Dear Grandson,
Well, life really sucks sometimes, doesn’t it? You went through a huge effort applying to a couple of schools and you got rejected. That’s the word, right? That’s how it feels. Like a slap in the face.
And, you are thinking, if I had tested better? If my grades had been better? If I were more deserving? If I were just better? If, if, if. It can drive you crazy.
So, your ol pappy here decided it was time to drop you a note and set you straight on some of these questions. You OK with that? If not, stop reading.
First, let me start by saying, I love you. I just felt like saying that. As you get older, you’ll hear those words less and less in your life, and believe them even less. So treasure them.
Second, let me say that it is always a challenge for an old guy to write or say anything intelligent to a young man, two generations away (your mom’s, and now yours). However, I have a very powerful ego – both a blessing and a curse – and it leads me to believe that I can reach across two generations and offer some thoughts that will help. I guess we’ll see.
At the same time, I am going to ask you to put your big boy pants on because this is going to be an adult conversation and my words may challenge you a bit. You may need mama’s help in understanding all that I am going to say.
I am going to start in an area that might surprise you. I want to comment on the ISEF exam – that’s what it is called, correct – the notion that perhaps your score was not high enough to get you into scholarship territory, or whatever, and what that means.
I never scored very well on tests like that. In fact, I never scored very well on what they call objective tests. I am referring to the kinds of tests where you are given multiple choices, and I am contrasting them to a test where you could write five pages for your answer.
I went through almost 40 years of my life figuring that I wasn’t really all that smart and that I was succeeding only because of hard work. I thought this even though there were many instances where I accomplished things that other people couldn’t, and not just because I worked hard. Rather, because I had a sense of things, and did the smart thing.
Then one day at home on Pony Lane I was reading a magazine in psychology and I was introduced to the notion that there were multiple categories of intellect, that is, of intelligence, and one of the categories they discussed seemed to perfectly fit me, and it was not a form of intelligence that you could even measure with an objective test.
The human IQ – so called intelligence quotient – comes in 6-8 different forms. For example, one form is an ability to remember piece parts. Another is an ability to see relationships, how things tie together (this is mine). Another is behavioral interaction with others. We actually call this behavioral intelligence. There is an intelligence that relates to the arts, another that relates to science. And there are others. We can go over those details at a later time. The point is, I did not discover this until I was 40 years old. I just thought I was fooling everybody with my success until I learned that my ability to quickly understand how separate pieces – complex pieces of a problem, for example – tied together was actually a form of intelligence. And in that regard, my IQ was off the charts. In effect, I could see the big picture, though that term is way over used today, and generally, in a meaningless way. A more sophisticated term would be to say I saw integration, the melding together of complex ideas into a single over reaching idea. I never took a test that measured that when I was growing up.
So, back to the test. I don’t know your score. Fact is, you can take that test three times a year and perhaps your score would go way up, after repeated testing. So the score, itself, proves nothing. But, here is what I know. You are a very intelligent person. I know this, not because I am your grandfather, but because I have a real sense of you. At your age, with much development to come, we don’t know exactly where your intelligence lies. This is something that will evolve over time. You’ll figure it out in the years ahead.
So as far as the test score goes, file it away. It’s history, and probably not even an important part of history. It has virtually nothing to do with how successful you will be in developing a stable and fruitful and hopefully loving life, for yourself and for others. Frankly, such a test may not even be measuring the right things about how your brain works.
Ok, so I started with a pretty adult subject. But I thought it was important because nobody ever told me this when I was your age, or ever, and it took me forty years to finally understand that I was a really smart person. I did not know this because the ways we measure intelligence are so very limited. If this subject stretched you a bit maybe mama will help you understand what I am trying to say.
Let’s talk about another subject for a few minutes. Disappointment. Wow, it hurts. But it is as much a part of ordinary life as breathing air. So, you better get used to it. An important goal in life is to build up the strength to handle disappointment, to manage yourself through it, so that you learn how to handle it.
