Sometimes, behind the fog, what you can’t see, is there. If you see patterns or have experiences that give you reason to believe that something is there—even though you can’t see it yet, then: Keep driving forward.
Monthly Archives: August 2020
Commitment
Last night at 11:53pm I was lying in bed when I realized I hadn’t written a blog post for the day yet. Because I committed to writing a blog post everyday in 2020, I got out of bed and wrote a blog post. If you want to do something, the first thing to do is …
People are different
Tonight my 2-year-old girl splashed water into my 5-year-old boy’s face in the bathtub. She likes water on her face, but he doesn’t. It didn’t end well. It ended with me explaining to her that not everyone likes having their face splashed with water. People are different. What assumptions are you making about other people …
What needs to be perfect?
The other day my 5-year-old son was practicing his letters and he brought them over to me, A-Z, and I told him that it was pretty good but that the J and the Z were backwards. Then he says, “Oh whatever, it doesn’t have to be perfect.” That made me laugh, and although I’m not …
Spinning your wheels
We had our car tires rotated today and as I saw the car’s tires lift off the ground and go up into the air, that phrase came to mind—“spinning your wheels”. All that power, dangling—doing nothing without the friction it needs to drive something forward. Is the effort that you’re putting in making a difference? …
You might disagree with everyone
We were at a hotel recently and I told my five-year-old son to try to straddle the drain in the shower rather than stand with his feet on the drain. I said it’s so weird that they put the drain right in the middle of the shower and he said, “What do you mean? Our …
Maybe it didn’t work because you didn’t make it work
I recently listened to an old interview with Ted Turner, the founder of the first 24-hour cable news channel, CNN. CNN struggled in its early days and I was struck by his answer when the interviewer asked him if he thought it was going to fail. He said, “I wasn’t going to let it fail.” …
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Ignoring your children
Kids feel ignored after about a second. They notice when you’re not paying any attention to them and they’ll let you know. What if your projects acted like that? The book you said you’d write. The shed you said you’d build. The trail you said you’d hike. What if they screamed at you when you …
Chasing efficiency
In an effort to be efficient, we crowd our dishwasher with dishes. But sometimes this backfires on us because when the dishwasher is crammed too full of dishes, they don’t all get cleaned well and we have to hand wash the ones that didn’t come clean. So it’s actually not efficient. Likewise, I sometimes don’t …
Mentioning it makes it real
You can’t mention that you might make chocolate chip cookies to a kid. Might means can. Might means will. Might doesn’t mean maybe. Mentioning it makes it real. And then you have to follow through. What if that were the case with the words we speak to ourselves? I might look for a new job. …