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.” …
Continue reading “Maybe it didn’t work because you didn’t make it work”
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 …
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 …
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. …
The other day my 2-year-old was using binoculars backwards and so I corrected her but she doesn’t always like being corrected and she insisted that she was using them the way that she wanted to. So, as I try to do, I imagined that she was right and I was wrong. It was not the …
There are some fires near our house and my wife suggested that we pack a bag of things we want to take with us if we were forced to evacuate. I thought about what was important to me and what I would take. One thing that came to mind is this wooden sculpture that I …
Continue reading “How much time do you spend with what’s important to you?”
Some of the cheetahs and other animals that were at the wildlife preserve that I went to recently were born at the preserve. Some of them were endangered species and the hope was that they would one day be released back into the wild to help increase their numbers. Can you imagine being raised in …
Yesterday we were at a wildlife preserve and saw a cheetah. She was inside a fenced off area that was comfortable and seemingly spacious but was probably much too small for her. Cheetahs, my five year old tells me, are the fastest land animal on Earth. They can go from 0 to 60 in 3 …
My son is adventurous but quick to scream for a Band-Aid. One day when he was not being as adventurous as I would have hoped, I sighed to my wife, “I can’t live his life for him.” But that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? The last thing in the world that I’m supposed to do …
I drew a maze for my son that had a spiral path in it. He stopped when he saw it because he thought it was a dead end. But there are two types of maze spirals. Dead ends and spirals you can come out of. Don’t quit too soon. Explore the maze.
