Just Keep Swimming

If there is one thing I used to worry about often, it was making the wrong decision. As you may know from previous posts, there is no such thing as a wrong decision. At any given time, we make the best choice available to us. It is only in hindsight that we can say whether the decision was right or wrong, good or bad. More importantly, indecision is often what holds us back, because not deciding is the same as choosing to keep things as they are.

So what we need to do is to “just keep swimming”. We need to make a decision and follow wherever the path may lead us. Along the way, we can adjust, alter, shift, and change, but doing nothing can be worse than picking the “wrong” path.

There is a perfect quote about this:

When one door closes, another opens, but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us
– Alexander Graham Bell

My brother Tsoof is going into his final year of high school this year and needs to pick a direction for next year. This is a tough topic and often times when we cannot seem to choose, we do nothing. A friend of mine is also experiencing something similar and even I have a story of my own, so I want to share these with you. This is something that has taken me a little while to grasp and now, the knowledge has served me well. Maybe you will glean some insight and be able to pass it on to your kids too.

Read Just Keep Swimming »

The Art of NEXTing

An old Chinese proverb says “Fall seven times, get up eight”. While in the past, people thought that high intelligence or IQ would guarantee falling less often, research on emotional intelligence has discovered that smart people fall exactly as often as anybody else, but those with high emotional intelligence are better at “getting up”.

Optimism is better than Knowledge
During the 80’s, Martin Seligman researched optimism and its effects on people’s performance. One of his greatest discoveries was presented in his research of insurance sales people. Seligman convinced an insurance company to hire people who passed the optimism test but failed their standard test. He compared their sales to those of sales people who were hired based on the standard tests alone. In the first year, Seligman’s group sold 21% more than the other group did. In the second year, they sold 57% more! The conclusion of his research was that optimistic people handle rejection better than others.

One great art that will help you get up again, whether you are facing a challenge or difficulty in your personal life or business, is the art of NEXTing.

Read The Art of NEXTing »

Risk, Success and Happiness

There is a beautiful story about 2 sales people of a shoe company sent to a deserted African country to examine business potential. The whiner calls his boss and says, “People here walk barefoot. They do not wear shoes at all. Our sales potential is zero”. The winner calls his boss and says, “People here walk barefoot. They do not wear shoes at all. We have no competition. The whole market is ours for the taking”.

Every success involves risk. It may sound funny, but the greater the risk, the greater the achievement. Poor people consider risk takers foolish, but those who excel will tell you that no achievement is ever accomplished by staying in your comfort zone.

The “comfort zone” is a very dangerous place, because it repels creativity and success. The comfort zone is the place where you welcome your fears with open arms and keep them company. There is nothing wrong with relaxing from time to time and resting before climbing the next mountain, but when we get too comfortable, out choices are eventually limited to getting up or drowning.

Read Risk, Success and Happiness »

Fighting Poverty

Luck has nothing to do with success and all the successful people will tell you that most of their success did not fall from the sky but there was some opportunity they were able to recognize. Developing the attitude to recognize opportunities is mistaken for some mystical luck similar to winning the lottery.

When my son was preparing for a competition, I told him the lottery story. This story is a ticket out of poverty. Take every opportunity to use it.

Every Friday, the archangel Gabriel went down to the Wailing Wall to pick up the notes of requests people stuck on the wall during the week. Every week, he read all the notes and organized them before presenting them to God.

One day, Gabriel want to God and said, “Dear God, there is this old man who comes here every week, rain or shine, for 25 years. Every week, he begs you to let him win the lottery. He is a good, religious man and never asks for anything else. Please God, I have read his requests every week for 25 years and it breaks my heart. Can you please grant the poor man his wish?”

God said, “I would do it gladly, if only he bought a ticket”.

Read Fighting Poverty »

The Good Life

The difficulty kids have with goal setting is their short life experience. Without knowing enough about cause and effect, kids focus on having fun right now. Spending any amount of effort on a reward they may or may not get in the future is just not something they do.

In the famous 1972 “Stanford marshmallow experiment”, psychologist Walter Mischel put kids in an empty room and put a treat next to them. He told them they could eat their treat, but if they waited 15 minutes, he would give them another. Of 600 children, a third waited long enough for their reward, some snatched the treat and ate it as soon as he left the room and most of the kids did their best to avoid eating the treat by distracting themselves (moving, playing with their hair, etc).

Mischel’s original conclusion was that older kids can wait longer and deferred gratification is related to age. However, years later, he followed up with some of the children in his experiment and discovered that those who waited longer were also more successful in life.

