How to build a culture of excellence within your family

Many families (with kids or without) want to create a culture of excellence, a place where everyone grows, contributes, and thrives.

But there’s tension here: No one wants their home to feel like a pressure cooker or fall into the negative stereotypes associated with high-achieving families.

The following five strategies show how to create an environment that promotes self-discipline and ambition by creating conditions where it emerges naturally.

Importantly, these principles are flexible enough to work for people with varied personal strengths.

1. Celebrate Different Ways of Successfully Solving Problems

If your family includes at least two people (adults or children) who know how to multiply, try this small experiment. Each person should solve 12 x 15 in their mind and pay attention to how they did it so they can describe their method. Don’t use pencil and paper. This is intended to be mental math.

Once everyone has had a go, share your methods with each other.

When groups of people try this, some folks use 12 x 10 plus 12 x 5. Others use 10 x 15 plus 2 x 15. In fact, there are at least seven common methods.

The idea behind this exercise is to see that there are many valid ways to solve problems. We all use different shortcuts. It is tempting to think everyone should use the same “best” method to reach a goal. This simple experiment shows how our different mental highways can create a stronger group.

2. Recognize Strengths Individuals Don’t Recognize Within Themselves

Your teenager neatly organizes their homework in color-coded folders and thinks “everyone does this.” Your partner troubleshoots broken items systematically instead of randomly trying fixes, but thinks that’s just common sense. You excel at asking clarifying questions to prevent confusion and mishaps. You assume everyone thinks that way.

The skills that feel natural are the ones we fail to recognize.

We all possess skills that go under-celebrated. This applies to all ages—for example, the toddler whose enthusiasm uplifts everyone, or the artsy kid whose constant stream of drawings and paintings decorate the house and remind everyone of creativity’s value.

When you help people recognize strengths they can’t see in themselves, you’re encouraging everyone to use their individual approaches and shortcuts to contribute, rather than promoting conforming to a template.

3. Model Active Learning, Not Just Achievement

The easiest way to build a culture of learning is for everyone to be learning something. When adults model active learning, it communicates that learning is something capable people choose to do, not something forced upon you. People generally, and kids especially, are wired to emulate others.

When we’re learning, we often have greater empathy for others who are learning. If you haven’t recently felt overwhelmed by new material, it’s harder to remember how vulnerable learning can feel.

Being open about the struggles and emotions involved in learning (confusion, frustration, breakthroughs) helps normalize them for everyone.

4. Upgrade Your Collective Environment Through Individual Choices

These days, we all know how a content algorithm works. We click on one video about a topic and all of a sudden we’re watching several hours a week of content on that same topic because the algorithm cleverly feeds it to us.

This effect isn’t limited to social media. Our choices influence our future environment in all sorts of ways. What’s more, in families, one person’s environmental exposures spill over to other family members and create a type of family algorithm effect that’s far broader than just entertainment.

Consider some ways this happens:

• Your partner also listens to whatever podcast you listen to in the car.
• Your kid makes friends, and some of their parents are more inspiring or have more diverse careers, interests, or philosophies than your own friends do.
• You go to a yoga class at the library, and everyone ends up spending more time at the library or getting more books as a result of tagging along or you bringing books home.

Individual choices create collective exposure. You can subtly upgrade your family’s environment through individual choices, not through direct instruction or pressure.

5. Build Comfort With Intellectual Sparring

Let’s say you have a family rule, like no one gets their ears pierced until they’re 13, or screen-time limits, or no quitting activities mid-season. You could take the approach of “My house, my rules.” Or you could encourage some philosophical debate, regardless of whether you change your mind.

Consider adopting a little of the French culture of social debate. Good-spirited intellectual sparring helps individuals understand the world, refine their thinking, explore complex moral and social questions, think critically, and challenge authority. A culture of excellence includes space for ideas to be questioned, not just accepted.

Subtle Strategies Promote Growth but Avoid Pressure Traps

The best teams are greater than the sum of their parts, and the same is true for families. Excellence doesn’t come from each person being perfect or from everyone following the same methods. It emerges when different strengths combine, when vulnerability is modeled alongside effort, and when the environment quietly supports growth in subtle, systematic ways.

We can avoid the traps of pressure and perfectionism while still encouraging self-discipline, ambition, and critical thinking by creating an invisible structure that allows these attributes to bloom.