After 41 years on this planet I’ve come to know a few things…

1. Parents have no ability, whatsoever, to evaluate their own child’s ability to do anything.  I don’t have to tell you this, you know it – you hear them at the water cooler talking about how great little Johnny is at everything from scoring touchdowns to wiping his own butt.  In my personal estimation, I think 1 out of 100 parents can even come close to truly being able to come close to evaluating what their children are actually good at.   I think it must be some crazy law of the universe, like the Law of Parenting, in which, parents only have the ability to truly and honestly believe their kids rock at everything they attempt.  I guess in Leave It To Beaver sense, that’s probably a nice little world to live in. The irony of all this is the majority of parents would say the exact opposite of this – so here’s the caveat – if a parent is talking about their own kid in a critical way, well that’s OK, but try and talk to their parent about their child’s short comings, and they’ll lose their f’ing mind!  I call this the Mama Bear Syndrome. (I can call my kid ugly, but the heck if I’m going to let you call them ugly!)

2. People tend to carry around negative stuff way to long, like luggage – they just won’t throw it out.  But throw positive stuff away on a daily basis.  One of my super powers is to throw negative stuff away very quickly and move on – but I also probably hold onto to positive stuff for too long!

3. If someone needs water during an interview – they probably aren’t going to do well in the interview.  Let’s face it, if you don’t have the ability to sit in front of another person and talk for an hour without a drink of water – do you really think I should give you a job?!  I think that last line is funny, because if I know anything – I know that HR Pros are the best at coming up with arbitrary reasons for not hiring people, that make absolutely no sense, whatsoever.  Like: not hiring someone who wears white socks with dress shoes,  Not hiring someone who has deeply, embedded wrinkles in their shirt, not hiring someone because they said “Um” to many times (an they have an over/under number on how many “Um”s are acceptable), not hiring someone because they are from a rival university, not hiring someone because they had a typo on their resume (this one I don’t understand at all – so the candidate is a perfect fit, but missed one typo, and they’re out? Really! So, short-sighted.), not hiring someone because they chewed to loudly during the interview lunch, etc.   Makes my – I’m not hiring you if you need a drink of water during the interview, not seem so bad now, doesn’t it?  BTW – if someone asks for and needs to drink a Diet Mt. Dew during the interview – I’m totally hiring them.