Lesson's from my Dad

My Dad was not the kind of father who sat you down and had a talk with you. He was much more likely to grab a ball and a glove and say "let's play catch" or shout out "Come on over here and help me fix this". This is how my Dad talked to me and often it wasn't the words it, was his actions that spoke louder than his words. He walked his talk. Although the lessons I learned from my Dad are too many to list here, I thought on Father's Day, while I think about him, that I would come up with the top 3 lessons I learned from my Dad. Here they are:

Hard Work, There is one thing that anyone who knew my Dad would say about him. It was that he was always a hard worker. My Dad truly believed nothing good ever happened without a lot of hard work. While I might have not agreed with this in my younger years, now on the other side of half a century. I would say I totally agree. Education, new careers. new skills and most of all relationships require a lot of hard work. No success comes without hard work.

Solid Values. My Dad never accepted anything but 100% integrity and honesty. We had a "wash your mouth out with soap" rule for lying (and it was enforced). My only spanking was for lying and most of the yelling by my father was about not telling the truth or some other poor value choice made. To this day, I only want to work with people with integrity, all others I find are too difficult to work with requiring too much follow up, too much oversight, too much stress and too much work in general.

Relationships. My Dad, I don't believe, had the best relationship skills, but his career, his life and all his success were driven from the good relationships he had. My Dad was not a social butterfly, but he did have the respect of many who knew him and he knew the importance of having good relationships. I have always valued relationships and I have built my career and my life around ensuring and working hard at all my relationships, especially the key ones and I must say any and all my success is about having good relationships.

So on a day when our thoughts turn to our fathers I also think about what my son will write as the three key things he learns from me. Happy Father's Day to all Dads and think about what your son will write about you when he is an adult.