Sloan Wilson, the author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, listed
in 1976 things that also resonate with me that he had learned in his five
decades of living:
1. Beware of people who are always
well-dressed
2. The hardest part of raising children
is teaching them to ride bicycles. A
father can run beside the bicycle or stand yelling directions while the child
falls. A shaky child on a bicycle for
the first time needs both support and freedom.
The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard.
3. Children go away and live their own
lives, starting when they are about eighteen.
Parents who accept this as a natural part of the order of things will
see their children surprisingly often.
4. Friends are fun, but they are more
dangerous than strangers. Strangers ask
for a quarter for a cup of coffee, while friends ask for a thousand dollars, no
questions asked. Some friends also have
a roving eye for your wife and your daughters.
5. Success in almost any field depends
more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid
leaders.
6. When things break around the house,
call a handyman. No intelligent man is
capable of fixing anything, unless he has made home repair his business.
7. Either afloat or ashore, it is
normal for everything to go wrong. No
one should be surprised or unduly upset by foul-ups. They are a basic part of the human condition.
8. Many children should be treated as
adults and many adults should be treated as children. Age has every little to do with capabilities.
9. Liquid shoe polish doesn’t work.
10. When I was young I was briefly
interested in politics, but politics soon board me. I was interested in business for a long while
but business eventually bored me.
Religion I never understood at all.
Although it may sound sentimental, the only meaning I have found in life
has been in my wife and children.
Without them, I would be in more despair than a bankrupt millionaire.