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Hay un amigo en mi!
My family and I just watched “Toy Story 3″.
Last week, we watched “Father of the Bride”.
By the end of both films, I fought tears.
I am not ready for my girls to grow up. I really wish they could go back and relive ages 3-7.
While wading through these thick emotions, I realized that it was my own issues that I was really wading through. Time to do the difficult, daily work of knowing and growing myself. Which will be either years of focused reading and writing. Or months of daily taking action.
If you could only read one book*, it should be…
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.
It is that good and important.
I am not the first to say this, nor will I be the last.
(*And you have to read. For growth, reading is not optional.)
Find everything you need.
Find everything you need by looking for it everywhere.
This thought became clear to me as I read today’s post at The Art of Manliness. The post was “Lessons in Manliness from Charles Atlas“. The post simply told the story of Charles Atlas and extracted some points from the story. It is an inspirational story. The kind we should read and share. But more than the story, what stood out to me was the act of extracting truths from the story.
By coincidence (is there such a thing?), the story was about how Charles Atlas extracted life-changing truths from ordinary experiences. Charles changed his life (and the world) by noticing something about the animals at the zoo that he liked to visit.
Charles had a burning question: “How can I change my physique?” And he found real answers by simply looking. Everywhere.
“Dig for gold in the supertexts.” says Steven B. Sample, arguably the greatest university president in history in his excellent leadership manual, The Contrarians Guide to Leadership. The message, and act, is the same.
I found gold in that story of Charles finding answers.
It seems to me that this is the skill that students should learn. I don’t know how to teach it.
But I bet I can find ways just by looking.
Thinking for yourself.
One problem with thinking for yourself is that you will soon do it all time. Soon, little that is commonly accepted will seem sensible to you.
W.E.B. DuBois
W.E.B., in his autobiography, talks about a 22-year-old being “fully mature”.
How often do we see that? In men?
Why doesn’t marriage mature more men?
Marriage is supposed to mature a person. One of the neatest things about marriage is that it requires and causes maturity.
So why doesn’t marriage mature more men, then? Of course the question is wrong.
Why don’t men mature in marriage? Why do some men seem to become less mature after marrying?
One explanation might be that they simply do not know they can, or are supposed to, mature in marriage.
Even if one is not religious, and therefore does not subscribe to such ideas as: “it is the devil’s doing”, there do seem to be forces at work here. Why would society/culture work at all to keep men from maturing? Yet we can find evidence of just that: keeping lust inflamed in men, keeping men from doing real work by pushing imaginary work (video games). Said this way, it is easy to see that money is driving such efforts. Sales matter more (to individual companies) than advancing humanity.
