Work Hard, Be Kind and Make Choices….Repeat
It has been an incredibly painful week for our country. A great American city burns, a nation's collective conscience again exposed and shaken to its core. Tribes feel under seize, the president of the the most powerful nation in the world feels picked on, 1 in 4 Americans have lost their jobs, and we continue to deal with trauma of losing more than 100,000 of our citizens to an illness we have never seen before with no immediate relief in site. 2020 will be one for the history books and we are not even half way though it yet.
I have written before about the words I share with my daughters each day before dropping them off at school. This was back when you actually took kids to school. Those words have always served as much as reminder to myself as an attempt to instill my values and aspirations into my children.
I hesitate to bring them up again for fear that it demonstrates a lack of creativity in coming up with new content, but when deciding how to navigate these perilous times both for myself and our clients, I don't know what else to do but repeat them again and again and again. Hoping. Praying, that in their recited utterance, it becomes true for me and my lived life.
Work Hard- Work is not dependent on a paycheck. Work is not about titles, sweat, or skill set. Work is not even about results. Work is about intention, effort, and perseverance.
You want to have a better financial situation, better job, better health, better world. It doesn't just happen. It has to have intention, effort, and perseverance. Let that sink in for a moment.
Are you intentionally working for those things? Are you giving the effort those things require? Are you giving up when it doesn't work out the first time, second time, third time? I know it is hard, but keep working. Never stop working.
“Do unto others downstream as you would have those upstream to unto you”
Wendell Berry
Be Kind- Each and every day I took my girls to school, I knew the would encounter people who were more/less talented they were. They would interact with people richer/poorer than they were. They would study with people smarter/less smart than they were.
What I wanted to them to know is that kindness offered is not dependent on kindness received. People are different but they are all people whom have dignity and are worthy of our best selves.
People will be cruel. People will try and take advantage of your kindness, but that is not on you. You are are responsible for how you act. As the great agrarian author and philosopher said, "do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you."
If we need anything right now, we need kindness.
Make Good Choices- I can't imagine being a child these days. I don't mean to wax nostalgically about how great it was to grow up before the internet, but the immense pressure of social media, the deluge of video and images that flood our children is overwhelming to say the least.
The (dis)information overload extends to adults as well. Every question has multiple and often contradictory answers. All of it, available with a five second inquiry into a search box. How do you decide? Who do you trust? These questions seemed simpler in my memory. It probably wasn't but that is how I remember it.
Good decision making, of course, is just as important to financial success as it is to all other aspects of life. The problem is not the lack of information, but the sheer magnitude of it.
What may be more important is how will you respond when you make the wrong choice? We must be willing to forgive ourselves, learn and move forward. Grow and be resolved to a make better choices going forward. No one else is going to do it for you.
That is it. Every day, I tell them, work hard, be kind and make good choices.
As a parent, it is difficult to know sometimes what to tell my kid, what to do. As a parent, it is also not my job to provide all the answers. It is my job to equip them to get to the right answers themselves. The same is true as an advisor. Sometimes the answers are not apparent, but we could do much worse than working hard, being kind and making good choices.