Episode 31 - Victoria Ransom - Don't Sweat the Small Stuff

Victoria Ransom (00:00):
Don't sweat, the small things, you know, the number one thing we should be doing is making learning super exciting and super fun. And just having kids really love school and love learning. You can never work walk in someone else's shoes and to some extent, kids are who they are. You can put a whole lot of effort in to pushing a kid to do something before they're ready and it's probably not worth it.

Young Han (00:26):
Meetings. Nice. Hey guys, I'm young a full-time dad and a full-time professional with the goal to become the best parent possible. The girl dad show is my journey interviewing fellow working parents aspiring to be both good at work and parenting. I'm gonna do this by gathering and sharing unfiltered perspectives from my guest to join me as I research parenthood one interview at a time welcome Victoria to the girl dad show. Thank you for joining me today.

Victoria Ransom (00:56):
It's my pleasure. Looking forward to it. 

Young Han (00:59):
Awesome let's jump right in. Can you tell the listeners what do for a living?

Victoria Ransom (01:03):
Sure. So I have been an entrepreneur founder pretty much my whole career. Actually. I had one short stint in investment banking, right outta college. And then I thought better of that and started my own company and have had a, a number of different ventures. Some very, very successful, including a, an exit to Google and others, less successful. Today I am the founder of an organization called Prisma. That's actually born directly out of sort of our needs. I'm talking about me and my husband as parents. We really as we started with three children and as we started to think about educating them, we really you know, went on a deep dive about what would be the best approach to education for our kids, given the kind of future they're gonna live in and given our family needs and that left, you know, sort of let our us on a large investigation of education, which resulted in Prisma which is for our kids, but for other kids too, cuz we thought, gosh, if we're gonna put all this effort into creating our dream school, let's make it for other families and other kids who might have the same hopes and dreams and needs that we have. So Prisma is current focused on fourth through eighth graders. It is a full educational program for kids who learn from home or anywhere in the world. But it is very very different from your typical sort of online school, which I would say has largely taken traditional school and brought it online. There's still lecturers. They're still sort of textbooks. They may be electronic, but they look like textbooks, there's still grades. No PRI is, is very sort of alternative and progressive in that respect, we have project based learning kids move at their own pace. Live workshops are very much collaborative and kids working together. They are not lecturers. We do not have grades. We have iterative feedback, so we're not typical online school. We're definitely not typical homeschooling because we've very much focus on the community and the social experience. We bring together kids that learn together every single day, collaborate together, hang out together do clubs together. We also provide a coach that is there to guide each kid. Our coaches work with a small number of kids and they really get to know their mentee learners very closely what they're capable of, what drives them, what they're interested in. So you know, that that's different from the typical homeschool experience. And obviously it's diff different from the typical bricks and mortar experience because it's very flexible schedules are flexible location as flexible. So we think we've created a new approach to education. And that is what I'm focused on today, which between that and being a mom of three young kids is making life very full and exciting. It's not boring.

Young Han (04:11):
I love it. I love it. Yes. That's amazing. I love your entrepreneurial journey and how you've merged that with parenthood. It's almost like the kids prompted you to kind of take your entrepreneurial drive and, and, and tick, and actually create a, create a company that actually incorporates them into your work life.

Victoria Ransom (04:27):
They did perhaps against my better judgment because this is my first time being an entrepreneur with kids. And I must say I had a break in between being acquired, you know, selling a company, need a Google, spent some years at Google and then my husband and I said, let's, we've, we've earned a break. Let's take a break. And, and then we told ourselves whatever we do next, it needs to be something that could have a large positive impact on the world. And during that time I saw a lot of amazing moms and dads running startups and being parents. And I thought, oh my God, that looks some PO I don't know how anyone could ever do that. And then what do you know? I dived in and did it myself. Now I know!

Young Han (05:10):
Can you tell us about your kids?

Victoria Ransom (05:12):
Sure. so I have a seven year old daughter Al just turned seven four year old, almost five year old son and a two year old, almost three year old daughter called Emily. And they're, they're the best. Every parent's kids are the best and mine are the best for me!

Young Han (05:30):
Absolutly, that's so amazing. And then what made you go with three?

