Monday, November 2
Teach one thing by hand
Somebody in your family is going to need to know how to do a thing, and the only question is whether they learn it from you or from a stranger on the internet.
Key takeaways
- Pick one skill you already know cold
- Hand over the tool before you explain it
- Let them finish it crooked and keep it
TL;DR
Somebody in your family is going to need to know how to do a thing, and the only question is whether they learn it from you or from a stranger on the internet.
Hand over the tool
Most of what gets passed down in a house gets passed down by accident. Habits, tempers, the way a door gets shut. The useful stuff needs you to be deliberate about it.
Pick something small and real
Not a lecture on life. Something with hands in it. How to shut off the water. How to sharpen a knife without losing a finger. How to change a tire in the rain, which is the only weather that ever matters for tires. How to make the one meal you make well.
The subject barely matters. What they remember is that you stood there and showed them. A kid who learns to patch drywall from you learns something underneath the drywall, which is that problems in a house have solutions and the solutions belong to people like them.
Photo by Taylor Flowe on Unsplash
Let them do it wrong
Here's where most men blow it. You hand over the tool, watch the first bad angle, and take it back. Faster that way. Cleaner. Also useless.
Let the cut go crooked. Let the eggs get overcooked. Correct once, quietly, then shut up and let them finish. The shelf that hangs a little off is worth more than the shelf you hung alone, and anybody who sits at that table will hear the story of it for twenty years.
Today
Pick one skill you know well and walk one person in your family through it, start to finish, with the tool in their hands.
Go deeper
There's a long view in this that's easy to miss while you're sweeping up sawdust. What gets handed down outlasts the hands that hand it. One generation shall commend your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts (Psalm 145:4). Commending is work. It's showing, repeating, standing there while someone fumbles it. The glory in a family isn't the trophies on the shelf, it's the fact that somebody three generations out knows how to do a thing well and doesn't know why. You're building someone you won't fully meet.
Remember Yesterday
Delete the news app tonight. Delete the news app from your phone tonight before you sleep, and check the news once tomorrow from a browser.
Remember Lasterday
Give something away this week. Send money to one person who needs it before tonight, and tell nobody you did it.
Tomorrow's memo, every morning
One a day. No noise.
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