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A Story about 1 Father and His 2 Sons with 3 Lessons for All of Us

By Bigg Success Staff
06-11-08

Life Skills

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There’s an old story about two boys who had a father who was an alcoholic. They grew into young men.

One son became an alcoholic. “What choice do I have?” he said. “My father is an alcoholic.”

The other son never touched a drop of alcohol. “How could I?” he said. “Look what it did to my father.”

From this simple story, we see three lessons:

We are all role models.

Like it or not, other people look at how we behave and model their lives after us. John Wooden, the great basketball coach, wrote a wonderful poem that goes like this:

A careful man I want to be,
A little fellow follows me;
I do not dare to go astray,
For fear he’ll go the self-same way.

It’s something that we need to keep in mind for all the people we care about and influence.

We can learn from others.
It’s much better to learn a lesson from someone else’s experience than to have to experience it ourselves. And that even applies to our parents. They aren’t perfect either. We can look to them for an example – in some cases it may be a positive one; in others it won’t be. Either way, we can take away direction in how to live our lives.

We all have the power to choose.
We don’t always get to choose what happens to us or around us, but we can choose how we respond.  We can’t control the circumstances, but we have total and complete control over our reaction.

These two sons started in the same place, with the same circumstances. However, they chose completely different paths as a result of their situation.

Hear today's lesson and laugh on The Bigg Success Show. 

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