I'm 62 years young today. I've learned a lot over the last year, but in order to maintain my practice of keeping my blog posts short, here are a few of my key learnings from year 62.
1.) From Ben Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanac", I learned to use the phrase "it's possible that..." in place of "I think" or "in my opinion". This has been helpful in my writing but even more so in conversation. I find using this phrase assists me to not take my own opinion (and by extension, myself) as seriously.
2.) Via her memoir called "Tolstoy and the Purple Chair", Nina Sankovitch taught me that calling a book "foolish" that a friend or relative has recommended to you is tantamount to calling the person foolish. Being the recovering judgaholic I am, this was akin to a 13th step. It's a powerful insight.
3.) From an act of inexcusable public behavior that I can term a fiasco without any exaggeration, I learned that my grade school teachers were astute observers when they said I sometimes lacked self-control. Lesson #2 from same source: To truly learn and grow, from now on I will resist any temptation to turn this incident (or any future bad behavior of mine) into stories with self-serving "morals".
How about you? What have been your key learnings over the last year? You surely don't need to be celebrating a birthday to consider this.
About Me
- Pat Barton
- My most recent single release - "My True North" - is now available on Bandcamp. Open my profile and click on "audio clip".
Learnings from my own (bigger number than yours) year:
ReplyDeleteWriting the first book was easier than writing the second book
Practicing what I preach to the small business clients I coach is harder to do than I acknowledge
Good friends are a blessing.
I'm holding on to my self-control, which is different from being a control freak.
Great learnings, especially (for me) the one about "taking your own advice"; so hard to listen to our own voice, isn't it?
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