A Blog for My Kids

Every year on December 31st, people get together and have a party to celebrate the new year.  They use the day as an excuse to drink and have fun with others.  They stay up later than normal, and probably have a slower than normal January 1st.

I never understood this philosophy. Every day should be treated the same, in an effort to move towards your goals and enjoy the people you love.

Instead of taking on this philosophy, try to instead focus on 90 day goals in your life.  Every 90 days, set new goals, and focus on them.  Some professional, some personal.  Then every 90 days, evaluate how you did, and re-adjust your goals for the next ninety days.

While it’s nice to get together with others and celebrate the entire year, focus more on short sprints that are moving you towards somewhere that you want to go.

Happy New Year.

Love,
Dad

We recently signed one of you up for a winter track program.  It is one hour each evening, two days per week.  Two of your friends also attend, as well as several other children.  The program costs $100 per month.

You’ve asked me several times, “Dad why are you paying $100 per month to have someone watch me run around the track?”  Good question.  Here are some answers:

1. You would never do it on your own,
2. Physical exercise daily is really important,
3. Interacting with other kids your age is really important,
4. Holding yourself accountable in life is fundamental (more on that below),
5. You do really well in structured situations, where you do the same things over and over on a certain day.

[Read more…]

You’ll see in this previous post about getting a dog that we messed that up.  One of the reasons we failed in this situation is because we didn’t allow for flexibility.  So, to try again, we recently attempted to foster a dog as a possible path to adoption.  First we followed all of the guidelines in this post, especially with respect to the size of the dog.  However, the most important thing that we did is we asked for a 5-day trial with the dog AND we told you we were doing a 5-day trial and most likely NOT keeping the dog more than a few weeks until it found a permanent home.

Well, the dog lasted 24 hours until it bit one of you in the face (you were okay), and we sent him (Otter) back.  He was a cute tripod (three-legged) dog rescued from Puerto Rico.  See photo below.

The point is, this time around we built in flexibility.  Any time you can avoid a long-term committal or give yourself time to try something out, DO IT!  Here are some simple examples that will help to cement this lesson: [Read more…]

Never put all of your eggs in one basket.  This is a piece of advice which means that one should not concentrate all efforts and resources in one area as one could lose everything.

Here are a few examples of this:

Let’s say you had a large vegetable garden, but you only planted one type of vegetable, and you happen to have a bug or animal in your yard that ate only that vegetable.  They would destroy your entire garden. However, if you had planted two or three different vegetables, you would still have some vegetables left. [Read more…]