Canceled conferences will force startups to focus on scalable lead generation
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Dan Wheatley Contributor
Dan Wheatley is CEO/co-founder of StraightTalk Consulting, a SaaS operations and growth consultancy that works with B2B founders to implement long-term, data-driven growth strategies.
Described by Sequoia Capital as the black swan event of 2020, the long-term economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic on startups is still to be seen. However, one effect which is sure to disrupt the MO of many early-stage startups is the cancellation of events and conferences.
According to Forbes, more than 35.3 million people who were planning to attend an event have been forced to change their plans in recent months. And while some might lament being forced to leave their Metallica T-shirts and 2020 Summer Olympics flags in the cupboard, many startup founders are biting their nails at the prospect of lost leads and connections from events and conferences.
The silver lining: Forcing founders to wean themselves off conferences and events as a “go-to” business development tactic might not be a bad thing in the long run.
Based on my experience, many early-stage startups waste lots of time and resources doing the rounds at events without clear aims, using up lots of the founder’s time, without driving much business value. At an early stage in a startup’s journey, every tactic used needs to drive real ROI and ultimately be driving new business opportunities.
So let’s look at why missing out on events might not be the end of the world, and how startups can focus their time, energy and resources on more scalable and consistent lead-gen activities.
What’s my beef with startup events and conferences?
Once again our dear Sliding Into Oblivion Actress Alyssa Milano shows why Hollywood treat their women as disposable furniture:
That was yesterday and it would not have been so bad in her quest for the ultimate Trump Hate Tweet if it wasn’t because rather than trying to spend millions retrofitting buildings not designed to be hospitals, the president had announced 2 days earlier that the USNS Comfort was to be deployed to New York City and it is arriving next Monday.
That is a 1,000 bed hospital with all the goodies of a modern land-based brethren and staffed with 956 fully trained Navy hospital personnel. And if that was not enough, it just finished having a full retrofit so basically what you have is a fully ready hospital that will start taking care of sick New Yorkers once it is anchor is dropped and the lines tied.
If Alyssa Milano wants to do something useful in this time of quarantine, she should do livestreaming strip teases and pole dancing in PornHub and have people send the dollar “tips” to their local homeless shelter. Other than that, she is pretty useless.
PA Sheriff, NRA Team Up To Offer Online Training For New Gun Owners
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While gun control activists are using the current coronavirus pandemic to push for the closure of gun stores and scolding Americans who’ve purchased a firearm for the first time, Second Amendment organizations are pushing a true gun safety agenda. In the Philadelphia suburbs of Bucks County, for instance, Sheriff Milton Warrell recently offered a free online training course for new gun owners with the help of the NRA.
After some technical difficulties were sorted out, hundreds of people tuned in to the Facebook livestream for the training.
Sheriff Milton Warrell of the Bucks County Sheriff’s Office says recently, their daily number of licenses to carry issuance have doubled.
“A large percentage of the ones we are issuing are brand new carrying licenses to people that have never had one before in their life. That’s a brand new issuance,” Warrell said.
This pushed him to organize the training in partnership with the NRA to help new gun owners get educated on proper gun safety.
“Gun safety, gun storage, how to clean your weapon, proper storage of it,” he said.
Kudos to Sheriff Warrell for doing this instead of wringing his hands and ordering gun stores to close over the prospect of a lot of Americans exercising their rights for the first time, which was the reaction of Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva in California. Warrell’s being proactive and protective of the rights of residents, and it sounds like the virtual training course was well-attended and well-received.
Of course there were a few technical issues, especially at the beginning of the online course (which you can watch here), but the sheriff’s office says they plan on hosting another virtual class for those who had any problems accessing the live stream.
I know sheriffs around the country are likely pretty busy at the moment, but the more we see of training events like this, the better. Not only is it a valuable service to ensure that new gun owners get the basics of safely handling, storing, and cleaning their firearms, but it’s a great opportunity for local sheriffs to engage with their constituents as well as show support for their Second Amendment rights.
