Exhausted notes made me a better parent.
My wife and I recently had our second child and despite having twice the chaos, it has been much more manageable. The most helpful thing I did to prepare for our second newborn was to write notes every 1-2 weeks to my future self. Since I knew we wanted to have more than one kid, I wanted to avoid making the same mistake twice and instead learn from every time we stubbed our parental toes.
This simple experience, helped reinforce a few things
- We all learn from failure, but only if we give ourselves the opportunity
- As kids, we’re told not to dwell on our mistakes but this really isn’t helpful if we want to keep avoiding them. Instead we should reframe mistakes as learning opportunities
- Arthur Brooks recommends instead you keep a failure journal and write down all your biggest failures so
- Explaining something in notes to yourself forces you to learn it
- Richard Feynman’s technique for learning was to explain something to a five year old child
- Once we view failure as an opportunity to learn, we can also switch our learning process. Instead of just taking notes, we try to synthesize and explain what we learned to a future me or a friend who knows nothing on a subject. This forces us to understand it better and causes the lesson to sink in
- Everything is a phase
- Delirious nights with a screaming baby may feel like they will never end, but viewed throughout our life, these moments are just a short blip. This is both a good thing and a bad thing
- While the frustrating moments are short, so are the moments you will treasure forever. As Tim Urban memorably illustrates in the tail end we have few moments with those we love and even fewer in different phases of life.
My current solution is to be present for the best moments and the rest aren’t failures, but “learning opportunities”
0 Comments