Money is a big part of every success in life. Money is an enabler – the more money you have, the more successful you can be. For example, my son is very successful as a musician, no doubt due to his special talent, but without the money we spend to support his musical journey, he could have never reached this level of success.
I often describe improvements and progress as the currency of personal development. We can only be highly developed by continually improving our thoughts, ideas, actions and outcome in life. To my kids I say that as long as they keep moving forward, they are developing.
Read Make a list: Improve My Life »
She paced back and forth and stormed, “I never see myself not having money for food or sleeping in my car because I have no home to sleep in. I never see myself without a family to support me. All I got from these presenters was that I must get very low if I want to be successful, which means I’ll never be successful. What kind of motivation technique is this?”
Birthdays should be wonderful events in everyone’s life. For some reason, however, grownups do not think of birthdays the same as kids. While kids see it as a happy moment with lots of gifts, grownups think of the birthday party as a checkpoint for their life and expenses, expenses, expenses.
Obviously, when you are happily wealthy, this is not a problem at all. I remember the stage in our life when we could spend money on everything we wanted and the dilemma was whether to travel to China for my daughter’s birthday for 3 or 4 weeks.
This may be fun, but most people do not have this luxury.
What are troubled teens? Could your teen be troubled? Can you do anything about it as a parent? What can you do? Get your answers right here.
In the past few weeks, I overheard talk about a teenager (let’s call him Jonathan). Besides being very talented, he used to be friendly and “normal”. But recently started to miss classes, show up late, fail various subjects and behave indifferently. One speculation was that he might have started using drugs.
I thought this was serious enough to report to his school through a friend of ours, who is his teacher. “Speculation or not, the school should look into it”, I said.
Read How to Make Troubled Teens Relax: Change Your Parenting »
Unfortunately, there are a lot of things we should have learned at school, because as a society, we cannot rely on parents to be able to do it by themselves. For example, we cannot expect all parents to teach their kids literacy and numeracy because not all of them know enough and out of those who do, not many are also good at teaching.
Living in stress is like living in an ambulance all your life. You are on the road most of the day, you live in a small space, not many people around, everything is difficult, your decisions are all about life and death, mistakes are critical, there is no time to waste, not time for fun, not enough time and space to make your own meals, you see (too) many doctors, you develop a dark view of the world from frequent exposure to accidents, drink driving, violence and self neglect. Through the eyes of the stressed person life sucks!
Last week, my son went to a small pool party and one of the kids who were invited did not show up. Somebody said Nick could not come because he was working. Nick, you should know, is a 14-year-old kid and had just started working at a donut shop that had opened next to his house. Obviously, a whole conversation started about working kids and whether or not it is good for kids to go to work.
Ronit and I love movies about relationships. We prefer movies showing “real” people (as opposed to flashy, overly unique characters) going through “real” challenges and hopefully completing a positive personal journey by the end of the film. This way, we can take something home with us, discuss it, learn from it and share the growth.
Read Everyone Knows the Truth »
My mom always says, “You will eat tomorrow what you cook today” (my mom was a chef, so many of her proverbs come from the cooking world). I think she heard it from her mother, who heard it from her mother, but I am sure that if I trace it long enough back, I will discover this proverb is very ancient, but I doubt most people understand it.
You see, many people cannot find the correlation between their actions and the outcomes they get. When such people are still young, we say it will take them time to learn. When they get older, we call them “stupid”.
I guess this means we are all stupid, because none of us have the ultimate formula for cause and effect. After all, life is a big guessing game based on trial and error and our level of success depends on which attempt we are at.
Nevertheless, there is one thing I know that definitely works and that is doing things in the right order: First we have to cook, then we can eat!
Read Cooking, Eating and Success »
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