not manufactured, not trivial
2. A reason to stay under it
3. Freedom to leave

Without weight: fragility.
Without meaning: resentment.
Without choice: compliance.

Toughness — real toughness — is formed at the exact point where a child bears something heavy, understands why, and decides to stay.

And one more thing I keep coming back to: physical toughness trains mental toughness. Mental toughness trains physical toughness. They're not separate categories. They're a feedback loop. The body teaches the mind what it can endure. The mind teaches the body what's worth enduring.

[Ben Smith @TreignUpBen]

The Greek word for endurance in Romans 5 is hypomonē — it literally means 'to remain under.'

Not escape. Not power through. Remain under.

Suffering → endurance → character → hope.

But here's the question that won't leave me alone:

Are we giving our kids something worth remaining under the weight FOR?

A kid who endures suffering for no reason builds resentment.
A kid who endures suffering for a purpose builds character.

The weight isn't the variable. The meaning is.

[Ben Smith @TreignUpBen]

I've been thinking about what toughness actually means. Not the motivational poster version. The physics version.

In materials science, toughness has a specific definition: the total energy a material can absorb before it fractures. And it requires BOTH strength AND ductility.

Strength alone is brittle. Something strong but rigid shatters under impact.
Flexibility alone is soft. Something that bends with no structure just collapses.

Toughness is the combination.

And there's this concept called work hardening — when metal is stressed beyond its elastic limit, it doesn't just survive. It becomes STRONGER. The yield point literally moves higher.

We're having a massive conversation about kids and toughness right now. Haidt says kids are antifragile. 11 states passed laws making it legal for kids to play outside. Duckworth says grit predicts outcomes better than IQ.

But almost nobody is asking: what IS toughness? The real definition?

Because if toughness = strength + ductility... then grinding kids through pressure without teaching flexibility produces something brittle. And protecting them from all stress produces something soft.

Neither is tough.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

True

[Tony Robbins @TonyRobbins]

Behind every decision you've ever made is one of the 6 human needs.

1: Certainty
2: Uncertainty/Variety
3: Significance
4: Connection/Love
5: Growth
6: Contribution

We all share them, but the ones we choose to prioritize and how we meet them explain everything about the patterns that are either helping us or keeping us stuck.

Knowing which needs are running your behavior, and whether the way you're meeting them is actually serving you, is some of the most valuable insight you can have.

Podcast: The Diary Of A CEO w/ @StevenBartlett

[Principal Jon @Principal_Jon]

He's not wrong.

[Ben Smith @TreignUpBen]

@APompliano 4th boy on the way!

[Michael Strong @flowidealism]

You cannot develop a habit from a TED talk. You cannot develop a habit from reading about meditation. You cannot develop a habit from watching a video about how to think clearly.

Habits develop through immersion. Through living inside a structure where the behavior is woven into everyday life.

Vipassana retreats last ten days. Meditating from 4:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Silence. No eye contact. Vegetarian meals. The retreat does not teach you the theory of mindfulness. It immerses you in the practice until the practice becomes part of you.

Most education tries to work the other way around: give children information about how to think, then expect them to develop the habits of a clear mind.

A child cannot develop the habit of Socratic reasoning by watching a video about Socratic reasoning. They develop it by spending hours in dialogue with someone who is genuinely curious about how they think.

The structure becomes the curriculum. The environment becomes the teacher.

If you want your child to develop the habit of independent thinking, they need to live inside that habit every day.

[History With Jacob @HistoryWJacob]

The concept of "teenager" is a modern invention.

For most of human history, a boy of 13 was already a man, apprenticed in a trade or fighting in a war.

George Washington was a professional surveyor at 16.

Alexander Hamilton managed a trading company at 14.

In medieval Europe, noble boys could be pages at 7 and squires by 14.

In Rome, a boy put on the "toga of manhood" at 14.

The idea that an 18 year-old is "still figuring things out" would have been incomprehensible to our ancestors.

I believe this is why we think teenagers are so troubled. They are men and women stuck in a society that treats them as children. Of course they are going to "rebel".

We should give them more responsibility and expect much more of them.

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

The reason many of our leaders hate people like Nayib Bukele in El Salvador is because he has quickly proven that crime and societal decline are not inevitable or beyond control…

It’s a deliberate choice allowed by weak leaders, terrible policies and suicidal empathy.

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

C. S. Lewis’s advice to a young schoolgirl on how to become a better writer:

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just described the terminal state of the global financial system.

The banking sector is obsessed with fiat currency.

Superintelligence won’t even recognize it.

Musk: “I think money will stop being relevant at some point in the future. I think the AI will not use human currency. It will just care about power and mass, wattage and tonnage.”

You can’t bribe an algorithm with digital dollars.

The operators controlling the next era won’t be the ones hoarding cash. They’ll be the ones commanding raw energy generation and physical material.

The global economy is transitioning from fiat to thermodynamics.

If your portfolio isn’t anchored in power and mass, your capital is already obsolete.

Musk: “It just represents some percentage ownership in companies that I’ve built. And it’s not like sitting in a bank account. It’s just literally I own a percentage of companies. The companies are doing lots of useful things.”

The general public thinks billionaires hoard massive piles of cash in a vault.

They don’t. Massive wealth is the mathematical byproduct of owning infrastructure that keeps civilization running.

Cash sitting in an account is a depreciating liability. The only real leverage is equity in systems that are actively solving bottlenecks at scale.

Capital sitting idle isn’t safe. It’s bleeding.

Peter Diamandis: “Elon’s driven to solve problems. He’s driven to make life in the world better by just solving the biggest problems over and over and over again. And if someone else were solving them, he wouldn’t need to. But no one else is solving them.”

You don’t achieve trillion-dollar scale by optimizing for a higher salary.

You achieve it by hunting the largest friction points on the planet and engineering them out of existence.

The market doesn’t compensate you for your time. It compensates you in direct proportion to the size of the problem you delete from the board.

Don’t build a company to extract money. Accumulate resources to fund the execution loop until the friction is completely gone.

And once AI measures value purely in physics, the entire concept of wealth as we understand it evaporates.

Who controls the energy. Who controls the materials. Who controls the infrastructure.

Everything else is just numbers on a screen.

[Michael Strong @flowidealism]

I believe providing moral education through habituation inside consistent environments based on coherence between families and schools will become a primary driver of school choice in the decades to come.

[Doug Ponder @dougponder]

G. K. Chesterton anticipated the problem of “toxic empathy” more than 100 years ago, explaining both its origin and its destructive potential:

[Ben Smith @TreignUpBen]

@jordymaui @hanksb00 I’m in the same boat. I’ve tried 50 times to oauth but it just won’t work or kicks me out after an hour or 2.

[Ben Smith @TreignUpBen]

Ebbinghaus proved in 1885 that humans forget 70% of new information within 24 hours.

140 years later, most schools still rely on lecture → test → forget.

We know how memory works. We know about spaced repetition, retrieval practice, interleaving.

So why does education still ignore its own science?

[Ben Smith @TreignUpBen]

A question I keep coming back to:

If a child spends 14,000 hours in school by age 18 — and we know environment shapes identity — what kind of person is that environment designed to produce?

Not what does it teach.

What does it FORM?

[Ben Smith @TreignUpBen]

Why wouldn't Anthropic have a better version of clawdbot in less than 2 months?