The Win Was the Distraction

There is a wind turbine in one of my books that works perfectly. That is the problem.

In Fateh Singh and the Shortcut, three children get a school design challenge — build something that catches the wind and spins a wheel. Their own first attempt collapses into what the story calls a crushed spider: bent straws, a paper cup, the whole thing listing sideways on the desk. So one of them does what any of us would do. He opens a laptop and types best wind turbine design kids competition. A team in Manchester won with a clean little build — four blades, thirty degrees, a bottle-cap bearing. He watches the video three times. They copy it exactly. And on testing day it spins beautifully, smooth and silent, a white blur, while the whole class goes quiet.

Then the teacher asks one question. Why thirty degrees?

And there is nothing. Not a forgotten answer — the other kind of blank, the kind where there was never anything there to forget.

This is not a story about cheating

It would be easy to read that scene as a story about copying, and to hand your child the tidy lesson: don’t copy, copying is wrong. I want to be careful here, because that is the small version of it, and the small version misses what actually happened in that classroom.

The children didn’t come undone because they were dishonest. They came undone because they went looking for the answer instead of the understanding — and those are not the same thing, even though a scoreboard cannot tell them apart. Their turbine was, by every visible measure, a success. It spun faster than anyone’s. If the competition had ended one second before the teacher opened her mouth, they would have won. The prize and the learning had come completely apart, and only one of them was on the table.

That gap — between the win and the thing the win is supposed to stand for — is what I actually want to talk about. Because I watched a real version of it in my own house.

The real one didn’t have a trophy in it

My kids entered a STEM competition. Not the one in the book — a real one, with real other children and a real prize at the end of it. And they did exactly what Fateh does. To get their heads around the topic, they watched videos. Plenty of them. That part was good; that is how you learn a new thing now, and there is no shame in it.

But I noticed where their eyes went. They weren’t watching to understand the thing. They were scanning for the design that would win — the shortcut with a rosette already pinned to it.

So we did the slightly annoying parent thing. We pulled them back from find the winning build toward understand what you’re actually working with — the materials, why one shape holds and another sags, what the thing is really doing when it works. It was slower. It was far less exciting than copying a winner. And I’ll tell you how it ended: they didn’t place. No position, no trophy.

They got the award for best costume.

I have thought about that ribbon more than I expected to. We steered them, on purpose, away from the prize they wanted and toward a kind of learning that doesn’t come with a medal — and the recognition that did arrive came from a completely different, unbought direction. There is something almost funny in it. There is also something I don’t want to lose.

The part I have to be honest about

Because none of the rest of this is worth reading if I write it from above the problem.

I am not. The pull toward the scoreboard is not something my children have and I have outgrown. I feel it as sharply as they do — probably more. I am building something too, and the thing I am building keeps a scoreboard: how many people opened this, how many didn’t, how many stayed. There are days that number is the first thing I look at in the morning and the last thing I turn over at night, and on those days I am not, in any honest sense, focused on the journey. I am refreshing the result.

So when I told my kids the win wasn’t the point, part of what I was doing was arguing with myself. It is easy to preach enjoy the process to a child. It is much harder to mean it about your own work, with your own numbers blinking at you. I was not a patient sage dispensing wisdom from a bicycle in the garden. I was a person who wanted them to build early the discipline I am still, at my age, having to relearn.

What Guru Nanak Dev Ji actually rewards

There is a reason this value sits so deep in Sikhi, and it is not an accident that the book reaches for it. Guru Nanak Dev Ji gives us a whole way of living in a single line:

ਘਾਲਿ ਖਾਇ ਕਿਛੁ ਹਥਹੁ ਦੇਇ ॥ ਨਾਨਕ ਰਾਹੁ ਪਛਾਣਹਿ ਸੇਇ ॥੧॥

One who works for what he eats, and gives some of what he has — O Nanak, he knows the Path.

— Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Ang 1245

Notice what it does not say. It does not say one who wins. It does not say one who comes first. The recognition in that line goes to the person who did the work with their own hands — ghaal, honest labour — and it calls the reward not a prize but a Path. ਰਾਹੁ. A road. Something you are on, not something you arrive at and pocket.

