Rule of Life (17 page)

Whether they do or don’t achieve is irrelevant. If they had the chance, that’s everything.

T H E Y H E A R I T F R O M

A L L D I R E CT I O N S ,

A N D T H E WO R D T H AT

F I G U R E S M O S T I N

T H E I R L I V E S I S “ N O . ”

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Never Lend Money Unless You Are

Prepared to Write It Off

The full title of this Rule should actually be: Never lend money—to your friend or children, or your siblings, or even parents—unless you are prepared to write off either the money or the relationship.

There is a lovely story told, I think, about Oscar Wilde (correct me if I’ve got the wrong person) who borrowed a book from a friend and forgot to return it. His friend turned up and demanded the book back, by which time young Oscar had lost it. His friend asked Oscar if he wasn’t jeopardizing the friendship by not returning the book. Oscar Wilde merely replied,

“Yes. But aren’t you also doing the same thing by demanding it back?”

If you lend money—or a book or anything else—don’t do it unless you are prepared for it to be lost, forgotten, not returned, broken, ignored, whatever.

If you are precious about it, then don’t lend it in the first place.

If it means a lot to you, keep it safe. If you do lend anything, including money, then don’t expect to get it back if you value the friendship—or relationship. If you do get it back, then that is a bonus. If you don’t, well you were prepared for that in the first place.

Lots of parents make the mistake of lending money to their children and then getting all hurt and disappointed when they don’t get repaid. But they have spent the child’s entire life giving them money, and then as soon as they get a bit grown up and go away to college or whatever, the parents suddenly start saying it’s a loan and demanding repayment. Of course the child isn’t going to repay it. She hasn’t been trained to. It is R U L E 7 8

unrealistic to expect her to do so. If she does do, count your blessings and be grateful for the bonus.

Same with friends. Don’t lend them anything if the nonreturn is going to matter to you. It is your choice, after all. You don’t have to lend anything to anyone. If you choose to do so, be prepared to write it off or don’t do it. Obviously, if the money means more to you than the friendship, then of course demand it to be repaid—and add interest as well.

And the same goes for siblings or parents. (Goodness, don’t ever lend money to them; they’ll never pay it back.) So who should you lend money to? Strangers, of course. And they won’t pay it back either.

I F YO U A R E P R E C I O U S

A B O U T I T ,

T H E N D O N ’ T L E N D I T

I N T H E F I R S T P L AC E .

R U L E 7 9

Keep Quiet

I have a friend who has three small children. She told me recently that before she had children, she didn’t really get the things that people with children told her. She wasn’t always convinced by their claims of tiredness or logistical problems, she didn’t necessarily believe that children could squabble that much or be such hard work, she sometimes just didn’t understand what they were talking about. Even when she had two children, she didn’t really get what people with more than two children were telling her. Now, however, she says she finally really gets it, and it just isn’t like she’d imagined.

You’d have thought that if you had two children you’d know what life was like for people with three kids. But you don’t. In fact, you don’t even know what life is like for other people with two children who are different sexes from yours, or further apart in age, or when there’s less money, or the parents are working different hours from you. Even apparently similar circumstances can be deceptively different.

And we all have our own personalities and values and strengths and weaknesses. I know one person who is widowed and hates spending time with happy couples because it reminds her what she’s lost. I have another widowed friend who has no problem spending time with couples because she doesn’t see it in relation to her own marriage. Neither is right or wrong, but both have their own histories and attitudes.

So what am I saying? Essentially, don’t judge. Try walking a mile in someone else’s moccasins before you presume to know what his life is like. My own mother had one of her children adopted when he was a few weeks old. For years I thought R U L E 7 9

this was a terrible thing to do. But once I had children of my own, I realized that I had no way of assessing whether what she did was OK. She already had five children, she was widowed, and therefore the sole earner (in the 1950s, when that was even harder than it is now), and she was working all hours with no money for childcare. Would I have coped any better in her circumstances? I can’t know.

