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Keeping your options open
Plus: Health as a barometer
Geoff Girvitz
April 17, 2025
Today on Dad Strength
No audio edition today. And a shorter newsletter, while we’re at it.
Keeping your options open
My son got into rock climbing a little while back. Bouldering, specifically. He has an appetite for it. So, after accompanying him for a while and maybe doing the odd climb, I got us both a monthly membership and started hitting the wall… in every sense of the word.
I am not amazing. However, something important is happening. Three things, actually:
I can take part and improve merely by continuing to do so
I showed up with a high enough baseline of physical strength, mobility, and overall durability to be able to practice in a meaningful way. So, I can show up, suck, learn some things, and come back a bit better.
I didn’t do any specific preparation for this (although, I would if I needed to bridge a gap in physical capacities). This is part of a general suite of health.I can engage in a meaningful experience with my kid
I can leverage the above into meaningful time with my kid. All of the above has been about planting the seeds of optionality. And now I’m able to harvest it in a meaningful way.
Most of my camera roll is the kid – but I know what the people really want to see: a bald, middle-aged man in action.
I am trying, falling, and getting back up (like, a lot) in front of my kid
Like Jake the Dog says, “Sucking at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.” So, it’s my pleasure and my privilege to model that skill progression in real-time.
New ad strategy:
I’m getting kind of bored of running ads. But it costs money to run this newsletter. Quite the little dilemma. So, I figured I’d just take products that I already like and tell you about those. Whenever they have referral/affiliate links, I’ll provide them. So here is… wait for it…
A thing I legitimately like:
I never would have expected any of multi-national conglomerates pumping out toothpaste to really be looking to maximize my value over theirs, but — then again- — I also never really thought about it. It was just a default behaviour.
I ordered a trial tube of Before as an experiment (someone I knew and trusted vouched for it) and I really liked it. I thought it was more expensive until I realized that the tube lasts twice as long. It’s been about a year and a half and I wouldn’t go back. I’m not making any claims other than I really like this personally but if you want to try it, click here.
Putting your kids to work
Last week, a friend and I took a long walk. Long. Borderline forced march. Along the way, we talked about the value of skilled trades. It turns out that the executive managerial class cannot reliably hang drywall or arc weld. A healthy, functioning nation needs to produce more than inspirational LinkedIn posts. We need skilled trades. That part, we know and agree on. But then we got to the sticky bit.
Would you encourage your kid to pursue a trade?
That part gets a more mixed response. And I think that understanding your own reflex response will tell us a lot about what directions we’re heading in terms of education, upward mobility, and optionality.
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Health as a barometer
I wrote about how health is essential to judging national leadership for The Globe and Mail. You can read it here.
What I’m reading/listening to:
A quote
"It's much easier to create a desert than a forest."
— Alex Lovelock
A dad joke
What does the Earth serve dinner on?
Tectonic plates
Take care of yourself, man!
Geoff Girvitz
Father, founder, physical culturist
dadstrength.com