In 1988, Mischel found that “preschool children who delayed gratification longer in the self-imposed delay paradigm were described more than 10 years later by their parents as adolescents who were significantly more competent”. In 1990, he found a correlation between the ability to delay gratification and higher Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores.

This is where we (parents) come in. If we teach our kids to set goals and achieve them, their life will be so much better. So how do we do it?

Read The Good Life »

The Art of Excellence: Success with High Standards

Quality and high standards lead to excellence

In the eyes of the average person, there’s something snobby in striving for excellence. For some people, possibly for most, excellence is pure luck, almost a luxurious state of living that you’re either born with or not. It is no coincidence that those who think this way don’t excel at many things in life.

There’s a paradox in the search for excellence, because it is the result of an attitude, a habit you need to have in the first place in order to achieve it. There’s something frustrating in understating what T. Alan Armstrong said, “Champions do not become champions when they win the event, but in the hours, weeks, months and years they spend preparing for it. The victorious performance itself is merely the demonstration of their championship act”. It’s frustrating, because it makes you think that excelling is hard work.

Excellence goes together with extraordinary success that is higher than all standards. It’s frustrating because you cannot reach excellence without succeeding big time.

Read The Art of Excellence: Success with High Standards »

I Want to Be a Billionaire

Some time ago, the kids and I discovered a song about being a billionaire by Travie McCoy (sung with Bruno Mars), most of which goes like this:

I wanna be a billionaire so [beeping] bad
Buy all of the things I never had
I wanna be on the cover of Forbes magazine
Smiling next to Oprah and the Queen
Oh every time I close my eyes
I see my name in shining lights
A different city every night oh I swear
The world better prepare
For when I’m a billionaire

Call me a pest, but after hearing them sing it many (many) times, I thought it might be a good chance to bring up the topic of money. Ronit and I believe that kids should be exposed to various topics at different ages simply because they are part of life. They may not “get it” every time, but they “get” a little bit more and develop their understanding over time. This way, they have fewer surprises when they become adults and have to take care of themselves.

The issue of money is no different.

Read I Want to Be a Billionaire »

Guardians of Beliefs

Beliefs can cause all our problems in life. Luckily for us, beliefs are also the most powerful weapon we have against them. It just depends what kind of beliefs we have.

For the most part, beliefs are created in our minds without our consent. Most of the beliefs you have today were not formed through a process of conscious choice. Things that have happened to you in the past, things you have heard from people who are close to you or who you trust, things you have observed in the world around you, things you have been taught and even imagined create your belief system. Most of them have occurred during childhood, when you did not have enough life experience to doubt them.

Doubt is a defense mechanism in our mind that functions as a bodyguard and prevents beliefs from entering our system. This bodyguard evolves over the years. When kids are young, this bodyguard is not very developed and it has very simple ways to filter beliefs.

– If it is from someone close to me who cares for/about me, it must be true
– If I have heard it 3 or more times, it must be true
– If something has happened to me once, it will happen again
– Every painful experience must be recoded to so I do not get hurt again
– Every success experience must be recorded so I can make it happen again

Read Guardians of Beliefs »

Give and take

Sometimes, I want to achieve something and I think I know how to achieve it, but when I ask someone else for their opinion or help, they just say, “You can’t do that”. I find this very frustrating.

Let me explain.

When I see a goal and a way to get it, my mind has something to hold on to. I can look at my vision from different angles, improve it and work with it, but it is there.

As soon as the other person rejects my idea, it is as if a bubble popped in my mind and left nothing. I then have no way of getting what I wanted. The other person has taken my vision away.

And that stinks.

Here is an example…

Read Give and take »

Dedicated kids

As a coach who works with parents, I usually meet with those who think kids need to be managed better. Coming from a family where saying good things about your own kids is bragging, it took me a while to get over that and use my kids as inspiration for others, just like they are an inspiration for me.

You see, as a kid, I lacked something that was very important for success in life and only when I found it at the age of 16, my life changed course. My kids have grown up with it. It is called “dedication”.

Dedication is the act of giving yourself totally to a course of action. An oath you give yourself to do something, a commitment or a promise that people make to themselves and/or to others to be true to a course.

This is the story of some great kids who are dedicated and therefore win awards and prizes. In ten years, they will probably not remember all these wins (there are so many of them), but they will still posses that trait so essential to winning in the game of life – dedication.

Read Dedicated kids »