Just as some gyms are bringing their classes online, we need to be looking at ways to do the same with basic firearms safety courses. Whether it’s offered by the local sheriff or the local range, there are likely hundreds of thousands of new gun owners around the country, and it’s important that they have access to the basics of gun ownership. Not all of them will be able to reach out to a long-time gun owner for advice. Heck, a lot of these new gun owners may not know any other gun owners at all. An online course isn’t a perfect substitute for a few hours at the range and in-person instruction, but it’s definitely better than simply telling people not to buy a gun, which is the only kind of “training” that gun control groups are offering.
Cam Edwards has covered the 2nd Amendment for more than 15 years as a broadcast and online journalist, as well as the co-author of “Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Start a Family, and Other Manly Advice” with Jim Geraghty. He lives outside of Farmville, Virginia with his family.
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‘Picard’ finally shows us how ‘Star Trek’s’ technology evolves
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This article contains spoilers for the first season of ‘Star Trek: Picard’ up to episode nine.
Star Trek: Picard is the show I’ve been looking forward to for 17 years. Not because I was particularly interested in finding out what happened to Picard, Troi, Riker and the rest. (But don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to check in with old friends.) Instead, it’s because we finally get to see what happens next in the Star Trek universe. We finally get to see it grow, both ideologically and technologically.
Star Trek at its core is a series of themes and ideas. A post-scarcity economy where the members of the Federation are free from hunger and poverty. A society of people focused on bettering themselves. Part of that focus is the desire is to see what’s out there and explore the universe. We’ve seen variations on that idea throughout the different series, but the core has always been there, even when things get dark (and this season of Picard has been particularly grim).
But behind those abstract themes is a more practical one: the role of technological progress. People can be free from want because there are replicators to make whatever they need. They can explore the galaxy because they’ve invented starships that can travel at warp speed and transporters that can beam them to alien surfaces in the blink of an eye.
The different series have embraced these technologies not just as tools, but as devices around which to build entire plots. How many episodes involve transporter malfunctions? Or a holodeck on the fritz? How often is an exploding warp core a problem? (The answer to all of these from a safety standpoint is "too much.") Technology is a huge concern in the Star Trek universe, and as the overall story arc of the franchise moves forward, so has its technology.
Concepts introduced in one episode may be used again later, and even iterated on. The time-travel technique Spock used in the fourth film, The Voyage Home, was introduced in the original series (TOS) episode ‘Tomorrow is Yesterday.’ In season six of The Next Generation (TNG) we see a Ferengi scientist invent "metaphasic shielding" so ships can journey into a star’s corona, and one season later the Enterprise-D employs this very technology to escape from an enemy.
Sometimes those technological concepts go beyond just one or two episodes and become more of an ongoing theme, with each appearance building on the technology and its societal effects. The original series introduced the idea of transporters, which convert matter to energy and back, allowing for the transportation of people and objects without needing a ship. (It was originally intended by the writers and producers as a money-saving plot device, to avoid having to build a shuttle set.) When TNG started up it explored the question, if we can convert matter to energy, why can’t we convert energy to matter? And thus we got replicators and the holodeck, with the latter able to build people. It wasn’t long until we met a self-aware hologram (Minuet) in season one, and then the fully sentient Professor Moriarty in season two.
Over seven seasons various TNG episodes continued to explore what the holodeck could do. Deep Space Nine (DS9) even gave us a recurring holographic character, lounge singer Vic Fontaine. But it was Voyager that made a sentient hologram part of the main cast and spent the next seven years exploring the concept of having a hologram as a full-time crew member — from his mobility limitations (he was confined to the ship until he obtained a mobile emitter in season three), his relations with his fellow officers and eventually, his legal rights as a synthetic being.
There were plenty of questions left to explore; plenty of ideas that could be iterated on. What happened to the Doctor when he got back to the Federation? Would he fight for the rights of fellow holograms? Would holograms continue to be used on ships? Would the Doctor’s mobile-emitter technology become widespread? All of these questions would not, and could not, be answered because, after the release of Nemesis in 2003, the universe stopped moving forward. Star Trek: Enterprise was set 200 years earlier in the 22nd century, and Star Trek: Discovery put us back in the 23rd. The NX-01 Enterprise barely had transporters, much less sentient holographic lifeforms. (And the three Abrams films were not only set in the past, but in a different reality with its own tech!)