Victoria Ransom (05:35):
Oh, great question. Oh, you know, if I'd started having kids younger, I might have more than three. I love it. I like having kids. I love it. I love parenting. I love the baby stage. I love the little kid stage. I love the seven year old stage and I dunno what it's like beyond that yet. But I, we chose to have kids fairly late in life, you know past, mid thirties. And so at a certain point you couldn't keep having them. So that's right. Part of the reason you know, my husband and I often talk three, three at this stage, feels like the perfect number. There's always when one kid feels like doing their own thing, there's always two other kids that can play together. And we're kind of lucky having a son in the middle, I think because he's special in his very own way. Every kid is special in their own way, but you know, he's unique for being the only boy. And then we have the oldest who's unique for being the oldest and the youngest who's unique for being the youngest. So for now, at least three is feeling like the perfect number, but I imagine however many kids, you feels like the perfect number in the end.

Young Han (06:39):
That's right. That's right. I, although I have heard common themes and almost like generic, like commentary from parents that have three that it's not as the same as getting one to two. Yeah. One to two is hard. One to sorry. Two to three is really hard. And then three to four, get you easy.

Victoria Ransom (06:58):
I mean, I, I still remember, and this was before we had three, so I didn't listen to the article, but I remember reading a New York times article that said three is the hardest number of kids to have four is easier. And it's because you always have this dynamic of one kid getting left out. But for art, well, versus if you've got four kids, you're gonna have two kids playing, two kids playing, you have four kids playing. For us, at least we haven't experienced that much. It's just, it's kind of worked really nicely so far where when our oldest wants to do her own thing, cuz she's starting to reach that point where she might more often wanna do her own thing than the two little ones play together. And yeah, so far it's working out. Okay. But I can see why that dynamic could be tricky. 

Young Han (07:46):
Sorry. Sorry, Victoria, in, in true. In true. I know in true girl, dad podcast fashion, my kids just barged into my office and lowered my desk. So this is grace. I have a two year old and a four year old daughter. Yeah. I have two girls. Hence the girl dad show.

Victoria Ransom (08:07):
Yeah, got it. I could have did so much. Yeah. So you're almost almost the same as us. You just don't have the seven year old!

Young Han (08:12):
That's right. And I think that it's also really funny what you said earlier because I feel the same way too, is like, I love the whole aspect of parenting and it's so fun and it's just so much more involving than I imagine thought that it would, that imagined. Yeah. I could not imagine that. I would love anything this much. Yeah. You know what I mean? Let alone two things this much. Like I just didn't know. I even had that inside of me. Right. It's not amazing. And it's just, yeah. It's an amazing experience. And yeah, I definitely want more, but similar to you, we started pretty late, like in our mid thirties as well. And so the age thing became a kind of a ongoing barrier even, you know, like at the, like we were at the cusp of like, should we still do it? And then we just decided not to, not to. Yeah. but I would love to have more, I, I probably like same, same exact sentiment as you, if I had the opportunity, I probably have like seven right. Gosh, I love, I just want all these kids wrestling all over me. Be amazing. Yeah. So I do wanna unpack what you said earlier though. So you said that you saw these other parents starting to do the entrepreneur route with kids. And I have to say that I've also noticed a large surge of people doing that. And it's pretty fascinating, right? It's like, almost like this new generation of parents are not like typical. Right. And what societally is normal and they're kind of pioneering this, this element of like incorporating work with their parenting. Have you noticed that?

Victoria Ransom (09:35):
Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, I feel like I became more aware of entrepreneurs who are parents once I became a parent, but it wouldn't surprise me if that is becoming more common. Cuz I just think sort of entrepreneurial careers are becoming more common, both in the additional sense of I've started a business. I run my own business, but even just, I just feel like it used to be that careers were largely sort of, you took a job with a company and you stayed with that company, your whole life. And and then it was maybe you didn't stay with the company your whole life, but you stayed in the same career. Now. I think we're shifting into a way out where people change careers frequently. They piece together careers for themselves or work for themselves and they might be having three different ways of making a living which makes more and more people sort of fall into that bucket of, of being entrepreneurial and piecing together their careers in their lives, and I do think COVID has accelerated this idea of how do you kind of fluidly merge, parenting and work rather than sort of you go out the door at 7:30 AM and you're back at 6:00 PM and that's your work time and there's no kids. And then for that it's kids and after that, it's kids for me at least. And I think this is a, a somewhat common experience during COVID it's fluid. Like I, I might, you know, need to start work at eight 30 on one day and nine on another day and seven on another day, but then I've got a break in the middle of the day. So I go and have lunch with the kids. And this day I feel as earlier, some other day I need to work a bit later and then the kids are in bed. I jump back on and I work again for me at least. And I think COVID having parents working from home has made this more common. It's become this sort of fluid merging of work and home and parenting, which I personally like a lot. I couldn't do it if I couldn't have that. But it does make it complex sometimes.

