How to be an inspiring parent rule 8. Here it is. This is the big problem of our kids, for me, my grandchildren, our shortened attention

spurs. How long can you concentrate for in an age of Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and all the

rest of it? And I discovered this years ago, because the BBC, I often do some broadcasting

for the BBC on that morning news program. It's called Thought for the

Day and I used to do it for three minutes. Fifteen years ago, they said, no, you've got to keep it,

cut it down to two minutes, 45 seconds because nobody can concentrate for three minutes anymore.

Now that was 15 years ago. I think we'd be down to 30, 15 seconds nowadays.

And that is really, really problematic.

But here is the irony.

The irony is that the people who created this world,

Bill Gates of Microsoft,

Sergei Brennan, Larry Page of Google,

Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook,

had among the longest attention spans of anyone I've ever come across.

These are the people who thought long and played long.

If you had been told 15 years ago that you could change the universe

by creating a new search engine

everyone would have laughed if somebody had said to you I can transform the world by having a bookshop

and what's more a bookshop that you actually can't go into or see any of the books and hold them in your hands. They would have loved.

The truth is these people saw it longer than anyone else and they stuck to it relentlessly

with absolute focus for years and years and years. Now that is one of the things we should be teaching our kids to see it long. Freud defined civilization

is the ability to defer the gratification of instinct. And it was another Jewish psychologist,

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