The choice to place new series in the past not only kept them from continuing technological threads introduced in other shows, but it kept them from introducing new ones lest they break the logic of the shared timeline. Discovery‘s spore drive was a pretty unique piece of technology, allowing travel across vast distances in a matter of seconds — way beyond warp capabilities — but ultimately it had to be kept secret with all records of it erased, since such technology didn’t line up with what we’d seen in TOS, TNG and DS9. It would have made the entire premise of Voyager, that of a ship stranded 70,000 light-years away from home, completely moot.
Now, with Star Trek: Picard, we’re back in the 24th century. And we can now start following up on these technological threads again. If Voyager asked what happens when you make a holographic being a full-time officer, Picard asks what happens if the entire crew of its ship, La Sirena, was made up of holograms. (Hilarity, apparently.) But Picard is more a continuation of TNG than Voyager, and so its raison d’être is one of its parent series’ continuing plot threads: sentient android life.
In the pilot of TNG we met Data, where we were immediately told he was a sentient android. In fact, he was the only sentient android, as his creator, Noonian Soong, never published the details of his work. Many of Data’s plots revolved around his desire to be more human and his role as the sole Soong-type android in existence. There were minor points of character development — Data developing an interest in Sherlock Holmes stories or getting a cat that he wrote poems about — but there were also huge leaps forward, like that time he built himself a daughter. Over the course of the show, Data would build strong friendships with his fellow crew and eventually develop the ability to feel (thanks to a chip which was first revealed in season four but not implanted in Data until the first film, Generations, four years later).
Data was killed in Nemesis and that was the end of it. Since the next two series were set in the past, where sentient androids didn’t even exist yet, they couldn’t address questions like, "Did anyone try to build more androids like Data? What happened to that scientist, Bruce Maddox, who was working on building one and wanted to take Data apart for research? What happened to the other Soong-type androids we met, B-4 and Lore?" The entire plotline was as dead as Data.
That is, until Picard, when the show finally returned us to that century. Set in 2399, we finally get answers to some of these questions. Bruce Maddox did continue his research, and eventually, we ended up with an entire cadre of androids being used for labor on Mars — essentially a worker class, just as Guinan warned us about back on TNG (‘The Measure of a Man’). Those androids, now called "synths," rebelled, for reasons unknown at the start of the series. Further research on synthetic lifeforms was banned. Maddox left the Federation as a result, developing other, more human-looking androids that didn’t even know they were synthetic: Soji and Dahj. Since Soji is one of our lead characters, we get to spend a lot of time with her as she investigates her own humanity.
As intriguing as that all was, the biggest technological reveal came in this season’s penultimate episode, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego Part 1.’ Jean-Luc Picard and crew land in an entire village of synthetics, created by Maddox and Altan Inigo Soong, Noonian Soong’s presumed biological son (assuming he’s not lying). Some look fully human, like Soji, while others have a more golden hue like Data and his brothers. Unlike Data, however, they can feel emotion; one has even figured out how to do a Vulcan mind-meld.
This village lets us see what would happen if synthetic beings were left to their own devices instead of being treated as no better than mindless workers. From a synth’s perspective, the Federation is a nightmare where their existence is illegal and other synthetic lifeforms (like holograms) are reduced to service jobs. When Data was alive and the only android around, we got to see the universe from his perspective; Picard has shown us what an android society might be like and how it might think, something we couldn’t have imagined 20 years ago.
Now we — and the writers — are free to imagine anything we want and explore it in detail. Of course, with one more episode in this season, there are still some plot threads to be resolved and things could be shaken up a lot in a span of an hour. We’ve already been promised a second season — which can either build on the ideas of the first, revisit other technological threads from throughout the franchise or introduce brand new ones. The one thing we’re sure of is that it’s finally a future we’ve never seen before on Star Trek: the 25th century.
Use This Time During Coronavirus Isolation to Learn to Play Guitar or Ukulele
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Many of us now have more downtime than we’ve had in years. And many of us also own a guitar or ukulele that we bought on impulse, promising ourselves we’d learn to play when we had the time. Well, now we do. Thanks to the Internet, we also have the resources to learn to play at home—for free. But the confusing array of options for online guitar and ukulele instruction may prove to be more of a deterrent than an encouragement. We’re here to help, with a few recommendations for online instructors we’ve used and enjoyed.
technology
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What we’ve learned from building 40,000+ links for clients
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Amanda Milligan Contributor
Amanda Milligan is the marketing director at Fractl, a prominent growth marketing agency that’s helped Fortune 500 companies and boutique businesses alike earn quality media coverage, backlinks, awareness and authority.
