Life Is Like Learning To Ride A Bike

Stuck at home, finally taking the big leap with my youngest to learn to ride a bike without training wheels. The beauty of having three kids is you've cut your teeth on teaching the first two how to ride, this one is feeling like a piece of cake. A friend of mine gave me the best advice when I was first teaching my kids to ride, and I continue to use it. To balance better you need to go faster. Your natural instinct is to try and go really slow and balance the best you can. But balancing is a lot harder when you are going slow. When you go fast your momentum keeps you up right.

The other piece of advice that I repeat often is to make little adjustments, not big ones. To go in a straight line, when you feel yourself starting to go left your instinct is to jerk it back to the right. Which is always an over correction and quickly turns into what looks like someone emphatically shaking their head no as the wheel jerks back and forth. To keep it straight it takes just the slightest of adjustments.

These two lessons are important for us in life in general I think. When you are on a path, you know where you are going, to keep in a straight line you are better off going faster than slower and make little adjustments. If you have to turn then yes, it will take a bigger movement and it is better to slow down. But trying to be as safe as possible often makes it more challenging.


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