This past summer I mentioned to my fifteen year old daughter, Emily, how I’d like her to own a manual transmission for her first car. My reasoning was, being able to drive a manual will come in handy later in life. I had a manual for my first car, and as much as I didn’t like it at first, I’m glad I experienced this learning curve when I was younger.
Like most of the advice I mention to my very independent and headstrong daughter, she gave me a funny look and resumed to snapchatting from our Los Angeles kitchen table.
Cut To: 4 months later, Winter Break in Utah
Emily, still at the kitchen table and snapchatting, mentions to me a completely different take on what kind of car she wants for her SWEET 16. Grinning with giddiness she says,
“No matter what mom, it has to be a manual.”
“Oh, okay,” I responded.
Apparently a guy friend of hers has a manual and “they are so much fun.”
One: never mind where the idea came from, as long as she has it.
And two: this is a big deal.
The more hard things she does now in her formidable years, the more she’ll strengthen those “mountain climbing muscles,” and in turn, continue to do more hard things in life.
Pondering on my daughter’s epiphany, I realized something else.
As a society we have gotten into a bad habit of disconnecting ourselves from doing hard things, especially with our hands. For example, we never write things out anymore, our kids rarely get their hands muddy, and our generation loves modeling the easy way out. (Be sure to watch the film, The Big Short, a must see)
Whatever happened to grit?
This is not my definition of a rich life. A rich life consists of doing hard things and accomplishing them.
Or failing, and failing again, then after a good dose of pain, the impossible becomes possible.
One of my favorite mottos is good to great is painful.
Writing 12 scripts in 12 months is a hard thing. Maybe even impossible.
But I’d rather not be stuck in automatic … if you know what I mean. Ha
So bring on the manual and lets do this! What hard thing have you done lately?
xx
AEJ
