You live and learn

A few years back I remember reading and laughing out loud about a guy who simply tweeted the sh*t his dad said. It was an online success propelling him and his Dad unwittingly to internet stardom. Why shouldn’t your dad – or mom for that matter – be as respected and quoted as Shakespeare, Dickens or Oscar Wilde?

Don’t we all treasure and remember the stuff our parents taught us? The more I work and interact with all kinds of clients and partners, the more jargon I hear, the more I value the simple truisms and expressions that we all treasure in our hearts. Instead of fancy business process terminology and buzzwords we hear every day at work or in the 24/7 news media, I find it helps to speak out the simple and powerful stuff my Scottish parents or grandparents taught me; some of them I didn’t ‘get’ until I ‘grew up’, like they said would happen

  • You’ve got a good Scots tongue in your head = Remember to speak up and ask for help
  • It’s nice to be nice = Treat others as you’d like to be treated
  • Old age doesn’t come itself = We all have aches and pains so respect others and be kind to yourself
  • What’s for ye will no go by ye = Everyone has to live with setbacks

The more we study and analyze change, transformation, continuous improvement and other such academic terminology it occurred to me that basically it is all about ‘you Iive and learn’. When you strip it down to basics isn’t living equal to learning and learning equal to changing, so if you’re not changing, are you really learning? Without learning are you really living? You can’t put an old head on young shoulders, right?

In the beginning was the word yet I still used it within my final sentence.