Tag: Good Grandpa book

Open the curtain. The Good Grandpa book cover design is here!

March 7, 2025 3:54 pm March 7, 2025

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I’m thrilled to announce that the cover my new book—Good Grandpa: Stories from the heart of grandfatherhood—has been finalized. The design is in the form of a photo mosaic, like…

I’m thrilled to announce that the cover my new book—Good Grandpa: Stories from the heart of grandfatherhood—has been finalized.

The cover for Good Grandpa, designed by Kris Collins.

The design is in the form of a photo mosaic, like a family album, showing some of the wide range of grandfathers I interviewed in the course of writing the book, including famed newsman Tom Brokaw. The book will be published in September 2025, timed for Grandparents Day, by Regalo Press and distributed by Simon & Schuster.

Here’s a video that tells the story of the book (produced by the great Doug Feinburg).

I am deeply grateful to all the grandfathers who took the time to talk with me. This included grandfather leaders of the world’s major religions, military veterans, pro athletes and many more. Their wonderful stories and wisdom formed an unforgettable tapestry that I hope will be seen by many grandparents in the US and around the world.

I also believe the book will be of value to young people, especially young parents.

Time and again the grandfathers I spoke with said, “I’m going to tell you something I wish I’d known 40 years ago.” I think it’s really important for people in their 20s and 30s to learn these things NOW so they can live a better life and help us create a better world. In a time when there is a lot of darkness and hate, the book will provide some welcome rays of hope.

Be sure to sign up for the Good Grandpa newsletter so you can find out when the book is available for pre-order this spring. This is fun!

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BUCKET O' WISDOM

Timeless Wisdom from a Six-Year-Old

grandpateddy1

October 10, 2024 1:20 pm October 10, 2024

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Whenever I interviewed elders for my Good Grandpa book, whether it was my Aunt Lois, a retired pro football grandpa, or the Dalai Lama, I always concluded by asking for…

Whenever I interviewed elders for my Good Grandpa book, whether it was my Aunt Lois, a retired pro football grandpa, or the Dalai Lama, I always concluded by asking for their #1 most essential wisdom.

As you can imagine, I learned some wonderful things along the way. Their ideas where like beautiful antiques, enough to fill a chest in the attic one might come across one day and open with great delight.

Just a few weeks after I submitted the manuscript to my publisher, my wife and I received another gift: our son is expecting his third child early next year — another girl. This will bring our tally of grandchildren to five, which we are of course over the moon about. It also means that our eldest granddaughter, Roen—now 6—will have two little sisters. We took Roen and her little sister, Mae, out for a delicious gluten-free brunch to celebrate. As I watched them chatting away and devouring their breakfast sandwiches, I thought again about all those #1 things that the elders shared with me. And here before me was an “elder” in a different form, still a child, but a big sister who perhaps had some wisdom to share. So, on a lark, I asked Roen for her #1 most essential wisdom.

“No matter what you want to do,” Roen replied, “be your best at it.”

This sounded so adult-like I thought maybe I’d misheard her. But sure enough, this six-year-old girl had in fact shared some excellent wisdom with us. It’s possible her parents, or her other grandparents, had shared these exact words with her recently and she was parroting them back. Or she’d learned this on her own. Or something in-between.

There was a lesson there for me in that moment, something that brought back memories of my time as a young father: don’t assume that children have nothing meaningful to contribute.

In fact, do the opposite. There is often a freshness to their thinking, an innate wisdom that too often gets lost in the shuffle when they grow up and get distracted by the heavy demands of adulthood. The treasure chests of childhood wisdom are typically overlooked simply because we assume they are not there.

I’d been seeking wisdom only from old people like me, but perhaps—like love—wisdom is actually all around.

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