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The most successful families embrace and elevate their family history, particularly their failures, setbacks and other missteps.

Bruce Feiler

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Bruce Feiler
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: October 25
Writer
Savannah
Georgia
Successful
Missteps
Family
Setbacks
History
Elevate
Setback
Failures
Families
Particularly
Embrace

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One question hovers over all of us who choose to spend our lives writing: why keep doing this in a world where so many forces are aligned against us?
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After a while, a surprising theme emerged. The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: Develop a strong family narrative.
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I had always believed that I left a bit of me wherever I went. I also believed that I took a bit of every place with me.
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Cancer is a passport to intimacy. It is an invitation, maybe even a mandate, to enter the most vital arenas of human life, the most sensitive and the most frightening, the ones that we never want to go to - but when we do go there, we feel incredibly transformed.
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Adam and Eve - and especially Eve - are victims of the greatest character assassination the world has ever known. Eve is not secondary. Eve, if anything, is the great initiator in the story. She's the first independent woman. For me, rediscovering that Eve was the greatest bad**s women of all time was a revelation.
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Moses is our true founding father.
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Here's a confession: I hate parenting books. I hate the ones that are earnest and repetitive.
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I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like myself, the white-hot Japanese miracle held a similar appeal as Russia in 1920s or Paris in the 1950s.
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Decades of research have shown that most happy families communicate effectively. But talking doesn't mean simply 'talking through problems,' as important as that is. Talking also means telling a positive story about yourselves.
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I think that most of the action in religion is around the home, is in families, and is in individual lives, and they can go on their own searches, watch their own TV shows, read their own books, form their own groups and discuss it, but that's where the action is - on the home front.
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If you tell your own story to your children - that includes your positive moments and your negative moments, and how you overcame them - you give your children the skills and the confidence they need to feel like they can overcome some hardship that they've felt.
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Fathers can find great inspiration in faith.
Bruce Feiler
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Every writer dreams of writing a book that will touch people.
Bruce Feiler
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You don't need a grand plan, you don't need to go back to the ancestors and rewrite the rules. You just need to take small steps and accumulate small wins.
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Children who plan their own goals, set weekly schedules, evaluate their own work build up their frontal cortex and take more control over their lives.
Bruce Feiler
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I'm a fifth generation Jew from the South, and I would say that I felt this connection to my religion, but it wasn't a spiritual connection.
Bruce Feiler
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One day, my daughter Tybee came to me, and she said, ‘I have so much love for you in my body, Daddy, I can’t stop giving you hugs and kisses. And when I have no more love left, I just drink milk, because that’s where love comes from.’
Bruce Feiler
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When I was growing up, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would get, I thought, because persecution had been such a burden to Jewish families for generations.
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Knowing more about family history is the single biggest predictor of a child's emotional well-being. Grandparents can play a special role in this process, too.
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Social media is fine, but we need to put the phones down and look somebody in the eye. Talk to your neighbor. Talk to your community. Especially talk to the one you love. It's all about connection. It's hard, but it's ultimately what gives us meaning in the world.
Bruce Feiler