Small Discipline
- Fatherhood: A trick for teaching your kids (or yourself) skills
- Exercise: How much range should you have in your shoulders?
- Focus: Small Discipline
- A book, a quote, a dad joke
Fatherhood: A trick for teaching your kids (or yourself) skills
Not all progress is about introducing new things. A lot of the magic is in upgrading current skills by holding them to a higher standard. Here, we could be talking about anything from hitting a target at a higher percentage to making sure you’re using an Oxford comma consistently.
During this phase, any other skills that still require deliberate attention will suffer a bit. This can make perfectionists pucker. But there is only so much cognitive bandwidth to go around and something's gotta give – either the new thing or the old thing.
The solution? Relax. Breathe. Let it go. And relax your standards for these other skills. Not forever. Not even for very long. But during the brief period of accommodating the new skill. And once it’s stabilized? Go back and tie it all together to your previous standard.
Exercise: How much range should you have in your shoulders?
I like to see 190º of shoulder flexion – overhead and then some. We’re weakest at our end-ranges, so having a bit of a buffer is important. Especially if you’re an overhead athlete or simply like to put heavy things over your head.
Here’s a quick video that includes some strength training options if you have less than perfect range.
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Focus: Small discipline
Big discipline is Herculean. It’s huge. It’s dramatic. Big discipline is what you use to push through your most intense moments.
Small discipline is quiet. It is persistent. Small discipline is making the changes necessary to never stop moving forward – even when they’re so tiny that they’re barely perceptible. It’s like water that cuts through rock.
Quote
“Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.”
– Alain de Botton
Dad joke
What do you call a dog magician?
A labracadabrador
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