Young Han (11:41):
That's yeah. I, I it's exactly what it is though, but I think that that's becoming much more commonplace and I think COVID does have a huge, a factor and impact on it. But I do think that there's like, I think it's the right thing.

Victoria Ransom (11:53):
Yeah. For me and I, I, you know, Prisma plays into this, right? Like, yeah, Prisma is a model where you can still have your kids at home or anywhere, but they are, they have a full education they're taken care of. The parent can still work. The parent doesn't have to be the teacher. And our part of our thesis was there'll be more and more parents that say, you know what? I really like this flexibility, this dynamic of spending more time with my kids, with my family of sort of merging work family school altogether. And so, you know, we have lots of families involved with PRI who are just like that. But yeah, it, it would be the only way that I could do what doing the downside I would say is, you know, for me, at least the age of my kids, I find myself, cuz I have an office in the garage. I find myself sneaking into the house when I need to grab something or go to the restroom because you know, the kids will find me. And then before I know it, instead of find minutes of sneaking into the house, it's turned into 35 minutes.

Young Han (12:56):
Oh yeah. It's like a 20 minute game of like games and like tickling and yeah, exactly.

Victoria Ransom (13:00):
Versus I think the kids that are used to their parent leaving an eight and used to their parent coming home at sex are just kind of used to that and they don't question it. That's right for my kids. It's a little more like, do you have to go now? Are you leaving early today? So there's a bit more negotiation going on I think, but nevertheless, I, I wouldn't trade that.

Young Han (13:20):
Have you, have you changed how you think about work success now that you have kids and now you're also working on a, you know, an education that based company, but have you changed your qualifications for what success is in business?

Victoria Ransom (13:35):
Yeah. Well, I think it changed already in that my metric for success is now firmly impact, not financial metrics. Although part of having an impact I believe is creating a business model that's sustainable so that you know, we have a really viable way to grow and reach large numbers of kids. But yeah, I think as openminded, as I felt that I was back when I was running other companies and as friendly as I thought we were to parents, I still had probably this little idea of like success equates to how many hours you're putting in, in to your adventure. And I can't do that anymore. Like, I need to carve out lots of hours for my kids too. And it's not even because they need it it's cuz I need it. Like my kids are absolutely fine. We are super, super lucky that we can afford to have a nanny, and she's amazing. Right. I, and we have great preschool options, so my kids are fine, but I recognize that they're getting up quickly and I will deeply regret it if I don't spend as much time with them as I can. So when I suffer with this sort of like work kids balance, it's much more about me and the amount of time I wanna spend with them than it is me thinking that they're, they're messing out in some way. And so I think I've just had to shift my expectations of myself, where there's only so much I can achieve today with work. What are the things I really, really have to get done today and the rest, gosh, I wanted to do it today, but it's now late and I do need my sleep. And so I'll just get it done tomorrow. And so that's been a bit of a shift, I think.

Young Han (15:24):
Totally. And then how about Prisma? So like as a company that focuses on kind of innovating the edge space like how do you, how do you qualify that success now that you're a parent you're also a former entrepreneur and now you're building a business that actually is like disrupting, you know, a very, very societally normalized space.

Victoria Ransom (15:45):
Yeah. Well, I, I mean we have a few different metrics for success at this. We're much more focused on kind of refining our model, getting it to be as the best educational experience that we can. We are less focused right now on reaching large numbers of kids. I think we've gotta put building blocks in place before we can do that. We've gotta sort of walk before we can run. So success tricks at this stage start first and foremost with kids loving PRI, we have a super strong belief that, you know, the number one thing we should be doing is making learning super exciting and super fun. And just having kids really love school and love learning because our belief is if, if we can do that, then they will be successful and they will really try their hardest. And so you know, we, we survey kids regularly and one of the things we ask is are you happier at PRI than your previous public school or private school or home school, whatever you were doing before, and at this stage, it's a hundred percent of kids that are saying you I'm happier at PRI than I was before. So that is something that we're monitoring really closely and we feel really good about. And then, you know, the, the right up there as well as parents being happy. So we survey parents regularly and one of the best ways to measure, if parents are happy with, with your product or your services, if they're willing to recommend it to a friend and it's something called a net promoter score. I mean, we have a hundred percent of parents that are sort of highly willing to recommend Prisma to a friend that equates to a net promoter score of, I think we're at 74, which is really high. So that, and then, and then we are looking at other things like we are looking at academic growth, we use a sort of national assessment. That's not, there's no time limit, it's sort of skills based, not knowledge retention base. And we're seeing really fantastic growth with our kids in math and reading like, well over 150% of sort of nationally expected growth. So that's really great. And then we also look, we have what we call our sort of PRI outcomes or PRI skills that we really want care to really become amazing at at Prisma, cuz we think that's what they'll need to thrive in the kind of world that our kids will live in. And so things like being great problem solvers, being great communicators and collaborators being having a design thinking mindset. So the idea of being able to sort of prototype up and iterate and take feedback and understand the needs of others having great follow through we, we look at these things and these are really hard to measure. So I think I'll be honest and say, I don't think we've figured out exactly the best way to measure these different skills, but by both looking at where kids are at when they come in based on parents' perception, kids' perception, coaches' perception and how they grow over time at Prisma again, by asking parents, by asking coaches you know, we'll sometimes have kids work on projects and we'll really look at how has this kid changed in terms of their problem, solving their creative thinking. We are, we're doing our best to measure those. And certainly parents across the board are saying, they're seeing kids growing in all of those areas.

Young Han (19:22):
And you said specifically fourth to eighth grade, right. Is where you're, you're initially focusing on is that that's a very specific yeah. Grade group. Why, why did you choose that? Why, yeah.

Victoria Ransom (19:33):
You know what, we there's a very specific reason. We actually started Prisma and nationally thinking, maybe we'd start with high school because high school was a more independent and prep, prep. That's a good place to start and then we'd moved down. But the the more we spoke to who teaches as we were hiring for our coaching role in speaking with educators, both those that were currently in the classroom and those that had moved on to do other things, we kept hearing the same thing, which is that fourth grade, roughly fourth grade. Maybe for some it's fifth grade, maybe for some at sixth, there's this real shift in kids from moving from loving school and being really excited about school and wanting to go to school to not loving school and really getting that, you know, that awful feeling in their stomach when they have to go to school every day, and also a shift in terms of kids sort of coming into their education, feeling like I can do this. I'm capable. I'm good at math, I'm good at reading to starting to, to hear things like, I'm not good at school. I'm not good at math. I'm not good at reading. I'm not good at writing. And I think there's a number of reasons why that shift might happen. One of, one of them is that testing starts to ramp up standardized testing ramps up around that age, right. And so we felt like gosh, if we can reach kids at, at that age, maybe we can catch them before they start to form these sort of fixed mindsets about what they're capable of. And before they start to get this sort of negative connotation about school and learning but we didn't go younger. We could have thought, well, let's catch them even younger than fourth grade. We haven't gone younger than fourth grade yet because we do think there's a limit to how young you can go and have a largely virtual model of education. Really what it, well, I think you know, there is a certain amount of and, and we build this into our model cuz we believe it's really good of giving kids choice and giving them ownership over their, their learning and ownership over their schedules that maybe tough to expect a five year old to do. We have had some third of graders in our program who I would say academically looked more like fourth graders or above and they're done just fine. But for now we haven't gone right down to sort of kindergarten age because we, we felt like we, we need to really nail it for this age group before we think about going much younger and we are more likely to go older sort of up into high school I think before we go go younger.

Young Han (22:14):
Yeah. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing that. And then I have to ask is your first daughter old enough to be in this programming and are you gonna send her in or?

Victoria Ransom (22:24):
We, we will. She's not old enough yet. Yeah. Cuz she's she's first grade. So, so she's got at least a couple more years to go. So we are homeschooling her. We, we are basically providing as close to what Prisma provides without her being a part of Prisma yet. Although, you know, our kids are as involved in Prisma as, as we can get them. She, she, my daughter Al often come, comes to expo day cuz at PRI we operate in five week cycles and there's these really cool themes that overarching each cycle, like cities of the future or inventor studio or you know, this builder business or some of our themes. And at the end of the theme there, or the cycle there's expo day, all the kids present what they've been more working on to the whole PRI community, parents, grandparents. And so my daughter always joins expo day and she gets to see what the kids are doing or we family social nights that my kids, my kids love to show up to. But no, we are homeschooling Al and, but we've put together a group of other home, well, is that three days a week she learns with and also plays with and that's sort of her community, it's the equivalent of the Prisma community for her.