Since our agency opened in 2012, we’ve learned a lot about how to build quality links through content marketing.
The industry has evolved for a variety of reasons, including Google’s algorithm updates and the state of digital media. We’ve had to change along with them.
Over the years, we’ve completely revamped the way we develop content ideas, report on results, identify pitch targets — everything except for our core belief: a combination of content marketing and digital PR is the best way to build top-tier links.
I want to share three of our biggest insights from our experiences adapting so you don’t have to start from scratch or wonder which of your processes needs an update.
Kids and guns–the idea is both terrifying to parents and thrilling to kids.
After all, what kid hasn’t wished for a BB gun or picked up a stick to play soldier or cowboy?
9mms like this Ruger SR1911 Lightweight Commander are a good option for kids (this is actually the author’s daughter’s gun).
Truth is, young shooters can be just as safe (and honestly, safer) than their adult counterparts. They just need appropriate training and someone to mentor them in the ways of the firearm.
If you have kids of your own, why not get them into the shooting sports? Or hey, borrow someone else’s kids (yes, with their permission).
Here’s how to safely get kids into firearms and on the road to a lifelong obsession with all things pew pew.
Disclaimer: this is just a starting point. There are a ton of considerations for teaching kids to shoot. Use your head.
Table of Contents
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Safety First
This may or may not surprise you but the NRA’s Eddie Eagle really is one of the best kids-and-gun-safety programs out there.
Eddie Eagle teaching a class how to stay safe with guns.
Eddie Eagle walked my sixteen-year-old daughter through gun safety in a fun, relatable way more than a decade ago and I’m using it again today.
To this day Grace remembers the “Stop! Don’t touch! Leave the area! Call an adult!” mantra of Eddie Eagle which is proof positive of its effectiveness at burrowing into their brains.
Another good program is run Kids S.A.F.E run by Derek LeBlanc. The Kids S.A.F.E program is a lot more hands-on and although it is largely available on the west coast hopefully it’ll expand this coming year.
The Kids S.A.F.E. Foundation trains kids of all ages in gun safety.
Of course, that only covers what to do if kids find a random gun lying around (something you yourself are never going to do, right?), so how do you handle the actual shooting portion of gun safety?
Personally, I prefer teaching my kids about gun safety myself. If you’re going to have firearms in the house you both need to remove the mystique and teach them to be safe.
That means memorizing the four golden rules of gun safety. Not only did I and do I make mine memorize the rules I’ve made them recite the rules back to me every time we go to the range together. Every. Single. Time.
The four rules every shooter should follow:
All guns are always loaded.
Never let the muzzle cover anything which you are not willing to destroy.
Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target.
Always be sure of your target (my addition: and what is beyond it).
This means a few different things. Your kids must be both tall and strong enough and mentally mature enough to understand and follow through with muzzle awareness.
A tiny little kid is going to have trouble controlling an adult-size long gun. Conversely, a handgun is small enough it might be harder for a brand-new kid shooter to be aware just how quickly and easily that muzzle can swing around and flag somebody.
Hitting the range with ARs is my idea of the perfect way to spend time with the kids.
You, the parent–or responsible adult, whatever–are responsible for constantly monitoring their actions and ensuring they do not take on more than they’re ready to handle.
It’s also your job to keep an eye on them repeatedly. One safe range trip does not make an expert, especially with kids or anyone else with a short attention span (like my own ADHD self… it’s harder for some of us to focus than others).
Hand-in-hand with teaching muzzle awareness, we have triggers. Your five-year-old can indeed be taught to index their trigger finger high on the gun.
Just because their fingers are tiny doesn’t mean they can’t stay the heck away from the trigger. Teach them early, teach them young, and teach them safely.
Not how you want to teach your kid to handle guns.
A great way to learn basic firearms safety is with empty guns at home (and then at the range). You can also use airsoft guns, BB guns, and Nerf guns (for real, people, you’d be amazed at the creative ways you can instill safe gun handling practices).