You might say, screw you pappy, I don’t want to handle disappointment. Yes, you do. Why? Because if you strive for greatness, if you want to “change the world” – the Commander’s speech – or if you simply want to be the best you can be you will need to take risks with your little heart. You’ll need to commit to work, learning, to apply for the job, to getting along with a person, putting in hours of study or practice, perhaps spending money and there is no guarantee that you’ll get what you wanted. Life offers no guarantees. Worse than that, frequently there is some ass-hole standing in front of you who is going to make that judgment and you’re going to have to put up with the indignity!! (Sorry about the language.) This is hard stuff. Ask your mom.
So, a really good thing that can happen to a 14-year-old is that you get put into situations where you could end up disappointed. The best outcomes for a young guy are not necessarily when you succeed. You learn a hell of a lot more when you don’t get what you want. In time, focusing on what happened, taking it apart, honestly asking yourself what were the causes of my failure, you learn how to win – and you win a bit more, and then you win a lot. I spent most of my life learning how to win but I did not start winning a lot until I was well into my 50’s. You will win earlier.
Embrace challenges. Set lofty goals. Never allow anyone to tell you that you can’t do something. But strengthen yourself to get through the times when you will face a setback. Then get up off the ground, figure out what happened, make yourself smarter, and do it again. You’ll end up loving life. It’s just a big game.
So, when you face a big disappointment what do you do about it? You could say, nice talk pappy, but what the hell do I do now?
OK, let’s take that apart. It is only human nature to worry about almost everything when you at a conflict moment – what school to go to, how to manage the environment – and that is way too much. Why worry about things that you have absolutely no control over. This is especially so when you are scared.
I have been scared. I have been in some deeply frightening situations. I have been brought to tears. I have prayed. Most people don’t like to use the word fear, but in fact, that is what is happening most of the time. Fear of actions against us. Fear of unknowns.
During the hardest situations I have ever been through, I learned to put a piece of paper in front of me and I would write at the top “what am I afraid of” and I would force myself to honestly answer the question. I wrote the answers down. I wrote as many answers down as I could write. (Most people will not answer this question, which is a shame.)
Then I would start to take the answers apart. The first thing I wanted to know was do I have any control at all over the thing I fear? If not, I put the fear in category # 2. If I had and degree of control, that is, if I could identify actions I might take to affect the outcome, to make the thing I fear go away, or get much smaller, I would put that fear in category # 1.
Then I identify all of the actions I can take, actions that are under my control, to make the items in category # 1 go away, or be reduced.
What I am telling you is one of the top five life lessons I could convey to you. I am teaching you about your circle of influence, and distinguishing it from all of the other things that lie outside your circle of influence. The more important a goal is to you, the more critical it is that you focus on the actions that you can influence, that you control; and the more important it is that you pretty much ignore the things that you do not control. The items that can be impacted by the actions you control are items within your circle of influence.
You control studying hard for a test. You don’t control the questions the teacher is going to ask. You control doing all of the hard work to apply to a school. You don’t control their answer. You control preparing yourself the best you can for an exam next week. You don’t control whether you’ll get into a good college five years from now. You control the choices you make and whether you accept responsibility for those choices. You don’t control bad luck. You control listening attentively to what someone wants to tell you. You don’t control whether they listen to you. You control working hard to get ahead, accepting leadership challenges if they are offered, and exercising social skills (that’s intelligence, by the way) that make you popular. You don’t control whether all of that makes others jealous.
Once you know what you want, and have identified the actions under your control that will get you to your goal, you then move into execution. In short, will you do the work? Will you do the work knowing that there are no guarantees that you will meet your goal? I am sorry. This is just life. There are no guarantees.
Notice I used the term work. Work! What is that? It is actions you take to make things in your life better later on. Yes, many times work can be deeply fulfilling in the moment, that is, when you are doing it. This is especially true as you get older, as you move into a profession, or as you work on things about which you are very accomplished, knowledgeable, respected. But when you are 14, and you are just starting to learn, work is hard.
So, let me introduce you to another term. It is incredibly important in life. The term is discipline. What does it mean? It describes something about your character as a boy. Can you make yourself do things that are hard? Can you make yourself work hard on something because it will produce results for you in the future – maybe the next day, maybe a month from now, maybe a year or more from now. I think it would be fair to say that almost every successful person has great discipline, what we also call self-discipline.