This isn’t easy. I’m not just saying that we should think twice before we form an opinion. I’m also saying that since we can’t judge anyone else’s situation, we should keep quiet about their choices in life. It’s not for us to tell even our nearest and dear-est how we think they should act. For many of us, and I’m certainly including myself here, this can be one of the hardest Rules of all.

However, think about how you feel when people try to tell you what to do. If you know what’s right for you, you don’t appreciate other people telling you what they think. They don’t understand. No, not even your closest family members really understand what it’s like to be you. Even if you’re making a mistake, you still want to be allowed to make it for yourself and to learn from it. And that’s how we need to treat everyone else around us. Tough, ain’t it? But necessary.

T H I N K A B O U T H OW YO U

F E E L W H E N P E O P L E T R Y

TO T E L L YO U W H AT TO D O .

R U L E 8 0

There Are No Bad Children

There are no bad children. Yes, there may be children who do bad things. There may be children who do appalling things.

But they are not bad. No matter how naughty my children are, they are not bad. They may make me climb the walls with their behavior at times, but when they have gone to sleep and I peep in at them, they are angelic little cherubs, utterly good, utterly perfect. Yes, what they do during the day, to get my dander up, may be naughty, may be bad behavior, but they remain intrinsically good.

The only reason the behavior is bad is because they are explor-ing the world and learning where the boundaries are. They have to make mistakes in order to find out what’s what. It is only natural and quite normal.

The same goes for any other behavior that is out of the ordi-nary. There are no clumsy children, only clumsy behavior.

There are no stupid children, only stupid conduct. They are no spiteful children, only spiteful acts. There are no selfish children, only selfish actions.

Kids don’t know any better, and it is your job to teach them, educate them, help them, encourage them. You start off on the wrong foot if you start off believing they are bad. You’re almost bound to fail if you believe them to be faulty. You can’t change a bad child, but you can change bad behavior. If you believe the child is good, you’re on to a winner immediately. All you’ve got to do is change the behavior, and that is an attainable goal.

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It is awfully detrimental to say to a child, “You are a bad child.” It sets something up in their mind that is hard to shift.

Better to say, “You’ve done a naughty thing,” or “You’ve been naughty.” This they can do something about. But if you tell them they are bad, there is nothing they can do about that, and it affects them.

YO U CA N ’ T C H A N G E A

B A D C H I L D ,

B U T YO U CA N C H A N G E

B A D B E H AV I O R .

R U L E 8 1

Be Up Around People You Love

Your job from now on, as a Rules Player, is to be up around people you love. No more moaning. No more complaining. No more grumbling. These things will no more issue from your lips. You are, from now on, the positive one, the perpetually cheerful, always up one around whom good things revolve and happen.

When asked how are you, instead of saying, “Can’t complain, mustn’t grumble,” in the future you will say, “Fine, good, marvelous”—No matter how crummy you feel, no matter what sort of a day you’ve had, no matter how low, down, or fed up you are. And do you know, the interesting thing is that when you do say “Marvelous,” even if you don’t feel it, you’ll find something positive to say to follow it up with. Whereas if you’d said “Been better,” then the follow-up thoughts would be negative. Try it—honestly, it really works.

In the future, right from today, from this very second, you have to become the one who is always happy, up, cheerful.

Why? Because someone has to, or everybody will want to end it all. This life is hard and treacherous. Someone has to lift the burden, lift the spirits, lift the gloom. So who’s it going to be?

You, that’s who.

I know, I know. You’ll be sitting there reading this, thinking,

“Why me? Why lay this burden on me?” Because you can do it, that’s why. But do it secretly (remember Rule 1), without fuss or bother. Just a simple change of heart, change of direction. From now on you cannot be anything but up around those you love. OK, moan to strangers. But loved ones get the full treatment. Up, up, and away.