If you use actual firearms consider putting a chamber flag in and remember the safe direction and triple-checking the gun is empty remain A Good Idea.
If I have said it once I’ve said it a million times: safety is ultimately your responsibility and you should not expect a child to function like an adult with a firearm. It is your job to make it safe prior to teaching them to be safe.
Your. Job.
Age
Age of your child, not age of the gun.
What age you can start teaching your kids to shoot varies because no two kids are alike.
I am a firm believer in instilling safety from a very young age and I don’t say that only because guns are my job.
The author’s daughter with the author at the age of three, which is the age she started learning to shoot.
If you have a gun in your house it is up to you to make sure everyone–and I do mean everyone–in the house knows how to be safe with it. Then there’s the fact that seeing guns as a natural part of life helps remove the mystery, which is what we call A Good Thing.
It is up to you what age to start your kids with guns.
This all depends on your own skill and experience level, your comfort with teaching and supervising, and the maturity level and focus of the child in question. Kids are different. Use your own judgment.
Caliber and Platform
You’ll find a ton of curriculum and social media opinion out there about what caliber is the best one to start your kids off shooting.
It is true that something like .22 LR is good because it’s mild, quieter, easier to control, and way less likely to create bad flinch habits, but that isn’t possible for everyone.
The Taurus TX22 is a decent little starter pistol in .22 LR.
If at all possible start small and work your way up. If you want to start with a Red Ryder BB gun or an air rifle from Gamo, go for it. Once your child is proficient with those, move on to firearms chambered in .22 LR.
No, throwing a .380 ACP at them is not a good idea. Pistols chambered in .380 ACP tend to be snappy and more difficult to control. Smaller does not always translate to less recoil and muzzle rise.
When you make the move away from .22 LR handguns, go for a larger 9mm, not a teensy .380 ACP or .38 Special. Guns like the Ruger SR1911 Lightweight Commander in 9mm are slim enough for smaller hands, produce less recoil, and are generally solid guns.
As for platform, I taught Grace to shoot using a bolt-action Marlin with a tube magazine.
The .22 LR-chambered Marlin the author’s daughter used as her first rifle.
Today I also favor the Rossi RS22, a semiautomatic rimfire with an 18-inch barrel and synthetic Monte Carlo stick. It also has a ten-round magazine so you can teach kids to load and seat mags.
The Rossi RS22 is a magazine-fed .22 LR suitable for teaching your kids to run a gun.
The Rossi RS22 ships with adjustable fiber-optic front and rear sights and is a nice teaching rifle right out of the box. It weighs 4.1-pounds, empty, and is reasonably well balanced.
Remember, you are not going to start your child off shooting offhand, they’re going to be sitting at a bench. Start simple and move on from there.
AR-15s are actually stellar teaching platforms, too. .223 Remington has minimal felt recoil and it’s ridiculously fun.
The trick is finding one that is light and balanced enough to be easily handled by a child. Yes that takes us back to starting from the bench but eventually you’ll have them shooting sitting, kneeling, and standing, so unless you can and will buy an array of teaching guns keep these things in mind when you buy that first AR-15.
Grace zeroing a Remington bolt-action Model 7 in .308 Win.
Shotguns are another area where the general consensus tends to be a deafening roar of “Use a .410 bore!”
If we’re talking about small children it is wise to use a .410 or 20 gauge rather than expecting them to run a 12-gauge right off. Realistically, whether you start with a .410 or a 20 gauge might be more about affordability than anything else.
If you buy a .410, is it ever going to see use or will it just serve a brief teaching purpose, then sit and collect dust? At least if you buy a good 20 gauge like the Remington 870 or 11-87 it will be useful for years to come for a variety of purposes.
Remington’s 11-87 in 20 gauge has been a long-time favorite of my now-teenage daughter’s.
A nice 20 gauge is great for not only the range but for hunting game like turkeys. My two cents is to get a 20 gauge, not a .410, but you do you.
My current pile of youth guns for the littles includes the aforementioned Rossi RS22, a Remington 870 Express in 20 gauge, and my beloved uber-lightweight carbon-fiber Axelson Tactical Black Pearl in .223 Wylde.
