What Little Girls Wish Their Daddies Knew

I'm spending the morning waiting for my car in the repair shop. Four men in flannel and I sit around smelling tires and inhaling exhaust fumes while an enchanting little fairy is in constant motion around her daddy. She climbs on him, giggles, turns around, and then she's back to twirling on the tile. She's bouncing and spinning around in her pink frilly skirt. Her black cable knit tights are sagging around her tiny knees, and her puffy coat makes her arms stand out further than is natural. To top off the ensemble is a shiny crystal tiara. It's been tacked down to her head with what appears to be about 60 haphazard bobby pins. She's probably 4 years old. So little, so vulnerable. She doesn't seem concerned about it as she sings about teapots and ladybugs in her black Mary Janes. I feel myself tear up as I watch her. I tear up as I watch him watch her. She could not possibly know at 4 what impact this man, his character or his words will have on her for years to come. And, maybe he doesn't know either. So, to all the daddies with little girls who aren't old enough yet to ask for what they need from you, here is what we wish you knew: 1. How you love me is how I will love myself. 2. Ask how I am feeling and listen to my answer, I need to know you value me before I can understand my true value. 3. I learn how I should be treated by how you treat my mom, whether you are married to her or not. 4. If you are angry with me, I feel it even if I don't understand it, so talk to me. 5. Every time you show grace to me or someone else, I learn to trust God a little more. 6. I need to experience your nurturing physical strength, so I learn to trust the physicality of men. 7. Please don't talk about sex like a teenage boy, or I think it's something dirty. 8. When your tone is gentle, I understand what you are saying much better. 9. How you talk about female bodies when you're "just joking" is what I believe about my own. 10. How you handle my heart, is how I will allow it to be handled by others. 11. If you encourage me to find what brings joy, I will always seek it. 12. If you teach me what safe feels like when I'm with you, I will know better how to guard myself from men who are not. 13. Teach me a love of art, science, and nature, and I will learn that intellect matters more than dress size. 14. Let me say exactly what I want even if it's wrong or silly, because I need to know having a strong voice is acceptable to you. 15. When I get older, if you seem afraid of my changing body, I will believe something is wrong with it. 16. If you understand contentment for yourself, so will I. 17. When I ask you to let go, please remain available; I will always come back and need you if you do. 18. If you demonstrate tenderness, I learn to embrace my own vulnerability rather than fear it. 19. When you let me help fix the car and paint the house, I will believe I can do anything a boy can do. 20. When you protect my femininity, I learn everything about me is worthy of protecting. 21. How you treat our dog when you think I'm not watching tells me more about you than does just about anything else. 22. Don't let money be everything, or I learn not to respect it or you. 23. Hug, hold, and kiss me in all the ways a daddy does that are right and good and pure. I need it so much to understand healthy touch. 24. Please don't lie, because I believe what you say. 25. Don't avoid hard conversations, because it makes me believe I'm not worth fighting for. It's pretty simple, really. Little girls just love their daddies. They each think their daddy hung the moon. Once in a while when you look at your little gal twirling in her frilly skirt, remember she'll be grown one day. What do you want her to know about men, life, herself, love? What you do and say now matters for a lifetime. Daddies, never underestimate the impact of your words or deeds on your daughters, no matter what their age. Source: HuffingtonPost.com, 02/04/2014