Young Han (23:41):
That's awesome. So you guys are actually doing homeschooling, but you are also doing that even with the twist because you're grouping people together. Yeah, yeah. So they're getting some of the social interactions as well as the classroom kind of like the feel of camaraderie. Yeah. Oh wow. That's amazing. Yeah.

Victoria Ransom (23:56):
And then as that was sort of a really big impetus behind PRI that as we went on this deep dive into like, how do we wanna educate our kids? We eventually looked at homeschooling, which I think we went into it with a lot of the preconceptions or misconceptions that a lot of people have, which is like, whoa, homeschooling, that's weird. That must be weird people. Right? Totally unsocial asocial kids and discovered that's totally not true. And there's many just beautiful things about homeschool terms of the ability to tailor an education to a kid's interests and their speed of learning and their ability level and to really tailor a kid's education to the needs of the family. But two things held us back from diving headlong into homeschooling. One was we didn't feel like we the bandwidth or perhaps the inclination to be the main teacher for our kids, and the other was as much as I think homeschool kids are well, socialized takes a lot of effort to do that of sort of, you know participating in park days and signing your kids up for different activities with other homeschoolers. And we just lie the idea of our kids, having this core group of other kids that they didn't only play with, but they learned with together and collaborated with on projects on a very regular basis. And you can put that together as a homeschool family, you know, there's homeschool, co-ops that do that, but it's a lot effort. And I think there's a lot of sort of turnover and homeschool coop works for a while and then it doesn't. And so we like the idea of, can we give all the best parts of homeschooling the flexibility and the tailoring to the kids' interests and the tying learning to the real world whilst providing the teacher part. So the parent doesn't have to be the teacher and providing this, this rich community that learns together and sort of, you know, socializes together. And that's where prism came from.

Young Han (25:57):
Yeah. I love it. And I, I love that you called out the stigma around it too, because that's kind of like very, very like an unspoken commonality that people think about when you say homeschooling and I love that you're sharing and kind of your homeschooling experience, cuz I think it's really powerful for more parents to hear that. And parents to understand that the optional that are coming out and, and I, I, and there's a very famous person that's starting their own school too. I, I think Elon musky is also starting the process of building his own school. Have you heard of that?

Victoria Ransom (26:24):
Yeah. yeah. He's had a school for his kids for a while. I think that's right. Actually. Yeah.

Young Han (26:29):
You're right. But I think that it's becoming like more, you can feel the momentum coming with like the concern around our education system, even like as far back as like 15 years ago with like even, even, you know, even Khan academy, right? Yeah. Like this whole ideology of like giving people access to the questions that the answers to the questions that they wanna learn about. And and then like this whole idea of like adapting to the customization of of the learners of the learners mindset, their pace, their velocity and all those things and how the current school education structure is set up to basically generate, you know, workers for lack of better words. Right. And and the, it was, yeah, a lot has changed since that was a necess necessity in the world. Right. And I, I don't think that we've adapted that. And so it's really fascinating that your parent and then the business that you decided tackle was one that had to do with this. And I think that that's very, very cool. So I kind of wanna switch gears and ask what was your childhood like? Oh, how did you, how did you grow up?

Victoria Ransom (27:35):
Yeah a beautiful childhood. I grew up in New Zealand. I that's why I have an accent still or a bit of an accent. I grew up in a rural KU community in New Zealand. So you know, when I was a kid, my dad worked on a farm and then over time my mom and dad bought some land and created their own asparagus farm. So I grew up in a very rural area. The school I went to until high school was like an actual one room schoolhouse. Actually it had two rooms. It ranged from 20 kids in the whole entire school to maybe the biggest it got was 35 kids in the whole entire school, and so academically, was it anything like the kind of prestigious schools that are in the neighborhood where I currently live of which is Silicon valley, which has arguably some of the best schools in the world? Yeah, no, I'm sure it wasn't nearly as academically rigorous, but did it give me like a wonderful foundation of confidence and community and just sort of loving school and it really did. It was such a great place for me to just build a whole lot of confidence and feeling like a lot of security and I didn't have the sort of social challenges that I think you know, twins have today of nobody and I didn't talk about, I didn't talk about that yet, but that is one of the biggest reasons we really started to deep dive into our kids. Education is we just, there's a lot of stories of anxiety and stress and in, in the community, in which we live in and that we didn't want that for our kids, like childhood is so short. It's such a beautiful time in kids lives that we didn't, we, we didn't want that to be MARD by sort of stress and anxiety. And I don't think that's happening so much at the elementary level where we live, but as kids get older, it's, it's a real issue.