For handguns the Taurus TX22 is a nice little teaching option – yes, I said Taurus. Don’t be a hater, dear.
The guns you are using to teach your children are not the same guns you would use to defend your life. Unless you have endless resources you need to make teaching them affordable and that means affordably-priced guns that get the job done.
A teenage cheerleader and an Axelson Tactical AR-10: a perfect match.
Yes, my Axelson rifle is on the high-custom-end but there are a ton of nicely-priced ARs on the market you can grab up.
Eyes, Ears, and So On
Protect your kids’ eyes and ears, for the love of all that is holy. Cheap foamies are not sufficient to guard their hearing. If possible, use electronic muffs so they can still hear you talking them through the steps.
Muffs are also more adjustable because electronic buds are sized for adult ears as a general rule. Of course, the good thing about teaching with smaller calibers is that they also create less noise.
Check out Walker’s Ultimate Power Muff Quads. They have four Hi Gain Omni-Directional microphones, 9X hearing enhancement, a 26 decibel rating, and independing AFT controls.
Walker’s XCEL 100 Digital Electronic Muffs with Voice Clarity are less expensive than the Ultimates and also well-made and effective. Yes you are going to pay more for good electronic muffs but look at it this way: you are investing in your child’s hearing for the rest of their life, not just for ten minutes or one day.
Eye pro should be worn at all times. If the eye pro is too big for their head it isn’t going to stay in place and it’s also going to be way less useful if something comes back at their face. SSP Eyewear offers a youth line with different levels of tint suited for varying weather conditions. Over the years I’ve become a huge fan of SSP Eyewear.
Hats. Yes, hats. Do I get annoyed wearing a baseball hat at the range? Yes. Do I always wear one when taking classes and hunting? Again, yes.
Grace running an AR-10 in .308 Win on a deer hunt at the age of twelve.
Especially when you are dealing with the littles you need to consider protecting them from every aspect of flying debris including brass that comes flying back and could potentially get caught between their eye pro and face.
Do they always, always have to wear a hat? No, but it is a good additional safety layer. Consider it.
Things to Remember
Break things down in bite-size pieces and brief lessons. Expecting a five-year-old to follow directions and retain an enormous amount of information all at once is ludicrous.
If your kid looks like this, it’s time for a break.
It just isn’t going to happen.
Kind of like asking them to sit their wiggly behind on a hard school chair for six or eight hours it’s asking a lot to expect stillness and attentiveness for long stretches at the range. Even the most interested kid is going to struggle.
Keep it simple.
Teach your kids that guns are tools, not toys. Guns require a high level of awareness and responsibility. Their use is a privilege (don’t get started on Second Amendment issues and rights, people, you know that is not what this is about).
Grace with the Marlin at the age of ten, keeping the muzzle down. She’s always had better discipline and safety practices than most adults I know.
Start with single-shot drills. Don’t toss your kid a loaded magazine and let them go nuts. This is, of course, assuming you’ve worked with them on empty guns and dryfire already.
The first thing your kid’s gonna do if you don’t train them.
Once you’ve done that, then move on to single-shot drills. I know you want your kids to be having a literal blast at the range but you must start safely and cautiously.
Start young. Let your kids watch you clean guns, then teach them to help. Becoming familiar with handling guns while remaining safe and learning the parts of guns is an excellent way to build a solid foundation for a young shooter.
20-gauge shotguns like this Remington pump-action are great teaching tools for kids.
Your behavior will influence your children’s behavior. If you handle guns carefully and safely, they will, too.
If you’re flip and inobservant, not really giving a crap where the muzzle swings, guess what? Neither will they. Model the behavior you want to see in your kids. This applies to more than guns.
For heaven’s sake don’t leave your guns lying around where your toddlers and grade-schoolers can get their hands on them.
Deer hunting with kids? Absolutely.
Conversely, don’t give me that “I have to keep my home defense gun locked up because there’s kids” line.
If you have a self-defense weapon, carry it on your body. It is not difficult and it is a lot more useful when it’s immediately accessible than if you have to run for the safe if someone breaks into your home.
That brings me neatly to my final point: buy a tourniquet, learn to use it, and teach your kids to use it.
You are statistically more likely to need and use a tourniquet than you are to ever need to use that self-defense gun. Your kids should be familiar with first aid–and that means tourniquets.