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Successful people, those who have got it licked, are invariably cheerful. They care more about what people around them are going through, feeling, suffering than their own petty problems. They invariably want to know what’s wrong with you rather than moaning about their day. They think positively, act positively, project confidence, verve, and enthusiasm.

I had a friend who went to live abroad in a country where he spoke very little of the language. But he said his mood lifted whenever he was there because he didn’t know the words for fed up or miserable or down. When someone asked him how he was, he could only say “Happy,” because that was the only word he knew to reply with. He found that when he said it, he felt it.

S O M E O N E H A S TO

L I F T T H E B U R D E N ,

L I F T T H E S P I R I T S ,

L I F T T H E G LO O M .

R U L E 8 2

Give Your Kids Responsibilities

Children grow up and leave home. They go from helpless babies to mature adults who have sex and drink beer while your back is turned. The secret is to try and keep pace with them. As they grow, you have to back off more and let them do more. You have to resist the urge to do everything for them and let them fry eggs* or paint dustbins** for themselves.

It’s a delicate balancing act. You can’t give kids more responsibility than they can handle, but at the same time you can’t hold them back. And when you do let them fry eggs or paint dustbins for the first time, they are going to make a mess—

yolk on the stove, paint on the garage floor. It’s the mess most often that makes a parent say, “No, you can’t.” But we have to break a few eggs (ha ha) to be able to fry one. We have to gloop a bit of paint if kids are going to be able to carry out any DIY job for themselves when they are grown up.

When kids are tiny and learning to drink from a cup for the first time we expect spillage. We stand there with a paper towel in our hand prepared to mop up. But by the time they are teenagers, we’ve forgotten the art of hiding the paper towel

* This one comes from my own son who, when he was asked what being a grown-up meant, said it was being able to fry eggs as he wasn’t allowed to—

he was about 8 at the time. I felt so mean I got him cooking breakfast every day for a month until he was sick of frying eggs.

** This came from a friend who was always angry with his father. When I asked him about his relationship, he complained that as a kid he was never allowed to do anything to help. He finally lost it with his father when his father was painting a dustbin and the kid wanted to help and his father said, “No.” But why? It wouldn’t have hurt. Why the father was painting a dustbin in the first place remains a mystery.

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behind our back waiting for them to spill stuff. We expect them to be able to keep their room tidy the first time. But they’ve never done it before. They don’t know how to do it.

They have to learn, and part of that learning process is not doing it, doing it badly, doing it differently from how we, as adults would do it. Our job is to help them. To hand them responsibility slowly, bit by bit, but with guidance.

We expect kids to do everything right the first time, no spillage, no broken eggs, no paint on the floor. It is our expectations that are unrealistic. Growing up is a messy business.

A S T H E Y G R OW ,

YO U H AV E TO

B AC K O F F M O R E A N D

L E T T H E M D O M O R E .

R U L E 8 3

Your Children Need to Fall Out with

You to Leave Home

Your kids have never tidied their room. They’ve played their music long and loud and driven you mad. You and your kids are about at a breaking point, and you wonder where you went wrong as a parent of sullen, moody, dressed-in-black teenagers. Your kids are monosyllabic, depressed (but miraculously cheer up when their friends come round), always hungry, rude, mercenary, troublesome, and unrelentlessly embarrassed by you. And you blame yourself. It is all your fault. You have somehow failed them. Rubbish. This is all good stuff.

Look, your kids have got to fall out with you to be able to leave home. If they loved you too much, they couldn’t leave.

You’ve nurtured them, wiped their bottom, dressed them, fed them, doled out money for all of their life. And they don’t want to feel grateful. They want to leave, drink too much, have sex, and use grown-up swear words. They don’t want to be your darling little angel anymore. They want to be irritating and daring and rude and adult. They want to discover and explore and get into trouble all by themselves. They need to break the chains, rip the parental ropes off, and run over the hill shouting that they are free at last. How on earth can they do that if they are still in awe of you, still feeling so attached to you, still loving you so much? They have to break free by not getting on with you before they can come home again as something more than just your child.