Explain it to a Six Year Old

"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself" ~Albert Einstein

This makes perfect sense. Have you ever sat down with a child and tried to explain something to them. You think you can explain it to anyone, but then you find that you can't find the words to make it understandable to someone who doesn't have an extended vocabulary.

I think this is how most self help gurus write their books. You should try this with something you know a lot about. Sit down and start writing. Split what you are trying to teach into sections. You want something that is separated into bite sized chunks. You want your six year old to be able to go away everyday with a small part of what you are teaching.

Now start writing each section as if you are trying to explain it to a child. Use small words. Don't try to expand on anything in exhaustive detail. Try to remember that the people you are trying to teach probably don't have any experience in what you know about. That means the parts you take for granted, they know nothing about.

When you are done, try your teaching on someone else. They don't have to be six years old. They just have to know very little about what you are teaching. When you do this, you will find out some of the things you left out. You will notice their face when you say something that does not make sense to them. Those are you ques to make changes to your teaching.

The interesting thing about putting together this teaching, you will learn so much more about what you are trying to teach. You will be surprised at what you have learned yourself.

Absorb what is useful

"Absorb what is useful, disregard the rest, Add what is uniquely your own." ~Bruce Lee

This is one of the best pieces of advice I have ever come across. It is important because everyone perceives the world differently. This means that one piece of information may be important to one person and completely useless to another. 

Personally I like to listen to as much information as I can. If the information that is being presented is not making some kind of movement within me, I move on to the next piece of information. If there is something I find interesting I will try to listen to it more than once. I want to listen to or read that information enough to absorb what it is trying to say to me.

That is another point I would like to suggest. The same piece of information could mean two totally different things to two different people. One might be thinking about the person who is talking and be focused on how the information changed the speakers life. The second person could be thinking about how the information could benefit the project he is currently working on.

When Bruce made this statement, he was talking about martial arts. The same techniques of different martial arts may not be as effective for one person as it is for another. He wanted his students to take the techniques that were beneficial for each person and build upon them. There is no point in spending time on a technique you can't do or don't do well when there are other techniques that will get you to your goal faster. Take what works for you and build upon it. That is my suggestion.

Make Your Better Your Best

Good, better, best. Never let it rest. Until your good is better and your better is best. - Tim Duncan

You should be striving to do better than you are right now. I don't care what you are doing. I don't care how well you are doing it. I think there is always room for improvement and you should have a goal to find ways to better yourself.

If you believe you are good at something, that is awesome. You should be good at it. Don't settle for just being good at it. There is probably someone out there who is better than you. Lets say you are a pretty good tennis player. You have found there is no one in your circle of friends who has been able to beat you in years. You may think you are good, but if you have the opportunity to play someone who is on a national circuit playing professionally, then you may find yourself getting beat by someone who is better than you.

That is OK though. When you lose, you have the opportunity to learn from the experience. Lean what it was that tennis player did differently to best you in the match. Befriend that player and ask lots of questions. Then you might be able to apply some of those techniques to your came to become better. Who knows, the coach of that player might have taken the time to watch you play and feels you have a potential for greatness. He might just ask you to join their team and drive around the country and give you the opportunity to play the best tennis players in the world. If that happens, you have the best opportunity to become better at the game.

If you feel you are better than you used to be and can beat most of the professional players around you, you still have the opportunity to continue to learn and to become the best tennis player of all time. The only way to do this is to keep playing till you can make your way to an international competition like Wimbledon. If you can beat every other Tennis Player in the competition, then you will be the best.

Don't settle for what you are doing in you life. Always strive to be better. If you are better, why not strive to be the best. Along that journey, make sure you are enjoying yourself. If you are not having fun becoming the best, then it is not worth the struggle. Only be the best if you enjoy what you are doing.

Never Regret

Never regret. If it’s good, it’s wonderful. If it’s bad, it’s experience. ~ Victoria Holt

A lot of people I fins, live in the fear that they are going to do something wrong. They live in the fear they are going to let someone down. They fear they will fail. I will be the first to admit, I have this fear more often than I don't.

As I live and work and learn, I have found that life is full of successes and failures. The successes are awesome. They feel good and may get you places you never dreamed you could get. It is the failures though that are the most productive. When you fail at something, you have the opportunity to learn from it. If you can learn from it, you will not only have the ability not to let that failure happen again, you also have the ability to teach other the avoid that same failure.

Now you can either give that knowledge away for free and let karma bring you the rewards of helping others, or you can charge for that advice and make a monetary profit from what you have learned. There is nothing wrong in charging for teaching others what you have learned. People do it all the time. There is an entire educational system that thrives of selling knowledge. I have found that if you give your knowledge away, you may get a whole lot more in return than what you will get by charging for it.

Another thing about failure is that it tends to make you feel bad. That is OK. You are allowed to feel the defeat of a failure. The only thing is that you need to immediately pick yourself back up and try it again. There are a lot more failures out there than there are successes. You have to keep trying so you can figure out what truly works. If you don't, then you will never know what you are capable of. So keep trying.