Young Han (29:41):
Yeah it is. It is definitely something that's increasing in its pressure. I, I feel like I, I just moved out of the bay area into Austin, Texas last year. And as I was looking at different schools and, and things, and I'd say the vast majority of the kids going even into preschool were, you know, like way more advanced than my, my girls. They had already at like three years old were already going to Mathnasium and Kumon and, and I'm like, wait, what?

Victoria Ransom (30:07):
I'm like, oh my gosh. It, like, I've worked so hard to avoid that and to avoid over scheduling, but at a certain point it's tough when that's what everybody. And so, you know, by doing the homeschooling thing, we just kind of opted out of it. We don't, we don't hear about it. It's like C evil, you evil. But yeah, and I, I know I've often thought about cuz my schooling was sort of like big fashion, a little pond sort of thing where like, cause the high school I went to was pretty average, but I did really well. I was like, you know, top my, most of my classes. So I graduated high school feeling like I can do anything I was on top of the world and then it was a little bit of a reality check when I started to go to, I ended up going to university in the us, but I'd, I'd formed enough confidence in myself by then that I could weather it. I could weather the fact like, oh, you know, maybe I'm kind of mediocre at this that's okay. I didn't lose my, I, I found my confidence and sort of had that base. And so I've often thought, are you better to be like, you know, a big fish, a little pond or a little fish, a big pond. And I guess the big pond in this case would be fantastic top rated amazing schools where everybody's brilliant and it's pretty hard to shine. So yeah. You know, I don't know. I dunno the answer to that buts. I know what I had and it worked.

Young Han (31:28):
So there you go. And that kind of leads me to my next question, which is like a part of this is really like, how do you, how do you qualify success as a parent?

Victoria Ransom (31:37):
Yeah. that is such a hard, because I feel like one thing I've really learned since becoming a parent is I've learned not to judge other parents also not to judge myself too harshly because I just think you can never work walk in someone else's shoes. And to some extent kids are who they are. Like, I think you can mess it it up like, yeah, if you're not loving, if you don't provide a secure environment, if you don't support kids sort of unconditionally, you can take a kid that could have been great in life and really mess them up. But beyond that, I think there's only so much you can do to if influence the way your kid turns out. Because to some extent they're gonna be who they're gonna be like there's parameters. Of course. And I really do think you can mess it up, but you know, I just one example, I have one kid that's an average eater. One kid that's a fantastic eater is anything. And one kid that is the pickiest eater you could ever imagine, like, you know, certifiably picky well, they didn't do anything different. And so I sort of, that gives me a little bit of relief. I'm like, well I did my best or we did our best. And I think they were just born like that. Like the picky one never really liked food, even when he was a baby. When we went on to solids, he couldn't geared less, the great eater loved solids, right. From the minute she encountered them. Yeah. And so I guess success, you know, what you usually judge success as a parent is if you've raised a happy, well rounded, well adjusted kid. And I think ultimately, you know, that is where you'll feel successful as a parent where your kid is well adjusted, generally happy and is finds a way to thrive in their adult lives. But I also recognize that some parents can do everything right and do their very best. And they still have a care that is struggling in some part of their lives. And I'm not sure that's always the parents' fault sometimes it is. But sometimes it isn't,

Young Han (33:56):
That's a great answer. I, I love that. I love that. That's a real sage response. And I think it's something that we need to tell ourselves as parents very, very often because you know, the reality is that you can nurture up to a certain degree, but there's a certain point that's nature. And then there's also a certain point that's also mixed in, which is just that they're a human being and they're gonna figure things out the way they want to. Right. And so, yeah, I love your answer there, Victoria. I'm gonna move right into my rapid fire questions next, just cause I wanna make sure that we get the same four questions asked to every single guest. So there's some symmetry to my podcast you ready for. Okay, sure. Yeah. All right. So what advice do you have for other parents and soon to be parents?

