Holding Babies, Ignoring Dates & Cake

I want to start a new series where I keep a running list of lessons I’ve learned—little bits of wisdom, I think—and when I get to ten of them, I put together an essay. These are going to be very random, and they could concern everything from faith to family to work or anything else.

So here they go.

1. Work as hard at conversation with your children as you do at your job

I always find myself going to work, and you really invest in working your job. Then you come home tired, and it is easy to think, Whatever. But you are their world. Especially if you homeschool—we homeschool our kids—this is your world, and you are their father in their real world. You need to work harder at home than you do at your job.

I have started to pray and get myself into the frame of mind: Okay, you are entering home now, and you don’t just end your day. Oh no, the day is starting when you get home. Work really hard at conversation, and think about good questions to ask them.

2. When you get older, don’t talk about the weather so much

The next two are about conversational patterns when you get older.

Here is the first one: when you get older, do not talk about the weather so much. It just doesn’t matter unless you are a farmer or something. No one cares about the weather.

3. Don’t get bogged down in the timeline of your stories

The third piece of wisdom is that when people get older, they have a tendency, when telling a story about something, to spend far too much time focusing on the minor particulars.

You might be telling a story about baseball or something, and you say: “Oh yeah, it was back when I was a sophomore in college… or was I a junior? Okay, yeah, yeah, because I had Dr. Peterson, and that was the third time…”

And the listener is thinking, Oh my gosh.

Don’t do this. No one cares about the exact times or places or dates; they only care about the actual details of the story. I said this for a long time, and then I recently caught myself doing it with an intern of mine. So don’t do that.

4. Use improv rules in all your conversations—unless you shouldn’t

Many of you are probably familiar with improv rules, and the main rule is “Yes, and…”

Whenever you are in an improv scene, someone says something, and you are supposed to affirm it and then add something to it so that you keep moving forward. You push the scene or the conversation forward.

This realization hit me because my wife and I were spending time with people years ago, and we came away feeling completely drained. You have probably all had this experience before, wondering, Why do I feel so drained after this conversation?

We realized it came down to a couple of things. One is when someone is very negative, so there is just a constant blocking. The other thing is having no progression. Normally you have “Yes, and…”, so one thing builds on another. But there wasn’t any forward movement here. One person made a statement, and then the other person made another unrelated statement. It wasn’t moving in a linear way; it was just statement, statement, statement. You had all this cognitive effort of thinking, Okay, I have to think of something else to say now. There was no rolling ball of conversation.

Along with that is learning how to ask good questions of other people.

Now, I said you should use improv rules unless you shouldn’t. Obviously you don’t want to affirm everything everyone says, because having differences of opinion is interesting. So sometimes you can’t do that.

5. If you have any freedom in your job, use it to learn hard things

Normally in every job, your schedule isn’t completely packed from one second to another. There is going to be a little squishing room.

Let’s say you have sixteen hours to complete a task, but you can finish it in fourteen. You have two extra hours. A lot of times it is easy to throw away that time. But that stuff compounds over time, and you can learn an enormous amount if you decide, I am always going to learn hard things. Whatever is the hard way to do something—like automating a process or whatever it is—spend that time to learn something difficult.

6. If your friends have babies, hold them

This one is probably more for the men, but I find that when people have babies—especially their first one, but even more so when they have more babies—you go over and spend time with them, and people won’t hold the baby.

The parents are holding these babies all the time, and they are very tired. Sometimes people think, Well, I don’t know, maybe they are weird about other people holding their baby. Most of the time that simply isn’t true. So just go hold the babies. Say, “Hey, can I hold your baby?” And do it for a long time, not just for a few seconds. Parents love that.

7. If your friends have kids, have a relationship with them

I find it really annoying that when people have kids who reach talking age, the parents’ friends engage almost not at all with them. They are a person; why don’t you talk to them?

I have a friend who was really good about engaging with my son. He bought him a whittling book, which my son loved, and he would ask him questions about it. My son loved that, and it became a great relationship. I don’t know why people don’t have normal relationships with their friends’ kids, because it is wonderful.

8. Learn to ask questions and be genuinely interested in people’s lives

This is something my mother taught me. She is extremely good at asking questions of people.

It is shocking how few people do this. Tons of people don’t even ask questions, and the people who do often just have a few stock questions. But consider the other person like a book and a story. Completely envelop yourself in this person’s life and try to figure it out, really getting into it.

People feel very loved when you do that, and it can actually be super interesting. If you learn to do that, you realize, Oh wow, this person is really interesting. But you have to learn the skill of how to ask questions, work your way in there, and become genuinely interested in other people’s lives.

9. How to tell if someone actually likes expensive food

I am not sure if this is a piece of wisdom or more of an observation. When people eat or consume something very expensive, like caviar or fine wine, here is a way to tell whether they actually like it: if they don’t like it, they will describe the food.

Someone eats caviar, and they say, “Oh wow, it’s very salty,” or “It’s very buttery.” But that is not how people react when they eat something that is genuinely good. When you have a warm chocolate chip cookie or an amazing slice of pizza, you say, “Oh my goodness, this is the best pizza I’ve ever had!” or “This is so good!”

You know people are faking when they describe it, because it is super expensive and they can’t admit they don’t like it. So with wine they will just say, “Oh, it’s very oaky.” They don’t like it.

10. Cake is a second-tier dessert

Cake is a second-tier dessert. First tier is the best things, third tier is the worst things, and cake sits squarely in the second tier.

In conjunction with this: Mexicans have it right with cake. Here is the problem with American cake: the cake part is simply too dry. Mexicans came in and said, “We need to add moisture and sweetness to the cake part.” Out pops tres leches, which is infinitely superior to American cake.

Standard American cake is tier two, and every cake should really become a tres leches cake.

Watch the original episode.