Rules to Build a Wildly Successful Business

Seth Goldman and Barry Nalebuff built Honest Tea from scratch into a $100 million enterprise. In my recent article on Forbes, you get a few lessons and a compelling story of their journey. Goldman and Nalebuff share 10 must-follow rules on how to start and build an equally impressive empire. You can find these rules in the back of their book; ‘Mission In A Bottle’. 1. Build something you believe in — because that’s the first step to building a great brand. Just like Goldman and Nalebuff, I learned a powerful lesson in tenacious passion from 30 plus years of entrepreneurship. When you’re all alone, sitting in a dark room wondering why your business is failing, there is only one true thing to power you forward — you believe in your purpose. 2. Don’t aim for 10% improvement. Make it radically better and different. Yes — in today’s society we collectively create amazing products, services and companies through entrepreneurship. World changing at times and Honest Tea was radically different when first introduced. But, if you look around, we also live in the land of ‘me-too’ businesses. Don’t fall for it. Dig deep and decide right now to build something radically different and radically better. 3. Prepare to be copied. Don’t start unless you’ll survive imitation. If your idea is truly radical and takes off, you can count the minutes before the copy-cats arrive. How will you survive competition from the big 800-pound gorillas on the block? Or even from the upstart little guys? Your key is a system of ‘continuous innovation’. Although you could also take the road of Honest Tea — make friends with one of the gorillas and let them buy you out. Coca-Cola Company acquired Honest Tea in 2011. 4. Build up reserves of money and energy for bad luck and mistakes. Great advice — but sometimes extremely difficult to do. What startup or growth company has reserves of cash sitting around? But Goldman and Nalebuff make a good point — run as lean as you possibly can and do not waste money or energy. You will endure mistakes and bad luck along the way, so having a good war chest full of capital and energy can help handle it. 5. Never, ever give up control — until you sell. Some high-impact entrepreneurs will readily give up control in exchange for the lure of high-growth through venture capital — but I am not one of them. Relinquish control and you risk losing the culture and vision of the company you set out to build. Even though Honest Tea raised investment capital from the beginning, the co-founders always remained in the driver’s seat. And yes — Goldman can still drive his vision as CEO of Honest Tea, but his boss at Coca-Cola can say ‘no’ at anytime. Thus, true control is now forever gone. 6. Don’t compromise on the big things — compromise on everything else. Vision. Purpose. Core values. Write these things in stone and never budge. But flexibility in the value propositions, products and services you build to execute your purpose is vastly important. Many entrepreneurs I see fail to ‘bend to the market’ by adapting to what their customer’s are telling them. 7. Figure out how to achieve your goals on a tiny budget — then cut that number in half. Yes — you’ve heard it said before — it will cost twice as much, and take twice as long as you think. My recommendation is you apply the principles of lean to your business from day one. No fancy offices. No fancy full color brochures. Your goal is to stay alive until you can nail your secret formula for success. Blowing the budget will insure nothing but a quick death. 8. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Is it ever. Building a business is neither for the faint of heart or the speed demon. Climbing Mt. Everest is not done in 3 easy steps: 1.) decide you want to do it, 2.) fly to Nepal with zero preparation, 3.) sprint straight up the mountain in 12 easy minutes. Build systems for the long-haul and focus on small-connected steps. It takes 26,364 steps to climb Mt. Everest, and that’s starting from half way up at Basecamp. 9. Take care of your family, personal and spiritual health — if you aren’t laughing or smiling on a regular basis, recalibrate. Imagine the path to a wildly successful business: founder working at a feverish pitch for 18 hours each day, for at least 5 years straight. True? No, it’s not. In my private conversation with Goldman, he flat-out told me two reasons he made it through the rough years: first — he believed in his purpose, second — his drive for personal balance. The notion we need to kill our family relationships, personal health or level of sanity to build our own business is sadly misaligned. Take it from me — don’t go there. 10. Build the enterprise and the brand as if you’ll own them forever. Will you sell your business someday? Maybe. Should that be the sole reason you are building it? Probably not. When you start and build a business based on passion and purpose, with a burning desire to solve the pain of your customer through the deliverance of value, you build a far more valuable enterprise. Those in it for the short-term quick buck rarely succeed. Plaster these 10 rules from Goldman and Nalebuff to your mirror, live by them every day of your life as an entrepreneur and you might end up as successful as they are. Honest. Source: Eric T. Wagner | Forbes – Thu, Jan 30, 2014