Lessons I'm Going
To Teach My Kids
Too Late #43
I don’t want to be one of those boring old farts who’s always saying to his kids, “When I was your age…”
I compare my kids to myself all the time because I use my life as the baseline for what’s normal, as we all do, so right there you know it has to be a faulty assumption.
But, putting that aside, I’m still not going to verbalize it to make my kids feel bad that they’re not living up to the standard I set back in the day.
Things are different now. Society is different, schools are different — the media, our culture, the neighbourhood, our family, all these things have changed in countless ways. I can’t hold my kids to a standard that just doesn’t exist anymore.
They’re going to have to find their own paths and set their own pace. They’ll reach their milestones in their time and if it’s before I did or after should be irrelevant. I’m not trying to best my kids, I’m trying to better them.
Also, I don’t want them to realize just yet that, for all my early achievements, I didn’t get too far. That’ll come eventually and, when it does, I don’t want to feel any worse than I do now that I didn’t live up to the standard I set for myself.
The standard I set a long time ago, when I was their age.
Lesson #43 —
It Is Better To Fail In Originality
Than To Succeed In Imitation
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