Now, the final thought for today is why should you care?
I am writing about very grown up things. You’re just a kid. I am writing about things that nobody ever discussed with me when I was your age. Well, in some respects, I think you face very different challenges from what I faced as a 14-year-old.
Let me give just one example. I went to Loyola High School, run by Jesuit Catholic priests. They were tough guys. The school was loaded with structure. There were many rules. And if you didn’t pay attention, you got clobbered, sometimes physically. So, it was actually very helpful.
I think your school may be somewhat different, though I really don’t know. I suspect when you go to a public high school it will be very different, in this way. In most respects, they’ll have all of the tools: qualified teachers, the right subjects, support tools to help you study, grading system, probably even counseling, safety, even young people who will become your best friends, etc. But, to a very large extent, they’ll leave it up to you to take advantage of these things. Nobody is going to demand that you perform. The demand will have to come from within yourself. And for that to happen, you will need the tools and the attitude that I am discussing in this letter.
There is another point. If you went to a private school, such as the ones you applied to, they would make great demands on you and perhaps your effort and results would have been positively affected by their style and structure. But, consider this, you would have learned very little about life, because the real world does not operate like this. If you are successful in public school, if you take the right courses, and if you perform at a high level you will actually be much better prepared for life after high school than you would from a high end private school. Why? Because you will have learned to find your strength from within yourself. Strength from within is personal power.
It is true that some environments are tougher to operate in than others. In a public school you will not get the attention you would get in a very good private school. It will be more up to you.
So, you need to be very careful about negative language. Listen to your words. Take note of words like: I can’t; the teacher will never go for it; it will never work; it’s too late to fix it now; that’s not my job; I don’t have to do that; it doesn’t matter whether I study; why practice, I am good enough; I am tired of working; and other similar expressions. These terms are not helpful. To some degree, they are terms used by people who always blame someone else, or some other thing, for their setbacks. As I wrote to you last year about choices, you are responsible for your choices. It is your job to find the path through your environment.
Try this as a test. The next time you don’t feel like working on something that is expected of you – studying, preparing, practicing – go sit down privately in your room, put that piece of paper in front of you, and ask yourself: why don’t I want to do the thing that I know will make my future better? What is stopping me? What is missing? What am I scared of? Answer honestly – you do not need to share these thoughts with anyone.
Then take a careful look at your answers. You will learn stuff that you did not realize. In some cases, you may say, hey, I now see why I am not doing that because I don’t agree on the goal, or I don’t know why I am being asked to do that thing, or I don’t think that action is the smartest way to get where I want to do, or I am focused on things that are absolutely not under my control, and they are chewing up my energy. OK. Fine. Then challenge your creativity and see whether you can reconstruct things so as to make them more agreeable to you. Sit down with mama and say, hey mom, I want to share some things with you and maybe you can help me figure something out. (Of course, I would be willing to discuss anything with you, at any time.)
There are three things I would like you to do. First, reread the “Make your bed speech”, the SEAL Team Commander’s speech or look at it again on YouTube. Notice, all ten items are things under your control. He is telling you what I am telling you, but in a different way.
Second, I want you to go on YouTube and pull up a speech by Lou Holtz. The citing is “Lou Holtz Inspirational Speech.” It also says some of the things I am saying, but differently. (Holtz was a very famous football coach at the University of Notre Dame.)
Third, I am going to send you a book. Now, this book was not written for a 14-year-old; but at the same time, I see no reason why you won’t understand it. I want you to read the first 90-100 pages. After that, you are on your own. The book is called “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” The author is Steven Covey. In short, it is all about your circle of influence. It is a really important book. I have probably given away two dozen copies of this book.
Ok, if you got this far you worked hard today. I know grandfathers don’t generally write letters like this. They are supposed to say you are wonderful, everything is great, forget the pain, it will all work out, it is nothing, you are wonderful, and so forth. Sorry, that ain’t me. I want to talk to you about how to win, how to overcome, how to pick yourself up, how to manage through disappointment that wil have a long term effect on you.
Again, I love you. I hope we can start a conversation here. I hope you’ll write back and at least let me know whether any of these words, one paragraph will be enough, helped you. There is so much more to talk about.
