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My son is afraid of the noises our upstairs neighbours make and it used to keep him up at night… Which kept us up at night. We’ve been teaching him to yell out “Kowaku nai yo!” (You don’t scare me! in Japanese) to handle it. Last night he added to it by starting to do open-handed punches and shouting “Dosukoi! Dosukoi! Dosukoi!” like a sumo wrestler. It was too cute!

I stumbled across a blog post about this video of a three year old explaining how she handles monsters. I wonder if my son will be like this next year!

Click Here for more great videos and pictures!

cute Miscellaneous sumo toddlers

In October I did my first annual physical inventory. I’ve worked on them before in previous jobs but only as a member of the count team. This time, I was a member of the organizing team and responsible for the results. What were they? It took 35 people 4 days to count our inventory. We had a net variance of about $45k. This is one of the better results for the plant I work in. I was very disappointed with the gross variance. It was almost 15 times the net variance. It means we either have offsetting systemic errors or just dumb luck. I’ve already come up with a goal for next year of a net variance of $36k and a gross variance of better than $520k. I’d love to do better but it’s not my full time area of focus. I’ll continue to post updates as I progress through the year.

Miscellaneous physical inventory variance

I wrote my mission statement a couple of years ago before I met my wife and well before my son was born. It’s pretty good and has served me well to keep my values clear.

Lately I’ve been taking parenting classes and restitution theory has come up. I’ve also been involved in trying to change the culture at my work and paying a little attention to Tim Sanders. This has led me to look at my Personal Mission Statement more closely. He just posted a series of videos entitled “The end of suffering.” In these videos he talks about developing a quality mission statement. He believes the only truly useful mission statement is one that ties into reducing other peoples suffering. Not ending hunger or bringing about world peace, just ending the suffering we all go through in our everyday lives. It’s the only concept that we can grab onto that will guide us in all circumstances. My personal mission statement is not totally centred on this idea, but the tool at Franklin Covey’s website does a decent job. Over the next few months I’ll give my mission statement a tune up and I’ll be thinking about how I can bring about the end of suffering.

The End of Suffering part 1:

The End of Suffering part 2:

everyday lives franklin covey Miscellaneous personal mission statement quality mission statement restitution suffering tim sanders