I cringed the first time my son fell off the climbing wall. He landed hard and laid there just long enough to make me nervous. Then he stood up, brushed the chalk from his hands, and studied the wall again, thinking about what to do differently this time.
It was my first exposure to his “three-pound project,” a requirement at his school and others. The name comes from the approximate weight of the human brain, about 1.4 kilograms.
Students are asked to learn to do something new, unfamiliar and perhaps uncomfortable. The goal isn’t mastery. It’s growth. It’s not 10,000 hours. It’s three pounds. I loved hearing about the projects in my son’s class, from learning to DJ to baking French pastries, from Japanese calligraphy to Redstone systems in Minecraft. My favorite, lock “bypassing.”
My son chose bouldering, a form of rock climbing that depends on balance, strength, and problem-solving rather than ropes. Watching him fall was hard. Watching him learn from falling was inspiring. That’s when I realized that the point of a three-pound project isn’t what you learn. It’s building the capacity to learn.
How do you start something you know little or nothing about? How do fail at it without quitting? How do you reflect on an experience rather than just post videos of it on Instagram. Over time, as three-pound projects accumulate, you can build muscle memory for learning itself.
In management education, we talk a lot about lifelong learning and how important is for careers. But doing it ourselves is harder than it sounds. In business and in higher education today, new ideas, tools, and expectations arrive faster than we can absorb them. It is tempting to rely on what we already know and what we always do, rather than risk feeling like a beginner, again and again.
Thanks to my son, I now call it the “three-pound mindset.” It encourages us to stay curious and try new things, ask better questions about what works (and doesn’t), and remain open even when answers and pathways are unclear. It builds creativity and resilience, as well the capacity to learn. These things matter more today than ever, especially in the age of AI.
So, this year, I’m going to do nine pounds (three, three-pound projects). What would a three-pound project look like for you? Not something safe. Not something practical and efficient. Do something hard, that stretches your patience and reminds you what it feels like to grow.
Because the real project isn’t the climbing wall, the pastry or the DJ set. It’s your capacity to learn.