I was thinking a few days ago about some life lessons I learned from my dad and wanted to share some of them with you.

#1 Responsibility

When I was 10 or 11 I was really into hockey. No being that I lived in sunny, warm SoCal, ice hockey was not something that was available to me, so I played street hockey, but I loved watching the NHL (National Hockey League, which based upon their ratings i would venture you may not have heard of them ). Well back then the LA Kings had a certain guy named Wayne Gretzky, and they were a pretty good team. They had made the playoffs and were in a game 7 for the conference championship. Now, I don’t know how, but we somehow manged to get free tickets to the game. Needless to say I was stoked.

Heres the thing though, my dad had to go to work that day and had told my brother and I to complete some chores around the house before he got back if we wanted to go to the game. Well, I think you realize by now that this did not happen. Dad came home, we had been lazy, and the tickets got a new owner at the last minute.

It Sucked! Big Time!

While I was crushed and swore I would never forgive my dad - BTW I should probably take a second to say this for the first time, I forgive you dad - I learned a valuable lesson, and now when I look back on it I am thankful that I had a dad who valued teaching me more then he valued making me happy.

I still struggle with responsibility to this day, but at least I don’t have a sense of entitlment.

Tags: hockey, Kings, Responsibility

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 8:35 am and is filed under Family, Personal, Relationships, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.