Effective and Efficient, Cute and Inspirational

My friend Keelee is always reminding me that Steven Covey's 7 Habits for Highly Effective People tells us to be EFFECTIVE with people and EFFICIENT with tasks.

This is me being effective with Merisa on a Saturday morning.

She's coloring with pens from my studying pencil holder. I'm not being very efficient at getting my journal writing done. She is cute, though, isn't she?

I did eventually efficiently finish my journal writing at the dining room table, in between times of being effective with Merisa, who also liked spending time with me at the dining room table.

Still cute, hunh?

While I write in my journal usually just once a week, this effective/efficient process is repeated many times during the week as I pursue my studies as assigned by my mentor and as the director of a Statesmanship Mentor Circle. Here's my thoughts on how my children fit into those studies:

Never settle for less than a classic. The world starves for classics. Only man’s greatest creations will fill the world’s hunger. It hungers for news of God’s impressions and man’s reasoning thereon. Man starves himself who ignores the past and the future. The future holds the seeds of tomorrow’s classics. Conversations with ‘hat’ and ‘cat’ and ‘mat’ are complex theorems. Buildings of block and brick and stick are rocket science. Eight plus seven is the solution to societal ills. Play ground feats will bring peace to nations. Watch and learn.

[My own meditation after reading those of Marcus Aurelius.]