6 Unusual Things I Learned From Hula Hooping

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I was living on my own after ten years of marriage and my kids were visiting me every two weeks I didn’t know what to do with them. I didn’t have a door on my bathroom. I had girl problems. I had money problems. And now I had two tiny people who I needed to entertain.

If you think about it superficially, what does a 40 year old man have in common with a 12 year old girl and a 9 year old girl. What? Are we friends or something?

But they were my kids and I loved them and I wanted them to love me back. I also didn’t want their lives to be in too much shock over the separation of their parents. Time magazine does its annual cover story on “Divorce Ruins the Lives of Kids” and now my kids were going to be divorced kids. “I don’t want to be one of those”, one of them was crying when we first told them.

Kids don’t deserve the burden that’s thrust on them. They have no control over their lives at all. They have no control over where they will live. They don’t know how to take care of themselves so they often get sick in the germ factories at the schools. Most kids hate school and are bored out of their minds sitting down from nine to three listening to boring teachers talk boring topics. Kids should run around and sweat and climb trees.

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Plus kids are often cruel to each other. My oldest daughter was having a problem at the time with being ostracized at the school she was attending. It was very hard for her and broke my heart. Having been cruel at points in my life, I saw very clearly what they were doing to her. On top of it their parents were getting divorced. I was so sad for the both of them.

So I did the only thing I knew to do with them. I overbooked them. They would arrive and we would eat out dinner at a nice place, then play ping pong, then go to a movie, then next day: bowling, ping pong, basketball, swimming, ice skating, magic show, Holocaust museum (they HATED that), and hula hoop lessons. They were out of breath, out of mind, by the time they left to go to their home. My old home.

I found a woman who performed with a circus. I hired her for almost no money to come over and teach my kids all sorts of hula hoop tricks. “Why don’t you join in?” she said to me.

“I can’t do that,” I said. Maybe something homophobic in me. Don’t only girls hula hoop? Plus, every time I tried it it seemed scientifically impossible. I would move my whole body in a circle to keep up with the hula hoop, I would to spin as fast as possible, and it would immediately fall down. Whatever. Hula hooping is for girls.

“Sure you can,” she said, and she had a hula hoop for me. So I took lessons. And by the end of the first lesson I was hula hooping and my kids were doing all sorts of tricks.

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But I did learn 6 Valuable Things From Hula Hooping

A) What seems hard is sometimes very easy. Sometimes you just need to know the right trick and something that you previously thought was not just hard but IMPOSSIBLE becomes easy. But everyone else still thinks it’s hard. So it’s like you’re doing a miracle whenever you show people. One time CNBC asked me to say something for one of their promos. I said, “Can I do it while hula hooping.” They said, “sure.” So I did it. Afterwards they were like, “Oh my god, how the hell did you do that?” Sadly they didn’t air it. I was in a tie, hula hooping, saying something about how capitalism was going to rule the free world and maybe it didn’t quite all fit together.

A lot of people say “I can’t do it” through their whole lives. I bet 95% of the things that “can’t” is applied to is actually very easy. In fact, I know this statistic to be true. I see “can’t” from people every day. When you say “can’t” look at the deeper fears why you might not want to do something. Or why you think you aren’t good enough. Or why you think you don’t deserve the magic.

B) You need a teacher. For everything I want to get better at, I get a teacher or mentor. Without a teacher I never would’ve learned the tricks to hula hoop. Without a teacher, I never would’ve gotten better at chess or poker. I had a good teacher on trading. I wish I had had someone show me the ropes on entrepreneurship. Instead I had to learn these rules the hard way. Through bitter tears and a lot of failure.