Life lessons

As my brain wanders to and fro minute by minute, old memories and aggravations surface seemingly out of the blue. I am sure that there are things in everyone's environment that trigger such memories but I have as yet not figured out more than a few of them.
Over the years I have taught a number of kids to drive. Side note: teaching your own kids is way harder than others. I'm just saying. Anyway, one such driver I had taught how to drive told me some time later that their father told them my rule about not letting the RPM's go over 3 (3000 for you purists) was stupid, they were taking off too slow and that I had taught them wrong. This irritated me on several levels. The first one I will not deal with much here other than to say teach your own kid. But more to the point of the blog/story I was aggravated because months of teaching this had a reason. While I do not have the profound wisdom of an Okinawan Karate master I do have enough intelligence to teach to the child. I did not need the government to tell me how to teach. I had a problem and I came up with a solution. This driver would get in and put the pedal to the metal. No amount of telling them would stop it. I knew my car and I had learned the driver. So I imposed the 3 RPM rule. This forced them to learn pedal control. It had nothing to do with actual speed. It had to do with a definable goal to achieve. It was not an out of reach goal. At every stop there was an easily attainable goal on acceleration. It worked. They waxed on and waxed off until it became a habit. One for which they even took crap for later (yes, I'm bitter). But it got the job done
I think that there are lots of life lessons like that. We don't understand why in the world there seems to be an arbitrary rule in place or an insurmountable problem in the way but sometimes it is there as a goal to get through. Not the end game or destination but something with a short term goal to teach us a certain amount of control. I don't know about everyone else but I am fairly certain that I fail most of these. Heck, I'm not even sure that I recognized them as short term goals even after the fact. But I suspect that there are even goals in that...