Last week, my oldest son was feeling a little down. He’s been applying for jobs without too much luck. He confessed that the summer felt like a huge loss.
Nonsense, I said. While he didn’t find his dream job this summer, he learned a bunch of new things, went new places, and generally improved himself. I reminded him that he went to Montreal for the first time. He organized his own vacation to New Orleans with his girlfriend and friends. He learned how to apply for jobs online and to SEO his resume. He went on first real job interview. He started lifting weights at the gym. He got back into running. He has reformed his college-style sleeping habits. I listed another half dozen achievements, and he felt a bit better about things.
Back in 2008, one of my favorite ways to procrastinate when grading midterms was a video game – Achievement Unlocked. The object of the game was to send a blue elephant through a series of mazes, while collecting achievements for doing crazy stuff, like dying in creative ways.
While the game itself was extremely silly, its message is important: Winning isn’t always about the one obvious big goal. Sometimes winning is doing a bunch of little things for the first time and earning an achievement point.
Continue reading at my newsletter, The Great Leap
Apt. 11d 
I loved this so much. I love the celebration and I am glad we got to hear of younger’s banking adventure.
A schoolmate of my daughter has just made the leap into fame in his chosen career. We are all celebrating. But I am also amazed at another classmate’s mountain traverse, which made my knees wobbly, my kiddos road trip (also planned entirely by her, like J’s trip to New Orleans), and all the other amazing adventures.
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I’ve just started writing letters to Russian political prisoners. After sending out one postcard and two long letters through an automated system, I just got a long response from Olga Smirnova, a St. Petersburg resident who was jailed in May for anti-war social media posts. I’ll need to write her a letter this week.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-four-women-dissent/31853445.html
I use the prisoner list at RosUznik.org
The letters have to be in Russian to pass prison censorship. Coincidentally, my Russian has really spruced up since Feb. 24, as I’ve spent more time glued to Russian-language youtube than you can possibly imagine.
I’m also signed up to be an adult reading buddy at Public-Elementary-Near-MLK-Blvd this fall. We’ll see how that goes.
High school senior got in his early decision application to Hometown U. this past weekend. We have a bunch more tidying up to do over the next couple weeks (scholarship applications and honors program applications), but the big one is done.
We’ll know in a few months if senior got in.
The college student is starting to put in the ground work for an eventual senior thesis in math. I’m not sure how this is going to go, but college student seems very confident about this.
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Love the use of Russian to reach out to political prisoners. I used to write letters for Amnesty International. Different, potentially from what you are doing, because they were in English, called out the political motivation (which, presumably wouldn’t get past censors), and the goal was more to just say to the government, and the prisoner that we were out there, watching. At least once I got a letter back, in Spanish, which I couldn’t read. I do think that there’s value in Americans having language fluency in other languages, and you’re pointing out a reason why.
Kiddo is taking Russian 2 at college. He took an online course in Russian a year ago, as part of the State Department NSLI program and apparently acquired enough that they didn’t want to have him do Russian 1. But, the class has only 3! students. I love that the college makes that possible and, hopefully, with 3 students the class can be taught at the right level. I hope he sticks with it. That’s a win, too.
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bj said, ” Different, potentially from what you are doing, because they were in English, called out the political motivation (which, presumably wouldn’t get past censors), and the goal was more to just say to the government, and the prisoner that we were out there, watching.”
That’s part of it, too, of course.
“I do think that there’s value in Americans having language fluency in other languages, and you’re pointing out a reason why.”
Early on during the war, I was listening/watching to a lot of clips from Ukraine and Russia to make sure that the people were saying what the summaries said they were saying. (They were.)
“Kiddo is taking Russian 2 at college. He took an online course in Russian a year ago, as part of the State Department NSLI program and apparently acquired enough that they didn’t want to have him do Russian 1. But, the class has only 3! students. I love that the college makes that possible and, hopefully, with 3 students the class can be taught at the right level. I hope he sticks with it. That’s a win, too.”
Very nice!
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Love celebrating the little wins.
I have a perennial glass-half-empty kid – who is also a drama lama.
So, we have a lot of doom-and-gloom, my-life-is-over, rants when things don’t go his way.
I work really hard on highlighting the little wins – but it sometimes feels like a Sisyphean task.
Talking about ‘rants’ – one of our team at work had a cute vocab book – which highlighted an unusual vocab word, with associated definition and pictures – each day of the year. Naturally we looked up our birthdays – I got “Cerulean”, Mr 14 got “Harangue” – I’m still chuckling over it….
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