My parents divorced when I was young and my sister and I spent our summers and school vacations in West Virginia at what I affectionately call Camp Dad, compulsory cooking and sports camp.
In the evenings, we walked to the public tennis courts a few clocks away. After tennis, we came home and played Boggle.
Boggle with Bob Schwarz was no ordinary game of Boggle.
We were allowed to use words we couldn’t define with one caveat – we had to look them up in the big blue Webster dictionary (yes, there were once printed dictionaries in a land far, far away).
My dad would take notes and quiz us at the next day’s Boggle game, not my favorite part of the game but it built character as he would say. And he credits our high SAT verbal scores to years of playing Boggle.
Starting at age 8, as part of the custody agreement, my sister and I had to write weekly letters to my dad and send school assignments from our classes.
We would send graded papers and he would send them back, with comments.
More than once, an A+ paper from a teacher returned from dad with a mess of red ink.
My dad was a journalist at the Charleston Gazette for 25 years and I credit him with my writing skills, love of language, and zealous proofreading tendencies.
I recently read Brené Brown's books Daring Greatly and The Gifts of Imperfection and was struck by her writing on perfectionism. She defines perfectionism as:
