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  • - [Vishen] What is it like to have me as your dad?

  • - [Eve] Uhh...

  • - I thought I was a good father.

  • These are my kids. They're amazing kids.

  • I know every parent says that. But they are.

  • When I held my first born, Hayden, in my arms for the very first time,

  • covered in crap and muck, I thought,

  • "Damn, I thought babies were supposed to be cute."

  • It was the same with Eve. But I was better prepared that time.

  • They have grown up to be two of the biggest loves of my life.

  • I don't think I've got words to describe that moment of holding Hayden

  • for the first time.

  • Suddenly, I was responsible for a whole new human being.

  • Every action I took from that moment was going to affect

  • how another life turned out.

  • It was scary, but thrilling.

  • I knew for sure that the kind of childhood I wanted to build for him,

  • something different from my own.

  • Where my classmates were bullies and my teachers were tyrants,

  • I was determined to build a life for Hayden and Eve

  • where they would be safe from that.

  • But somehow, even with the best intentions, I still managed to mess up.

  • In trying to protect him from the experiences I went through,

  • I made the mistake of enrolling Hayden in different types of 'excellent' schools.

  • A Chinese school, a Russian school, an American school.

  • But I never realized how some of these schools were tormenting him as a child.

  • One day, Hayden came back from the kindergarten I'd enrolled him in.

  • The rules there were so strict that Hayden told me they had served him something

  • to eat that didn't sit well for him, and he needed to puke.

  • But he was afraid to puke because he thought he was going to be punished

  • by his teachers, so he had to puke in his own mouth, and then swallow it,

  • too afraid to spit it out on a plate.

  • This was one of the most heartbreaking moments for me as a parent.

  • And that's when it hit me. I knew nothing about parenting.

  • I had unwittingly enforced the ideas of damaging discipline

  • that I detested so much.

  • What is it like to have me as your dad? - Uhh... Good. I love you as my dad.

  • - I'm not a bad father. In fact, I think overall I'm a pretty decent one.

  • But it's by chance and not by design.

  • In every other aspect of my life, how to build a business,

  • how to optimize health, I find the best mentors,

  • I learn from the best, I optimize my systems of living.

  • Yet, in this one area, parenting, arguably the most important task I have

  • in my life, I was an amateur. I wasn't bothering to learn.

  • What's your message for your grandfather?

  • - Hello. You're my best grandad. He taught me so much and I love him so much.

  • - In fact, everything we know is what we learned from our parents,

  • who learned it from their parents, who learned it from their parents,

  • who gained it in a completely different era of human society and culture.

  • Modern parenting is one of the most important things we can learn,

  • which is why I decided to seriously study parenting as a system for living.

  • And I sought the best teachers and experts in the world.

  • And in all of these learnings, one message kept coming through.

  • Our fascination with imparting our own knowledge, our romanticizing of parenting,

  • our underdeveloped consciousness in this area of life, our thinking

  • that we know it all, all creates broken human beings.

  • The best thing we can do to create a fully conscious, enlightened world is to create

  • fully conscious, fully developed children.

  • I'm still learning. I don't have all the answers.

  • But I'm committed to being the best parent I can be.

  • If like me, you want to get access to some of the most powerful ideas we come across,

  • sign up below this video, and we'll notify you

  • when Mindvalley's parenting division takes off.

  • - Finished.

- [Vishen] What is it like to have me as your dad?

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