Advice

Be Careful about the Enemies You Intentionally Choose

Fighting

(Photo Credit: therepublika.com)

Although it would be great to live in a world where we don’t have any enemies, the reality is we all have enemies.  Most people don’t choose their enemies.  Some people elect to make individuals their enemies.  If you intentionally work to develop an enemy, you better make sure you can completely handle that enemy.  This can be the person who ruins your life forever.  It’s quite foolish to actively seek a person to become your enemy.  Most people work tremendously hard to keep people from being their enemies and avoid those who are their enemies.  While it may sound strange for an individual to want someone to be his or her enemy, this happens more often than one may think. 

When this does happen, the person who desires for a specific individual to be his or her enemy thinks he or she really knows the targeted individual.  Once the person learns that you’re trying to start a feud with him or her, the individual will probably not employ tactics you anticipate.  The person will probably adopt a strategy or strategies to respond to your attacks that will surprise you.  Will you be ready for the surprises your newly desired enemy has for you? 

Don’t start a war that you cannot win!

People’s egos, arrogance, poor judgment, emotions, low self-esteem, unhappiness, and etc. often cause them to begin fights they cannot win.  This is why it’s vital to take a serious moment and deeply reflect on things before you make drastic errors.  A moment of irrationality can cause you a lifetime of pain.

Antonio Maurice Daniels

University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Teenagers Need Curfews

Teenagers

If you want your teenagers to stay out of trouble, you must establish a curfew for them.  Teenagers will make many unwise choices when you let them choose when they are to return home.  When you give your children a curfew, it communicates to them you have quality standards you expect them to meet.  Too many parents allow their children to determine when they’re going to come home from a friend’s house.  How much sense does that make?  As a parent, it’s your job to resolve a curfew for your children—it’s not your children’s job.  Be clear about the time you expect your children to return home.

While it’s important to give your children some freedom, you shouldn’t grant them the liberty to decide their curfew.  Of course, there’s nothing wrong with hearing how children feel about a curfew.  Parents must, however, be the ones who ultimately create the curfew.

When you set a curfew for your children, this is a great opportunity for you to engender some guidelines for your children to follow when they’re not going to be at home.  Don’t just give your children a specific time they must come home without telling them other essential things they must do before, during, and after they leave home.  Make sure you know where your children are going when they leave home and who they are going to visit.  If possible, drive your children to their destination to enable you to survey the milieu in which they will be meeting their friends.  Warn them against inappropriate behavior and inform them about the consequences of inappropriate behavior.

You need to learn more about your children’s friends.  Meet with their parents to find out what type of people they are and discover their values.  You don’t want your children hanging out with the wrong type of people who may have imprudent values.

Too many children are dying because they lack structure and discipline.  Many parents across the nation have to do a better job of parenting.  It’s the hope of this piece to offer some suggestions for improving parenting.  We need to keep our children safe and establishing a curfew for them is a vital part of good parenting.

Do you feel it’s necessary to give teenagers curfews?  Why or why not?  What are some other things parents need to do to keep their children safe?

Antonio Maurice Daniels

University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Boredom Can Lead to Trouble

Bored

On Facebook and Twitter, I often read about how “bored” many people are.  With as many tasks I have to complete each day, I have a difficult time envisaging how any individual who is in middle school and beyond can experience boredom.  Why not read the numerous great books available?  Why not start a blog?  Why not invest more time into studying your core academic subjects, especially those that pose the greatest challenges?  When you feel like you’re bored, this is simply a sign you’re not devoting your time to enough important phenomena.  While you may not feel inclined to make lifestyle changes, I want to warn you that I’ve witnessed too many people get themselves into serious trouble by being “bored” too often.

The answer to being bored is not drinking so many alcoholic beverages you end up attempting to drive your car and then foolishly run into someone on the road and kill him or her.  This can cause you to end up incarceration and then you’re really going to know what boredom truly is.

Although you may live in a small town where there’s not many places to visit to offer you entertainment, you need to learn to gain satisfaction from appropriate things you can do with your time.  For those of you in middle or high school, I would encourage you to participate in as many extracurricular activities as you can.  Join as many clubs as you can.  If there are not clubs or organizations on your campus that interest you, see if there is a faculty member who would be willing to start a formal organization or club that interests you and others.  If you cannot get a faculty member to help you to start the type of organization or club you desire to be a member of, then partner with other students and form the club or organization.  You will find that there’s nothing wrong with having an informal club or organization.

Make the most of your time.  Life is too short for you to waste most of your time talking about you’re bored.  One of the best ways to terminate boredom is to find things you can do to help others.  Your life will be more rewarding when you give some of your time to helping others.  Many people are always bored because they are empty on the inside.  When you share some of your time assisting others, your life will have more meaning.

Allowing yourself to be bored can cause you to make poor choices; choices that may impact you for a long time or forever.  Be the master of your own behavior.  Don’t let your body control you—you control your body.

If you’re a college student and you find yourself bored, this means you’re wasting valuable time that you could be investing in increasing the prospect of you obtaining a job after you graduate or improving your chances to gain adequate funding for graduate school.  It may be useful for you to get a part-time job to occupy some of the time you believe needs to be filled, and this will enable you to make some needed money.

