How to be awesome

I have the habit of telling my daughter to have an awesome day when I drop her off at school. (Go away, naysayers who claim the word is overused. I like it.) Generally, she rolls her eyes and tells me she’s always awesome. Today, she told me I should be awesome, too. I was not feeling particularly awesome earlier this morning, so I only said I would try.

This was not good enough. She took the matter seriously. “Do you want to know how to be awesome?” she asked.

“Well, sure. How do I be awesome?”

“There are two things to do if you want to be awesome.” My daughter is very precise and authoritative for a seven-year-old, even in matters of awesomeness, and she marked each item with a pointed finger. “The first thing to do is to be active. The second thing to do is to be creative. If you do those two things, you’re awesome.”

“That … makes a lot of sense.”

“I know it does.” My daughter is also not overburdened with false modesty.

So, I sent her off to school to be awesome and I went home to work, thinking somehow, when I wasn’t looking, she got a lot wiser than I am in some ways. But there you have it. How to be awesome in two simple steps. Feel free to borrow them for your own use.