House rules

The speaker reflects on the importance of setting rules and foundations for personal growth and relationships. They emphasize the need for kindness, respect, and selflessness in order to understand and support others. The speaker also discusses the impact of teaching these values at a foundational level and the potential for positive change in society. They highlight the role of pride as a hindrance and advocate for a shift towards a more empathetic and inclusive mindset. Grand Ross, this shall be dope, this is Willie Whittle, this is the podcast, let's get into it. I'm trying to figure out a couple of things and this week has been an up and down week. Let me first say this, I celebrated another spin around the sun for my birthday, so now I'm a year older, you guys don't get to find out how old I am unless you know me. But being in my age, you know with time and wisdom you learn some things and it's a lot of thought provoking conversations that I've had over the last week and definitely today from multiple different people, multiple different facets of ideas and thoughts, situations, ideals on situations, how can we fix it, can we not, should we intervene, should we not, how do we approach, right? It made me really think about me, myself, the rules and boundaries I put in my place to make sure that I'm progressing as I want to and I said, you know how much of that is actually the way? Everybody has their own way, so I bring that to my statement, which is a long time ago me and a much smarter person than me and Alexis Whittle, my wife, we came up with some rules for our house, house rules, right? And in the Whittle household, you have three rules to abide by and it's listen, pay attention and try your best. If you follow those three rules on a daily basis consistently, you should be able to either find out something that you'll learn, see something that you'll learn to understand and then push yourself to another level with that same understanding. And then I take those rules to heart because I apply it to everyday, everyday functions, everyday occurrences, everyday life. I think what happens in our world, in our society is that we take the simpler concepts for granted. We don't want to really pay attention to other things, we don't want to listen to other things because it requires a level of selflessness that some people have to admit that they don't want to give up. I'm a pretty stubborn person and if my wife was here, she would tell you that it took a lot for me to be selfless also. But there were definitely acts and times where I was very selfless, where I give, where I care. I think once I had to have some of the harder conversations and started understanding importance of time and valuing each other's time, I was able to prioritize how selfless I was. Now I showcase that towards my love circle. Anybody who's in my love circle understands when I talk to them it's genuine, I'm here. I'm not giving anybody any type of propaganda or anything like that, it's real authentic talk. But some of the situations that people get put into are so easily overlooked to be just a personal issue versus seeing the big picture. One of the conversations I had today was literally about mixed kids and my kids and nationalities and things like that and I know that was a wide range of that, right? But I think I saw a post and it was from Japan or Tokyo, I mean Tokyo, Japan or I'm pretty sure it was Japanese and it showed these four and five year old kids understanding and learning the first thing that they should learn in school which is how to tend to each other's needs, how to understand emotions and empathy, how to be kind, how to have partnership, how to be friendly with the people that's in their class. This class would walk, they would all hold hands, they would all help each other if somebody had something that happened, they would go check, they would help. They teach this and I got to look the school up but they teach this over in Japan and that's early on so one of the things in one of my conversations today was the foundation of kids sets the tone for how they grow to be adults and I know me as a millennial thanks to the whole concept of my generation is tough and that generation is soft, the next generation is soft, right? Well all of that conversation is relative but what I do know is the foundation of how we're teaching has to change and once we get the size that we're talking about a foundation we literally have to set aside the type of caliber person that we're trying to build from this blueprint. When we're talking about teaching children, when I teach my children there are definite things that they need to understand as black kids in America but the very first thing that they learn is how to be kind and treat everybody with respect, period. There is no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Everybody gets treated with respect and be kind to everyone. Once they understand that baseline then they execute their three house rules which is listen, pay attention, and try your best. Everything after that is a learning experience. So the foundation for my family, not saying it's better than anybody else's or anything like that, is very much different from other people and the way that they teach their kids and times a billion or however many people there are in the world. Humanity is suffering. Lives are suffering and whether we feel like it's a third world problem, whether we feel like it's a first world problem, either way it goes we all feel like we have some kind of plight that we're fighting through and we all want to be heard, we all want to be understood but sometimes you have to give yourself up in order to understand the person or the vision that's in front of you that actually needs you. Until we decide that we are going to be selfless we can't even let humanity win because we're going to constantly fight, we're going to constantly battle. I depict life as a war. I was talking to my friend earlier and I told this person, I said, a relationship is war. What you don't understand is that there's always battles going on and the war is the success of the relationship. Well, it's like, okay, well, yeah, but in war it's like winners and losers, right? Well, yeah, but guess what? You either succeed and you win a happy, healthy relationship or you fail and nobody's happy and when you pick and choose certain battles, and people's not going to agree with this and that's fine, when you pick and choose certain battles, it's okay if you lose one. It's fine, it's okay if you concede for compromise. One of the words that I really dislike and I said it before in a previous podcast is I really don't like the word sacrifice because in relationships and in life in general, if you sacrifice, you gave up a piece of you in order for another piece of something else to continue. When you're being selfless, you understand that you're just taking a break from like overpowering a situation. You're like, okay, no, this is okay. This is bigger than me, right? This is fine. I don't mind if this person misses soccer or this person misses basketball. I don't mind because the greater thing is this person is taken care of. Alright, got it. I don't mind that, you know, I did something and then you notice and instead of you like knocking it, you celebrate the positive part about it. Hey, you know, hey, you're supposed to drink eight glasses of water a day. Hey, I did six. Best I could do. Hell yeah, you did six. Push. I like that. What can I do to help you with the other two or just celebrate the six, right? I mean, what are we doing? We nitpick little things that makes no sense to me sometimes and this is coming from a person who had to have very hard conversations and I keep bringing that up because it's an important statement. Struggling for me was not fun. The hustle, the grind, the get up, the go, it made me a different beast. I put us in a position for my family to be able to have a different springboard to start. What I wanted to do and what me and Alexis did was we created a new foundation for us to start the caliber, person, blueprint for our family and we had to give them vision. We had to give somebody different vision. When you do that, the important piece is to not lose yourself, understand yourself and then be able to step back from yourself. Hey, I understand that this situation is going on and it's bigger than me but I understand it and whatever I can do to help it, I will and I'm okay with being that person because I understand there's a bigger picture at play. I know I'm rambling but what I'm saying is there's a big picture. We let pride get in the way of that picture all the time. We do. There is no way that we're going to succeed in relationships, in society, in humanity if we don't understand that our pride is in the way. I don't understand how some can do such great things when they just stop and look and see a bigger picture and some can still stay narrow minded in the sense of this is the way like banging their head against a brick wall. Because it's too much static and then it's just insane to me. It's just insane to me. I feel like we can do better. I feel like understanding the simple house rules and our golden rule which is always respect others. Do unto others as others will do unto you. But what we have is our house rules. Listen, pay attention and try your best. Imagine how something simple can go a long way. Imagine if you take a simple blueprint and you teach against it at a foundational level. Imagine the results you'll get, how exponential it will be because you taught something so simple, something so strong and structured at the same time to teach people about being kind, being selfless, having humanity, having citizenship, caring for other people. You teach it at such a base level where it's instilled. There is no other option. So when you see something happen, they snap into action. They don't sit back. They don't become bystanders. They don't have to really understand the fact that this is not for certain people once you start nitpicking and things like that. You look at the baseline and say, I understand where you're coming from. How can we find a solution? It's crazy to me. I feel like we understood the assignment to be win the war. I think we understood the assignment to be win the war at all costs. That means every battle needs to be won. I don't think a good strategist for war would be a person who wouldn't be able to compromise or wouldn't be able to have loss. So you are going to lose. But is the fight worth the amount that we're trying to lose today? Or did you try to win a battle that actually caused you to lose the war? I believe if you just simply listen, pay attention, and try your best, you'll be able to decipher if that's true or not. Because we're on a mission. And I know what my mission is. My mission is simply peace. I'm trying to take my peace to another level. I'm trying to instill peace in my family. As long as I do that with peace and love, it shall be dope. I hope you guys hear this. I hope you guys understand that just exercise a little bit of selflessness. Please look at your partner. Please look at your children. Look at the people that you support. Look at who you can help and understand that sometimes it's not about you. Sometimes it's not about you. It shall be dope. Till later, y'all.