Don’t let your idle mind be your tragic flaw.

Antonio Maurice Daniels

University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Research Who You’re Dating Before You Commit

Although you don’t want to have a complete fear of commitment, many people need to have a little more caution about who they choose to date.  Many people are just too happy to be intimately involved with someone or to have the appearance being intimately involved with someone that they neglect to do some of the basic research that can be quite helpful in discovering that their “special” woman or man is really not just “special” to them but to others as well.  If you do some asking around about the person you’re involved with, you just may find some valid things about him or her that he or she has not shared with you.  You may even be surprised with what those who hang around you all of the time can reveal to you about who you’re dating.

You have to have a willingness to listen to what people around you may have to say about the person you’re dating.  Of course, there will be many people out there that will simply hate on the person you’re dating, but you can eliminate those folks by asking them to give you proof to verify what they’re saying.  People who really have some knowledge about the person you’re dating can provide you with some proof of what they’re claiming.

In no way does this piece assert that you should become a private investigator or hire one to investigate the person you’re involved with.  This piece does, however, contend that you should ask that person serious questions and ask questions about the person to people who knew him or her before you did.  You just may be amazed at what you find out!

You can make yourself look like a fool when you go around acting and talking like you have the most special person in the world when that’s the same person who has slept with nearly everyone in town, or has slept with whorish people you know you don’t want to come behind.  You don’t have to turn into an interrogator, but it certainly is a wise decision to asking some probing questions before you truly commit yourself to a person.  A person who is truly committed to you will not mind you asking questions about their past and what he or she is doing right now.

If you discover that the person you’re dating has slept with one of your friends, do you really want to continue to be with that person?

Of course, everyone has a past and if you find out aspects about someone’s past that you don’t like, then that’s up to you how you judge that person for what he or she has done in the past.  For example, if you discover that the person you are dating has been really whorish in the past, you may resolve that this is not the person you want to stay committed to or desire to build anything further.  However, if you learn that someone has slept with your friend or associate since you’ve been together, then you need to reassess whether or not you should be with that person, especially if you’ve asked the person you’re dating if he or she has slept with that person before and the response was no.

Again, don’t go to extremes in your attempts to learn more about the person you’re dating, but do some basic research about your mate.  Start with basic questioning.  If you don’t have open and frank communication with your mate, then the relationship is going to end inevitably anyway.

Before you present the person you’re dating to the public as being so “special,” make sure he or she is not also someone else’s intimately “special” person too.

Antonio Maurice Daniels

University of Wisconsin-Madison

It’s Natural to Grow Apart from People

You may think it’s a bad thing to grow apart from some of your relatives and friends, but you should stop feeling this way because it’s natural to grow apart from some of them. As time passes, you can begin to see differences between some of your relatives and friends that are not just simple differences but are differences that are incompatible with the core values and principles that define you. While you may have tolerated things they have done in the past that are conflicting with the core values and principles that define you, time may unveil to you that you need to separate from them. I would argue that you made a serious mistake in tolerating them in the first place and never should just simply tolerate people who you claim you love. However, we all do make mistakes and the best thing we can do is acknowledge our mistakes, learn from them, move on, and progress.

Although you may disagree with people on many political, social, cultural, and economic issues, it is ultimately their core values and principles you should be more concerned about than their political, social, cultural, and economic viewpoints. You should assess your relationship with people by who they are at their core. You should ask yourself the following query: What kind of human being is this person? Is this the kind of human being I want to be associated with and who is or can be a positive force in my life? Does the good outweigh the bad with this person? If you don’t like what kind of human being this person has become, then you should peacefully sever your relationship and ties to this person. If you don’t believe that the person is the kind of person you want to be associated with and isn’t a positive force in your life, then you should peacefully disassociate yourself from the person. When the good does not outweigh the bad with this person, then it’s time to disassemble the relationship.

Of course, you should not simply discontinue a relationship with some of your relatives and friends without making serious efforts to engage them and talk to them. You cannot worry about how other people will perceive the reality that you no longer associate yourself with these people. There’s no need to go into great details about why you are no longer associating yourself with certain relatives and friends. One of the best explanations is it’s natural for people to grow apart from one another.

When every little aspect about a person begins to irk you, then you know it’s time for you to either take some time away from this person and/or resolve whether it’s time for you to sever your relationship with this person. Far too often, we delay the inevitable when we already know the relationship is really over.

Relatives and friends who disassociate themselves from one another don’t have to become enemies. You can still be peaceful to one another. You certainly shouldn’t just maintain a relationship with one another out of fear of personal information and secrets you know about one another. If those secrets and personal information come out, then just deal with this reality but don’t let fear of those things keep you in a miserable relationship.

Always give your relationships an opportunity to work, but do know when it’s time to end them or modify them. We are all human beings and we all do change. The changes that happen with us may cause us to no longer be connected with others anymore. Accept this natural development and do what is necessary to appropriately respond to this natural evolution.

Antonio Maurice Daniels

University of Wisconsin-Madison