The FAA has a pretty serious people problem.
Massive delays, daily near-misses, and even actual collisions show a federal agency that somehow can't figure out how to hire enough people to keep planes from hitting each other.
This has been building for years, but in recent months, the problem has simply become too big to ignore.
Forgive me if I state the obvious real quick, but a huge part of the FAA’s staffing trouble is because of its DEI hiring practices.
For several years now, they’ve been explicitly running diversity hiring processes that subordinated competency to demographic optics. That choice made them poster-employers for certain crowds, but the piper eventually has to be paid, and the predictable result of hiring people for reasons other than whether they're good at the job is that you end up with people who aren't good at the job.
Faced with constantly picking up after their incompetent co-workers, the good controllers quit, and eventually the hiring pipeline went dry.
(We actually wrote a book about this.)
Then, in a stroke of outside-the-box genius (something I’m shocked came from the government) somebody had a different idea.
Secretary Sean Duffy announced a campaign to recruit gamers for air traffic control positions, and within 24 hours, they got 12,000 applications.
12,000!
That’s the most applications in a single day in the FAA's entire 68-year history.
It turns out gamers and air traffic controllers are a match made in heaven.
See, air traffic control isn't really about knowing things, it's about doing things. Doing things under pressure, with a lot of competing information streams, in real time, while the consequences of a mistake are pretty high stakes. Spatial reasoning, split attention, rapid pattern recognition, the ability to stay calm while managing six things at once—gamers have been developing those exact skills for years.
And they weren’t doing it through some expert-led curriculum, or toward any type of credential. They just loved gaming, and because they were doing it with their friends, collaborating, planning, pivoting quickly when they failed, and getting immediate feedback, they kept getting better.
For generations, parents and teachers have worried about kids who learn and achieve in ways that can’t be easily graded.
You know the kids. The boy who's been obsessed with a strategy game for three years, or who knows more about Roman military history than his teacher, or the girl who built something genuinely impressive in Minecraft. Parents and teachers would never coach these kids to put their extra-curricular achievements and skills on a college application because the assumption has always been that this kind of learning is neutral at best, but that it doesn't count as anything “real”.
The FAA just blew that argument all the way up.
What those 12,000 applicants were doing in front of their PCs and consoles was developing competency. Competency is different from a credential, and it turns out it matters a lot more. The credential is proof that you sat still and followed instructions. Competency is what you can actually do when it matters.
It reminds me a lot of the lessons we teach in our original kids book series.
In The Tuttle Twins and Their Spectacular Show Business, Ethan and Emily spot an opportunity and decide to open their own theater. Along the way, they learn all the lessons of entrepreneurship, and quite a few lessons that most people don’t associate with entrepreneurship at all.
(Like why competition is actually good for business!)
It's based on Israel Kirzner's Competition and Entrepreneurship (which sounds dry until you realize it's basically the intellectual framework for why the gamer-to-FAA pipeline makes perfect sense). Entrepreneurial thinkers aren't made by coursework. They're made by noticing things, trying things, and refusing to stop when it gets hard.
I’m willing to bet if you take a look at your kids through a slightly different lens, you’ll find that they’re already on an entrepreneurial path right now—probably in some form that you might not immediately recognize as preparation for anything, but that actually is.
I know that when I started to view my kids as entrepreneurial thinkers our whole family dynamic changed. So much of what I thought was time wasting was actually them building something of value that only they could offer the world.
Once you start to see that kind of potential in your kids, you’ll never look at them the same again.
The future won’t be built by MBAs and DEI hires. It’s going to be shaped by the doers, thinkers, and innovators who the gatekeepers of credentialing have historically written off.
It’s going to be built by kids like ours.
— Connor