Above all, have fun. This is an awesome lifestyle and one you should be proud to pass on to your kids.
Conclusion
As for me and mine, you can find us at the range–or in a hunting blind. Or against a tree calling in turkeys.
Introduce your kids to the shooting sports. It instills responsibility, teaches dexterity, improves focus, and is a great way to spend time as a family. Go on, get thee to the range with your kids.
Did you teach your kids how to shoot and handle firearms? Looking forward to doing so? Share your tips and questions in the comments below! For a first gun, check out:
My wife and I have homeschooled our boys for 14 years. Two started university this year, returning home last week when their campus closed. The third is a sophomore in high school. At home, we’ve applied many of the principles, models, tools, and skills I use in my work to help individuals and teams learn and work more effectively.
This morning, my wife, one of my college-age sons, and I put our heads together to share some tips that might help people who are homeschooling, suddenly and not by choice, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
1. Your Family Is Not a Scrum Team
You may have had good results with Scrum at work. This does not mean it will work for you at home.
Just a few ways your family is not like a Scrum Team:
Your family is not a dedicated team working towards a common product increment. Different people have wildly different responsibilities, commitments, and availability.
There’s no clear Product Owner. Nor should there be. Different areas have different people who can set direction and prioritize. In some cases, it’s the person doing the work.
There’s no clear ScrumMaster. No one can focus full-time on the system of work. Everyone has tasks to do.
Not all the work is plannable. Things emerge every day. That’s ok. That’s just life, especially during a crisis.
Keep the principles. Experiment with some of the practices. Don’t try to apply the whole framework.
2. Make the Work Visible
If there’s one thing that has made the biggest difference for our family, it’s this. Get all the work, school and chores, onto a big Kanban board. You can find the board layout we ended up with in this post.
This works at home for all the reasons it works at work. But there’s a more important reason why it matters at home:
Your relationships are more important than the work to be done.
By moving the work to be done outside of you and your child, the work is just there. It’s not you chasing them around, trying to get them to do the work. It’s just, “Is there work left to do?”
3. Use Timeboxes All Over the Place
You’re probably also working from home now and trying to get your own things done. You’ve probably discovered that getting anything done with interruptions every two minutes is, basically, impossible.
The thing is, the kid interrupting you probably isn’t getting anything done either.
To give both of you a chance to focus and get something done, use timeboxes: “Let’s set this timer for 20 minutes. You work on your math, and I’m going to do my work. Write down any questions you have for me. When the timer goes off, we’ll talk through your questions.”
This also helped us ensure we took regular breaks and moved around instead of just sitting at the table all day long. (Breaks benefit from timers, too.)
4. Everything Seems Worse When You’re Hungry
More time together means more things to have conflict about. Those conflicts seem—and actually become—worse when you’re hungry. Plan time for meals and snacks. Don’t hesitate to call time-out on an argument to have a snack and then come back to discussing it.
5. Not Everything Is Equally Important
The 80/20 principle applies here. Not everything is going to get done perfectly every day, especially when we’re all stressed and adapting to a new way of living and working. Sometimes your energy is done before the tasks are done. That’s ok. Find the most essential part of each task. Focus on the why. Let some things slide.
Prioritize health and relationships over accomplishment. That’s what will matter in the long term.
6. It Doesn’t Have to Look or Feel Like School
As I write this, it’s the middle of the “school day,” and one of my sons is laying in bed listening to an audiobook, one is on the back porch on a Zoom discussion for a college class, and the third is doing his laundry. As long as everything is getting done, it doesn’t matter when, where, or what it looks like. Kids don’t need to sit in rows—or even in chairs!—for learning to happen. Take advantage of the flexibility you now have to integrate school, chores, rest, and play. Let your kids experience how lifelong learning is just a part of life, not something that has to happen in a classroom setting.
Finally, be patient with yourself and your family. A wise friend once explained patience to me as something like, “choosing to let go of your expectations.” It’s not having no expectations. It’s owning your expectations, acknowledging where they’re not being met, and choosing something else you value more (usually a relationship).
Leave a comment below if this was useful or if you have additional questions. If there’s interest, we may host a Zoom call to answer questions and share more tips.
