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Learning to ride a unicycle is like learning to ride your life: You just have to try, fail, find balance and try some more.
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It’s a little hard to explain, but I got an emergency text from my 15 year-old, she needed a unicycle, today, like NOW, and she was in a bit of a panic. You see, she is registered for a CrossFit competition next weekend, and is already waaaaay out-classed by her competitors. The events were just announced, and one of them is a max-distance unicycle. She has never so much as touched a unicycle.
Unicycle acquired, my husband and I set out to learn something about learning to ride the thing. (We have bruises to prove that we tried.) In so doing, we ran across a video which was so fabulous that immediately upon finishing it we thought we had jut been given the secret to life. Really.
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Although it is ostensibly about learning to ride a unicycle, the messages were just so applicable to anything and everything in life. Things like:
- The only real secret is deliberate practice.
- Don’t be afraid to flail.
- Forward momentum is critical.
- Vary your mistakes.
That last one is my favorite. Coach Bob spends a lot of time talking about the importance of failing. Failing a lot. Failing in new ways. He sums it up with the perfect advice to purposely over-correct bad mistakes to find middle ground. He even includes the Samuel Beckett quote that I had on my locker when I was in theater school, “Try, fail, try again, fail better.”
Add great outfits, a terrific character and a dry sense-of humor, I think that this video can change your life. Really, I do.
I’ll let Coach Bob tell you is 5 Ps of learning, because they are all you need to win at life. Really. Trust me.
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