Words of Wisdom – The Monsters
Once again, I am going to let you deep into my life and inner thoughts.
My hope is that maybe one of you reading will relate.
There is nothing in my life more meaningful to me than these two things:
- My beautiful, amazing, loving wife.
I’ve had the hots for her since my 2nd day in high school when I saw her walk into the same classroom for the first time.
I have never, and will never deserve to be associated with her, let alone be her goofy husband. Which leads me to #2
- Our 3 beautiful kids.
Our kids go – girl (11), boy (9), girl (6).
They are a fountain of never-ending frustration, but an ever bigger waterfall of bigger-than-myself emotions that I haven’t been able to pin down appropriate words that fully embody those feelings.
Joy. Love. Pride. Overwhelming fear.
There is a willingness to trade any pain or even death to keep them safe.
I love them all equally and for different reasons, but I want to focus on my son for a minute.
These are words from his mom, his grandparents, and any of our close friends:
“Jared is a mini-Erik.”
When those close to us say this, I don’t think they understand how accurate they are.
They see his love of sports, his goofy energy, his desire to make sure people around him don’t feel sad or hurt, and his habit of getting super shy and awkward around a girl he thinks is cute.
What most don’t see are the expectations of perfection he puts on himself, the anxiety he feels when he thinks he’s letting down the people he cares about, and the crippling fear of scary monsters.
Problems Sleeping
After we spent 40 days together traveling the country in our van and staying in hotel rooms, the kids got used to sleeping in the same bed with each other.
As much as they pretend to not like one another and describe each other as, “like… totally annoying,” they do love each other.
*Read that last part in a California valley-girl accent my daughters slip into when describing their brother…
When we got home from the trip and for the rest of the summer, they would all sleep together in my oldest daughter’s room. My daughter’s bed has a built-in pullout and then my son drags in a foam mattress.
Once school started, we wanted to transition everyone back to their own rooms, and it was at this point that my son started to have problems sleeping.
We’d go through our nighttime routine with my wife and I telling stories, reading, and kissing them goodnight before heading downstairs to watch our shows. After anywhere between 5 and 10 minutes, my son would inevitably get out of his bed, walk downstairs, and call out for us in varying levels of alarm.
Sometimes it is quiet and polite.
“Dad, are you going to check on me?”
Other times, it is hysterical crying.
“DAD! I CAN’T SLEEP AND I’LL NEVER GO TO SLEEP AND WHAT IF I NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN?!”
I’ll go up there, tuck him in, lay next to him and try to calm him down.
This gets repeated between 1 and 15 times a night, depending on where his mind goes.
Imaginary Fears
He gives several reasons for not being able to sleep.
Here are some of them:
- What if there’s a monster in my closet?
- What if there’s a monster under my bed?
- I don’t want you (dad) to leave the family and never come back.
- I don’t want you and mom to get divorced.
- What if you die?
- What if I embarrass myself at my next basketball game?
- What if I’m never able to sleep again for the rest of my life?
These aren’t all of his reasons, but they are all real thoughts he’s shared that keep him from sleeping.
I try to convey to him as best as I can that each one of those is scary, but none of them are remotely probable, and most of them are 100% impossible.
I’ll open his closet. We’ll both look under his bed. And, so far, we have yet to see a monster.
My wife and I have never even hinted at divorce or me leaving.
Now, I don’t want to come in here and make anyone feel bad, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that my wife and I just don’t fight. We’ve rarely had any sort of major disagreement, and when we do disagree, we’ve never yelled at each other or argued in front of the kids.
We aren’t perfect, but we’ve never had those problems, so he’s never heard any hint at divorce, making this fear a strange one to bring up.
Finally, yes, I guess there is always the possibility that I’ll die, or he’ll have a game where he doesn’t play his best, but those are all statistically… low probability events.
Even so, they are very real fears to him.
Mini-Erik
I told you how he’s a mini-Erik.
I used to do the same thing as a kid.
I was, and still am, a perfectionist in many ways.
I was afraid of a lot of things, including my parents dying and getting divorced.
One difference is my mom actually did get cancer when I was young and my parents threatened each other with divorce about twice a month for as long as I could remember, ultimately going through with it when I was 17.
I don’t tell my son that at least my young fears had a realistic chance of happening.
That doesn’t seem like good parenting.
But, I still am afraid of a lot of things, even though they don’t cause quite the same reactions anymore.
I used to get anxious about sports or school or relationships, as I imagine most people do.
My son and I shared a habit of picking at our fingers when we’re nervous or stressed, which I’ve more recently been able to stop – he hasn’t.
This isn’t about how we shouldn’t have fears.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
It’s that we all have fears, but what do we do with them and, more importantly, who is using our fears against us?
Preying on Your Fear
I don’t consider myself smarter or more wise than anyone.
I do, however, have a specific set of experiences and skills that I’ve acquired over my life that have resulted in being able to see how certain things work behind the scenes.
And, if you’ll allow me, I have some advice for you that I hope you’ll at least consider – even though you and I both know that you have more experience and wisdom than me. There are things I am both blessed and cursed to know – and here’s one of them.
The sales and marketing world, which includes massive, powerful entities, small companies, and individuals… have a vested interest in causing you and I to be very afraid of completely imaginary or statistically improbable events.
Allow me to demonstrate.
YouTube Strategy
You all know me from YouTube.
There is a YouTube software that can help you see your channel’s stat, your competitors’ stats, give video ideas, and analyze your thumbnail (little picture you see when browsing videos), your title (the sentence of words describing the video), and your description of the video.
The software will kick out a score from 0 – 100 on how “optimized” it feels your video is.
According to this service, the higher your video’s score, the more likely your video will do well – meaning more views.
A quick side note – About a year ago, I tried using this program and making my videos as optimized as possible. It would give title suggestions, keyword suggestions, and all kinds of other tips, but the videos didn’t outperform my previous (and current) strategy, which is – listen to the people who watch and make videos about what will help them best.
Back to the story.
The single highest contributor to how well the software thinks your video will perform boils down to the Title of the video.
If you make that appealing enough, you get a 100% score.
If you got that wrong, it could drop your score all the way down to around 70%.
I’m going to show you what that software wants from your thumbnail:
