Archive for the 'Kid Lessons' Category
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My one year old daughter just took her first couple of steps recently and it is an amazing site to see. To see how much effort and determination she puts into each movement of her foot while trying to stay balanced is amazing. The way she does it is by holding onto our couch or coffee table and pulling herself up. She then lets go with one hand and tries to stay balanced. Then comes the movement of one foot slowly moving forward, almost dragging itself on the floor to keep some security. Finally, when she has stretched as far as she can go while still holding on, she lets go of the table or couch and takes a step. If she can stay balanced, she takes another step. The most important detail that I omitted was that she doesn’t just do this for the hell of it, she does this when she is trying to get something. She has a goal and she is literally using baby steps to achieve it.
Lessons I learn from my children are some of the most enjoyable learning experiences in my life. I watch them grow and at the same time, they cause me to grow. The important lesson my daughter recently taught me is when trying to achieve a goal that you have never achieved before, you must go about it slowly and carefully by taking baby steps.
I ended off yesterday’s post with the importance of making it a point to become a better person each day. Today I want to talk about baby steps. No matter what the goal is, no matter how big it is, you can achieve it if you move towards it at a slow but steady pace. You just have to break the goal or task down into tiny little pieces and do one little piece at a time. They say that “Rome wasn’t built in a day”. It’s a great example but anyone can take anything and turn it into their own personal example. Just think of yourself and your life. When you were born, your goal was to grow up to be a toddler and then a child and then a teenager and so on. When you started school, it was you goal to graduate someday. You will notice that these goals cannot be accomplished in a day, year or multiple years, but each day you move forward towards your goal and each year you move even closer to achieving it.
Now that you have seen some large goals that you either didn’t have control over or never really thought about, look at something practical and much smaller. Imagine writing a term paper for school or a report for work. You start out by sitting in front of a blank screen on your computer, you crack your knuckles and then you get so overwhelmed by your task that you begin to procrastinate. The unlucky person will go get a snack for themselves, and then check their email, take a shower, or anything else to fool themselves into thinking that they are helping themselves. A lucky person will take out a pad and paper and break down the task into tiny little parts so that they can start moving forward.
The task list can look something like this:
- Write down my thesis or goal of the paper/report
- Decide how long the paper will be and which sections will be in it
- Jot down any points that I want to discuss in each section
At this point, you have a skeleton of your paper and with very little work your entire project is now more doable. Just continue breaking everything down into tiny tasks and taking baby steps to complete each one.
Once you are happy with the outline of your paper, you can take one topic to be discussed at a time and do research on only that topic. When you are finished, take the next topic. You will be finished before you know it and the unlucky person sitting next to you will just be finished checking his email for the 50th time.
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February 22 2008 | Advice and Kid Lessons | 1 Comment »
One of the most remarkable things about being a parent is how much I can learn from my children in any situation. Children are pure and don’t have any outside motivations or involvement in politics or anything else. That is why what you hear out a child’s mouth is often the truth. Unless they are trying to score an extra treat, deny hitting their sibling or stalling so that they don’t have to go to bed. One thing that I noticed recently is the difference between my three year old son myself getting out of bed in the morning.
My morning routine consists of waking up to the alarm, pressing the snooze button, waking up to the next alarm, opening my eyes and then slowly getting out of bed. My son’s morning routine consists of opening his eye the second he hears something, jumping out of bed and running to either the tv or my bed depending on what he wants that morning.
You see the difference is that when I am waking up, I look at the day and think to myself “ok, here’s another day, let’s get ready and head off to work”. My son gets to play all day so he wants to start his day as soon and as quickly as possible.
After noticing this difference, I decided to change my morning routine. Instead of slowly getting out of bed in the morning and thinking about just “another day”, I am going to make each day special so that I can jump out of bed just like my son.
My previous attitude to getting up was that of an unlucky person. As long as I was thinking about my day as just another day, I was blocking all the possible luckortunity from my day. The second you change your attitude and mind set, you wake up like a lucky person and open up all of the day’s luckortunity.
Everyone needs something to look forward to in life. We need short term, medium term and long term events to look forward to to keep our lucky attitude.
Short term can be something special you have that day like meeting up with friends or going to see a movie you have been waiting to see.
Medium can be anything from an activity you are planning for this weekend or at the end of the month to a commission that is coming in soon to a vacation that you are looking forward to.
Long term is accomplishing your goals that you have been working hard for.
For me, I wake up, look at my long term goals, think about how it will feel once I have accomplished them, think about what I need to do to get there and then think of what I can do today to make sure that I stay on track. Doing this lets me jump pretty quickly out of bed in the morning. I’m still not as fast as my son though.
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January 28 2008 | Advice and Kid Lessons | No Comments »
You may have noticed that I haven’t written in a few days. This is especially bad since my last post was the first of a series of 10 posts on how to increase your luck. I was supposed to post every day or at least every second or third day which would give my readers the 10 ways to increase their luck in about 2 weeks. Unfortunately, i lost site of my goals and my posting came to somewhat of a stop.
Not long ago I made myself a few lists of goals that I wanted to accomplish over the next few months, year, 5 years, 10 years and 20 years. I was very proud of myself for getting them down on paper and making a list of things that I think are actually realistic. One of my goals was to build up this blog and post articles regularly. For the next few days after writing down my goals, I looked at them every morning and thought about how I would bring myself closer to my goals each day. After a few days, I stopped looking at my goals every morning. Maybe I thought that I had them committed to memory, maybe I got lazy but the realization that I came to is that “out of sight, out of mind”. I couldn’t believe it, the days that I looked at my goals in the morning were very productive and the days that I didn’t look at them were just the opposite. I think that was my problem for most of my life, I didn’t write down my goals and I certainly did not look them over each day. I wrote my goals in the first place because I woke up one day and realized that although I have had some accomplishments over the last whole bunch of years, I have not even come close to my potential especially financially.
I can’t take all the credit for my realization above, it was pretty much my 3 year old son that made me realize that I need to keep looking at my goals every day. My wife made a 3 foot tall chart for my son and hung it next to his bed so he knows what he needs to do every day from the time he wakes up to the time he goes to sleep. The chart is nicely decorated with pictures so he knows what everything is. He wakes up, goes to potty, brushes his teeth, eats breakfast and so on. His day ends with brushing his teeth, reading a story and going to sleep.
On Friday night, my sister in law was over and went to lie down in my son’s bed. My son went over to her and said “if you sleep in my bed, you have to follow the chart”. He then told her exactly what she needed to do. At that point I realized if you want to build up good habits and accomplish your goals, you need to have them written down and very visible. It also helps if they are in public view because when other people know about your goals, you become more motivated to accomplish. Many people don’t mind failing when nobody else knows about it but if other people do know, they try harder to show that they can accomplish.
Kids are some of the best teachers out there, they make you see things that are right in front of your eyes but you just don’t notice. Another thing my son can do is tell you every time a TV show says the word “stupid” because he knows that “stupid” is a bad word. I watch the same shows and don’t even notice.
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December 23 2007 | Goals and Kid Lessons | No Comments »
