I told my almost 7 years old daughter that phones used to be different than those she sees today.
The world is changing. Rapidly.
In fact, much more than a technological evolution, my children live in a very different world than the one I experienced as a child.
Yet, this has not always been the case. I think the time when a man’s life resembled that of his father. When a father taught his own occupation… When a father taught his son to be like … him.
We live in a world that is reinvented every day. A world in which occupations evolve, change, disappear, are reborn. We do not know what will happen tomorrow and even less in a year or two. So what can we teach our children? And how can we, in these conditions, ensure them a better future?
A long time ago, my father gave me a book. Since this was a unique event in our relationship, I obviously read it. The book was In search of Excellence. All is in the title…
The book has probably influenced a generation of American engineers and managers in the 80s. It deals with the quest for excellence in life as the ultimate goal. I particularly liked a story about the excellence achieved by the doorman of a known hotel that remembers the names and faces of all his customers. When the author visited this hotel 10 years later, the doorman still remembered his name…
For a long time I looked for a book having the right to sit near my In search of Excellence. And in order to give one to my father.
I think I have found it (thanks to my friend Arnaud).
The book is Getting things done, the art of stress-free productivity. Again, everything is in the title. This book offers a method and numerous tips to eliminate what clutters our minds, increases our stress, reduces our productivity and leads to failures. The book is clear, the method difficult, and the potential immense.
More than anything else, this book, though having a less noble title than the one of my father’s book, it has the same quality and pretentiousness: trying to improve our self makes us better in all that we do: With yourself, your family, your friends, At work, at home, on vacation, in what we know already and in what we will discover in the future.
My eldest daughter lost her first milk tooth. She’s almost 6 years old. Obviously, the mouse took the tooth…
Where does this story of the little mouse come from? And, what about the tradition of replacing the tooth with money?
Actually, the mouse is part of many countries folklore. The exchange tooth-Money ritual is probably Anglo-Saxon (The Fairy Tale of The Teeth of Lee Rogow, 1949). But the mouse origin is in France, in the 17th century under Louis XIV. Madame d’Aulnoy wrote the fairy-tale of the Good Little Mouse. This story is different from the story that we tell our children today. In that story the fairy turns into a mouse to help the gentle queen to defend herself against the evil king.
To punish the king, the little mouse hides under his pillow. At night, she devours the ears, nose and everything inside his mouth ! The story of the mouse as it is known now goes back to the early 20th century. In 1927, Esther Watkins Arnold published The Tooth Fairy, a character sketch in three acts for children. Then, in 1949, Lee Rogow published The Tooth Fairy, the first real story for children on the small mouse. This story was very popular in the 50’s. Since then, parents have adopted this little mouse that has become part of family life.
This mental exercise, whose origin is probably a system of counting used by English and Scottish shepherds called Yan Tan Tethera, is particularly known in some European cultures. Unfortunately, this activity is so boring that the brain tries to find other topics of interest thereby stimulating his activity and keeping us awake longer than usual…
The two researchers made an experiment. They took 50 people who have trouble getting to sleep and asked a third of them to count sheep and another third to imagine a beach or a waterfall. The rest were asked not to do either so they could compare the results.
Those imagining the waterfall fell asleep 20 minutes earlier than usual and the sheep counters actually stayed awake longer than usual…
Good night to you all, including Mr Bean that my daughter Leora loves so much.
