40 câu hỏi để hỏi chính mình hằng năm

And I’ll give you another example. We were talking about kids earlier, and I assume a lot of people listening have kids. One of my kids came home with an exam and he got a really terrible mark. And he hands it to me. And he’s like a teenager, so he hands it to me, he’s like, “I did the best I could,” walks away. And normally the conversation ends there. And I was like, “Okay. Now is not the moment that we’re going to talk about this because I know we’ve got this teenage attitude thing going on, but we’re going to circle back to this.” And so later that night I was like, “Talk to me about what it means to do the best you can.” And what he told me about the best he could was when he sat down to write that test from 10:00 to 11:00, he focused all of his energy and all of his effort on it. He made the best decisions possible from 10:00 to 11:00.

But what he forgot or didn’t really appreciate is what position was he in at 10:00 a.m. when he sat down to write that test? Did he fight with his brother in the morning? Yep, he did. Did he eat a healthy breakfast? Nope, he didn’t. Did he get a good night’s sleep? Nope. He was up late. Did he study? No, he sort of half-assed it. And so what happened was he was in a bad position at the moment he sat down to write that test. He was ill-prepared to write the test, but yes, he did the best he could in that moment. And so often we think about life in terms of, “How do I do the best I can in this particular moment?” rather than, “How do I put myself in the best position?”

“We are not imprisoned by our circumstances, our setbacks, our history, our mistakes, or even staggering defeats along the way. We are freed by our choices.”