This is Kirat Karni — honest work, one of the three pillars Guru Nanak Dev Ji gave us. In the story, Dadi ji explains it to Fateh with the old sakhi of Bhai Lalo, the poor carpenter whose simple roti Guru Nanak Dev Ji chose over the wealthy Malik Bhago’s feast — because Bhai Lalo’s bread was earned with honest hands and Malik Bhago’s was not. Children remember that sakhi because it is vivid. But the quiet engine underneath it is this: what makes work honest is that you actually did it. You were there for the whole of it. You know why thirty degrees.

And a few pages earlier in Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji, Guru Nanak Dev Ji says something that reads almost like a note slipped to a child after a competition:

ਜੋ ਬੀਜੈ ਸੋ ਉਗਵੈ ਖਾਂਦਾ ਜਾਣੈ ਜੀਉ ॥

Whatever is planted, shall grow. The soul eats the fruits of its actions, and understands.

— Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Ang 1243

Whatever is planted shall grow. Not whatever is copied. And that last word — understands — is the whole thing. The harvest was never the ribbon. The harvest is that you understand.

What you can actually do about it

So what do you do with a child whose eyes are locked on the trophy? I don’t have a system, and I would distrust anyone who handed you one. But a few small things have helped in our house, and none of them require you to be calmer than you actually are.

Change the first question. When they come home, most of us ask did you win? — because we are anxious and it is fast. Trade it for what did you figure out? It is a tiny swap and children hear it exactly. One question is about the scoreboard. The other tells them where you are really looking.

Let the first version fail. The impulse is to rescue a child from the messy, wobbly, falling-apart attempt and steer them straight to the clean one. Resist it, at least for a while. In the book, the kids only understand thirty degrees because they tried twenty and forty first, and felt for themselves why those were wrong. The failed version is not wasted time — it is the lesson. The polished shortcut skips precisely the part where the learning lives.

Praise what they can explain, not what shines. If they can tell you why something worked, make a fuss of that — more fuss than you make of any medal. You are teaching them what you value every single time, whether you mean to or not.

Say the quiet part about yourself. There is nothing wrong with a child hearing a parent admit, I catch myself chasing the win too — let’s both try to enjoy this bit. It does not weaken you. It tells them the struggle is normal and lifelong, which is true, and it takes the shame out of it.

Where this is harder than it sounds

I want to be honest about the limits, because journey-over-destination is one of those phrases that sounds wise on a poster and falls apart in a real week.

The world does not, in fact, hand out medals for understanding. It hands them out for outcomes, and our children are going to grow up inside that reality — applying to schools, to programmes, to jobs that count the win and not the wrestle behind it. I am not pretending otherwise, and I am not raising children who float serenely above the scoreboard, untouched. Some days the win genuinely matters, and pretending it doesn’t is just a nicer-sounding dishonesty.

What I am after is narrower, and I think more durable. Not that my kids stop caring about winning — that they stop confusing it with growing. That when the two come apart, as they did on that testing day in the book and in the drawer where a best-costume ribbon is quietly outliving a great many trophies, they know which one was ever really theirs.

What stays in the hands

The medals will be in a drawer by next spring. Most of them always are.

But the afternoon someone spends finding out why a blade catches the wind at one angle and slides past it at another — that stays in the hands. It becomes the next thing they build, and the thing after that, none of it copied, all of it slightly lopsided and entirely their own.

My kids didn’t win. They came home with best costume and a small, real understanding of wind, and I have decided that is a very good year.

---

How do you pull your kids’ eyes off the scoreboard — or your own? I am genuinely still working this out, and I would like to hear what actually works in your house. Reply or leave a comment.

You can read Fateh Singh and the Shortcut — the wind turbine, the bent bike, and Bhai Lalo’s honest bread — free at maastarji.com/books/fateh-singh-and-the-shortcut/.

Maastarji.com makes free, English-first Punjabi and Sikhi learning resources for diaspora families.