You have to understand. Education is a race against premature convergence. The longer you wait to build skills, the harder life pushes you to settle for something beneath your potential capabilities.
Every system decays toward mediocrity unless someone keeps the standards high. Your life is not exempt from this rule. Sometimes you have to imagine yourself as your own parent. That’s basically what growing up is.
Sometimes you just have to behave like a parent to yourself and say this to your inner child:
Listen kid, I know you don't always want to do these things that are good for you, but I care about you and that's why I'm going to make you do them.
Watching Elder Stevenson’s talk this thought came to mind:
On Primary Voices
If you want to hear the truest sound in the whole Church, it is not the Tabernacle Choir. It is a room of six year olds shouting 'I Am a Child of God' slightly off key. They do not sing it as aspiration. They sing it as fact, the way you'd announce your own name.
Every adult in that hallway stops, and something in the chest turns over, because we recognize the sound: it is the doctrine before doubt gets to it, faith with all its baby teeth.
You knew it that purely once. The whole gospel project is the long walk back to singing it that way again.
Save this posture routine and give it a try during your next training session.
Good posture isn’t about constantly forcing yourself to “sit up straight.” It’s about learning how to control your head, spine, ribs, shoulders, and pelvis—and keeping that alignment as you move.
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If you don't actively steer your life, comfort and normalcy will make the decisions for you. Mediocrity has a gravity that everyone succumbs to unless they are actively fighting against it day after day.
Why are marriage and birth rates falling among Latter-day Saints young adults? Sure, culture plays a role, but there's one source you might not have thought of before: parents.
About 10 years ago, BYU professors started polling their students about their barriers in dating and marriage. They've noticed a sizable shift in the answers over the past 10 years: parents urging their kids to delay marriage. Many couples visit them in their offices, saying:
"We're in love, we can't stand being apart, we've even prayed about it many times and we feel so good about it, but our parents are saying no. And they don't even have a great reason for no other than 'we just need to wait.'"
One professor asks his class to "raise your hand if your parents have incentivized you to NOT get married." And "it's pretty consistently about a third of them" and "it's a higher percentage of women than men."
Somewhere along the line, in our desire to make sure our kids had a realistic picture of marriage, we also stopped teaching the blessings and duty of marriage like we once did.
Interview with the BYU professors below. Great resource. This whole series on the Family Proclamation is amazing 👇
https://t.co/JqqNhV2jjS
Everything you do for an hour per day, ask yourself: when I am at the end of my life, will I regret having spent 5 years doing this? Because that's what you'll have done. 1 hour per day is about 6% of your waking life. About 5 years. Half a decade. Use that time intentionally.