Victoria Ransom (34:40):
I would've give, and the advice I just gave, which is like, there's only so much you can do, you can't break the child that easily. I think the other piece of advice that I've learned over time, you know, I, on the first kid, I made this mistake on the second two, I think I've got better at it, which is don't push your kid to, to do anything basically like they will reach development to milestones when they reach their developmental milestones. And I think you can try to get your kid to be able to recognize all the letters of the alphabet at age two. And if you work at that, you'll probably do it, but you can just wait till they're four or five and it'll just kind of happen on its own and there'll be no pushing and struggling or, you know, similar, like riding a bike, you can push a kid to ride a bike without training wheels. When they're four, you could just wait until they're five or six, then it'll probably just come swimming. Like, you know, there's just, I think kids are ready to do things when they're ready to do things. And of course you create the environment where they can experiment and try and, and have opportunities to learn. But I just think like you can put a whole lot of effort into pushing a kid to do something before they're ready and it's probably not worth it. Just wait till they're ready. 

Young Han (35:55):
Yeah, enjoy the moment.

Victoria Ransom (35:57):
Yeah. Our first kid could recite the, like recognize all the letter of the letters of the alphabet at two, the other two kids we've spent zero time on that and yeah, they've figured it out over time for the little one, not yet, but the four year old has, so that's good.

Young Han (36:10):
Really good. I feel like you're talking directly to me right now. So I really appreciate that answer a lot. Okay. So if you can go back and tell yourself one thing before having kids, what would you tell yourself?

Victoria Ransom (36:24):
First of all, like, you're gonna love this. I still remember the night before my first child was born thinking like it was a scheduled C-section. So I knew when it was gonna happen. Nice. And like stay in there, stay in there. I want you, I do want you, but like, I don't want you to, like, I don't want tomorrow. Like this is gonna like totally change my life and it was the best thing ever, but this is very cliche, but it's just so true. Like it goes really fast, enjoy every minute, like maximize every opportunity because it goes so fast. And then the other thing that I just said of like don't sweat the small things because they'll, they'll turn out like you, the little things will not mess up your child. It's the big things. It's the love and the security and the room to experiment and take risks. And all of that really matters. Not the day to day, little things that, that you do. And I've really learned that. I think as it relates to eating, cuz I have a kid that doesn't eat well and that's caused a lot of anxiety of sort of like don't count day to day, what nutrients they're having. Like just think big picture, try to provide a re reasonably, somewhat balanced diet and big picture. It's gonna probably work out.

Young Han (37:45):
Okay yeah. That's great. So what is the most surprising thing that you have learned about yourself after becoming a parent?

Victoria Ransom (37:56):
I have infinite patience. I, I mean, it takes a lot, it takes a lot to get me to lose my call, but sort of related to this. Sometimes I'm a pushover, so yeah. You know, if I had to critique my parenting, I could do lots of CRI critiquing. One of them is sometimes I should stand my ground more than I do. My, my husband would tell me that.

Young Han (38:24):
Okay. So to close this out, what's your all time favorite business book?

Victoria Ransom (38:28):
Oh funny, you should ask cuz I was just talking about this yesterday. There's a book called good to great. Which actually lots of people know. So this is probably not gonna surprise anyone, but I love that book just because it's one that I feel like I read years and years and years ago and I read it again and it actually I've actually been influenced by it and it actually changed my thinking versus other books where you read them. They're kind of interesting, but I'm not sure it changed anything.

Young Han (38:57):
Yeah, that's a great book. I love that book.

Victoria Ransom (38:59):
It's a really good book. Yes, it is so many.

Young Han (39:02):
Awesome. And then if people wanted to learn more about Prisma as you, cuz you continue to develop this out and build it would it just go to your website or would that be the best way? 

Victoria Ransom (39:11):
Yeah. There's tons of information there. It's join. It's not prisma.com. It's join prisma.com. There's a lot of information. You can also sign up for a small group info session if you really wanna learn a lot of about Prisma. So yeah, that's the best place.

Young Han (39:24):
Yeah. Awesome. And then I'll link it in your in your description as well on your, on your episode as well. So people can click to it. Great. but thank you so much for joining me on my podcast. I had a lovely time meeting you. 

Victoria Ransom (39:35):
Yeah me too. And, and your daughter, I'm glad I met your daughter.

Young Han (39:39):
Thank you for letting letting her join her podcast episode. Thank you. Talk soon. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the girl dad show, we really hope you enjoyed that interview. And as always, please take a moment to review, rate and subscribe. We'll see you next time.