All parents want their children to have the wisdom they have without having to experience the pain and struggle that they’ve had to endure to gain that knowledge.

I’ve known many successful and accomplished people. Almost all of them have hard-won wisdom that they’ve acquired through experience and struggles. I’ve never heard any successful person say that their journey was easy. They’ve all encountered periods in their lives with challenging circumstances, uncertainties, doubts, and times where they didn’t know how to continue. But through all the difficulties and obstacles, they were able to show an enormous of grit and emotional fortitude. They persevered, continuously learning from their mistakes and were able to adjust, tweak, or completely change their paths.

Experience is the ultimate teacher and there is a tremendous amount of wisdom to be gained through it. Yet, as parents we want to spare our children the pain and difficulties that we’ve endured to gain that wisdom. Building grit, resiliency, emotional strength, and obtaining wisdom are difficult and take hard work. I don’t know that it is possible to do without experiencing it.

I don’t believe every generation has to start at 0, but I have a young family, so this is something I think about frequently and have significantly more questions than answers. Questions like:

1. How do you balance the interdependence of being part of family while still encouraging independence? This sounds like a contradictory statement, but it’s important for a person’s own self worth and strength to be self-sufficient and recognize that they are their own unique individual who is also a part of the larger collective family.

2. How do you balance between being supportive and loving while encouraging your children to grow into emotionally strong people who can handle and tackle complex problems that life throws at them? As much we want to handle things for our kids, life is going present difficulties we cannot protect them from such as: an unexpected death, professional challenges, relationship and marital issues…ect. So how do we make sure they are equipped to handle the tough times they will face?

Because I do not have the perfect answer, here’s what I’m going to acknowledge. Parenting is complex and a challenge. But it’s the most important thing I will ever do. As much as possible I want my children to feel loved and supported while still encouraging them to embrace and deal with difficulty. While I’d like spare them the pain, mistakes, and challenges; I understand that the only way to acquire hard-won wisdom is when it is HARD-WON.

“We tend to measure what is easily measurable instead of what is truly important to measure.”
We recently heard Charles Koch the CEO of Koch Industries in an interview talk about his company, their philsophies, and how they want to seek mutually beneficial relationships with their shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers, and partners. This mutual good and interdependecy throughout the ecosystem creates a “rising tide, lifts all ships” that creates loyalty, strength, and lasting power for everyone.
Mr Koch revealed how he the team spend an enormous amount of time designing the compensation packages of their people. They look at all kind of measurement metrics to incentivize the type of behavior and actions that promote the overall goodwill and strength of the company. When he spoke about this, he acknowledged how hard it was to design these metrics because so many of the behaviors they are incentivizing are not strictly about maximizing profits, revenues, costs or other qualitative measures but instead qualatative attributes that lead to good will across the entire ecosystem. “The Problem is, We tend to measure what is easily measurable instead of what is truly important to measure.”
The significance of those words stuck in our minds. How often do we seek simple and easy measurements when we are looking at Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)? Short term revenue, sales and profitability at all costs, cost of production, user acquisition, might all be examples. While we shouldn’t discount measuring these items, perhaps we should dive deeper into the measurements and analysis.
For example: Is it beneficial to increase profitability by squeezing our suppliers making them unhappy to do business with us, decreasing their loyalty for the future? Or would we be better served taking less profits in the short term, but ensuring that when we hit a difficult with supplies that they take care of us in turn? Is it beneficial to acquire customers at all costs, even those customers do not align with your values and will most likely cause problems for your organization, or would you be better served seeking out customers appreciate your services and worth the future investment of your company? There are countless more examples that we could identify, but the main point is it’s difficult and requires hard work to look deeper at the intagibles that should be measured.
Innovation, fortitude, trust, commitment, creativity, consistency, and looking after the long term value of the company and all it’s members are just a few examples of other items that are difficult to measure but might be invaluable. To dive deeper and identify what matters most then try to measure that, requires a leader or organization to have courage and to think long term about what adds value and strength to the organization and it’s entire ecosystem.
While business is the easy example to point to, this idea could most likely be extrapolated and applied to many areas as we pursue our best lives.

If you ask the average man, “are you lonely?” He’s gonna say, “No, I’ve got my people at work, I’ve got my people at home.ect..”
But who do you open up your heart to and who do you pour vulnerability into? Who do you feel comfortable enough and confident enough that no matter what, they’re not gonna judge me no matter what? Those are the questions men should be asking about who fits those definitions in their lives
From a hardcore, humanistic, evolutionary perspective, we are tribal. For thousands of years, humans were hunter gathers that lived in communal areas like tepee or caves with 4-10 families. The men would go out and hunt, The women were staying back with the children, taking care of things. But men were out there doing life and death stuff.
When you look at the military community, why is it the camaraderie is so tight between combat veterans? Because of what they have been through together.
It’s no different today, but thing is that the average male in a first world, country nowadays does not have those sorts of relationships. There’s no forging of a fire that required to build those relationships of trust and deeper understanding.
So when we have “acquaintances” and “friends”. But it doesn’t mean that we would sit in a foxhole with them. It doesn’t mean that we would go to war with them. It’s a convenient relationship at the time.
It checks a box. But it doesn’t mean I have that true brotherhood, that true connection. So that’s a huge thing that’s missing nowadays, camaraderie amongst men.