How do you handle hard times and set backs? Do they make you stronger, or set you up for future failure? In a series of articles, the "Art of Manliness" explores this topic. I encourage you to read the articles and discuss them with your children. They are at a crucial point in their lives. The attitudes toward difficulties and failure that they develop now can affect them for the rest of their lives. (http://artofmanliness.com/2010/02/03/boosting-your-resiliency-part-2-avoiding-learned-helplessness-and-changing-your-explanatory-style)
Habits are hard to form, and hard to break - especially for us as adults! We should encourage our children to form good habits and abandon bad ones when they are young. Here is a site dedicated to making "manly men," but the advice given here is good for both genders, and all ages.
Bullying can be physical, but it can also be verbal. The words we use and the expressions we use reflect our personality and the values that we hold. Read the article at this link, and encourage your children to do the same. "Maintain a Civil Tongue"
In today's (Sunday, September 27, 2009) Denver Post on page 4D was an editorial by Ellen Goodman entitled "Paying attention in a multi-tasking world". In it she describes some recent research that shows that those who multi-task are actually short changing themselves in their ability to work hard and concentrate. Read the article, and if you agree, encourage your children to learn to do one thing well at a time - like study! Have them work hard for thirty or forty-five minutes then take a break and do something that they enjoy. Repeat as needed. Dr. Pegler
This link worked today, I hope it continues to: http://www.billingsgazette.com/news/opinion/editorial/columnists/ellen-goodman/article_6c5007d2-abce-11de-be39-001cc4c002e0.html
Harvey Mackay
Outswimming the Sharks
Path to true mastery takes 10,000 hours
For years, I have preached the importance of hard work, determination, persistence and practice as key ingredients of success. A nifty new book seems to support my theory.
Malcolm Gladwell has written a fascinating study, Outliers: The Story of Success (Little,Brown & Co., 2008), which should make a lot of people feel much better about not achieving instant success. In fact, he says it takes about 10 years, or 10,000 hours, of practice to attain true expertise.
"The people at the very top don't just work harder or even much harder than everyone else," Gladwell writes. "They work much, much harder." Achievement, he says, is talent plus preparation.
Preparation seems to play a bigger role.
For example, he describes The Beatles' rise to fame: They had been together seven years before their famous arrival in America. They spent a lot of time playing in strip clubs in Hamburg, Germany, sometimes for as long as eight hours a night.
Overnight sensation? Not exactly. Estimates are that that the band performed live 1,200 times before their big success in 1964. By comparison, most bands don't perform 1,200 times in their careers.
Neurologist Daniel Levitin has studied the formula for success extensively, and shares this finding: "The emerging picture from such studies is that 10,000 hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert in any thing. In study after study the number comes up again and again . . It seems it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery."
As Gladwell puts it, "Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good."
My purely unscientific observations support all that he says. I don't know anyone who has succeeded any other way. And you don't just have to work hard; you have to work smart, too.
Reprinted with permission from nationally syndicated columnist Harvey Mackay, author of the New York Times #1 bestseller "Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive."