reward – what a fool believes . . . .

Credo

Everyone should have a credo. Consciously-developed beliefs, understood and articulated so that they can guide individual actions.

So what is my credo?

I believe many things, and, like any credo worth its salt, all of those things have implications for action.

First, I believe we all have equal human value, even as we are unequal in what we can contribute to the collective at any one time. No one is inherently better or worse – or worth more or less – than another because of their specific talents. The value to our community of those talents may ebb and flow, but fundamentally we are all worth the same, and as such we deserve the same basic communal benefits.

I also believe that every dog will have its day.

Meaning that we will eventually need those folks whose talents and skills and experiences are out-of-season today. We don’t know when, but their days will come, and we want them healthy and committed when they do. So we must provide to each other food and shelter and education and basic healthcare, all of those things that ensure survival and growth, regardless of what each of us contributes to our immediate needs.

I believe that people should be rewarded for their efforts and the positive outcomes that result (positive outcomes are those that improve collective utility). Every dog will have its day, but the dog that hunts today rather than tomorrow must get some benefit, lest that dog withhold its talents.

Why would a dog withhold its talents? And why wouldn’t we insist that it make its contribution to our collective benefit?

Because I believe in full agency. In fact, I might believe in full agency as my foundational truth.

Until our decisions and our actions hurt someone else, we must be allowed the widest discretion to choose our own paths. Each of us is uniquely human, a complex stew of ambitions and experiences, influences and knowledge, skills and blind spots, and we exist in a complex and dynamic environment. I cannot know what’s best for anyone else. I’m not sure I can know what’s best for me, given how much everything changes both within and around me. And since I cannot know what’s best for you, I cannot tell you what to do. I can suggest action, I can provide data so I feel like you’re better informed, I can share what choice I would make, but I cannot force you or even manipulate you into a decision. You must be free to choose your way, just as I must be free to choose mine.

I believe people are communal. We form tribes. Even introverts like me relish other people’s company (at least sometimes!). A shared laugh is so much more fulfilling, so much more robust than a solitary chuckle. We find meaning in community. We find purpose in working with others towards common ends. We want to belong with other people.

When someone holds themselves outside our community, it’s possible they’re just an antisocial asshole. But I believe it’s far, far more likely that they just feel rejected by the rest of us. They feel unappreciated or vilified or ignored. They feel like they’ve been treated unfairly. So when we see someone isolated, instead of asking what’s wrong with them, we should ask ourselves whether we’ve made that person feel welcome. Or, looking forward rather than backwards, let’s ask how we might help them feel welcome, so that they will join our community and strengthen it. Regardless, people must freely choose to join community, not have it forced upon them.

(If Gallup Strengthfinders is to be believed, Includer is my greatest strength, and it likely comes from this part of this fledgling credo – helping others feel like they can be part of our team. I see value in others, and I want to bring people together in a way that makes each individual feel valued.)

I believe we all strive to matter. We want to make a difference in the world around us. We want other people to know that we are here. So we strive to achieve. We create. We don’t need other people in order to achieve or to create, but other people add dimension and perspective to our accomplishments. And they allow us to achieve even greater things, more complicated things, more intimidating things when we band together with them. Many hands make light work, after all.

We can accomplish more when we work together. Not only do we have more capacity for work, we also have more creativity, more imagination, and more energy to call on. We have countless examples of individual genius, but we have many more examples of teams that accomplished amazing things because they combined the knowledge, wisdom, skills, experiences, energy, and creativity of many minds and bodies.

So put it together, and my credo is that we make community to accomplish things that benefit us collectively while recognizing the value that each of us contributes, knowing that those contributions will be uneven, always favoring some of us over others. We need to recognize those who contribute more, but we need to care for everyone so that they are ready when their turn comes and we need them. And all of it has to be chosen freely, individually, by each member of our community.

That’s my credo. Or at least the start of it. I’m sure more elements will occur to me as time marches on.

Measured

I am, if nothing else, measured.

I think linearly. Deliberately. Some might even say ploddingly. When I gather data to make decisions I plug my emotions, shut them below deck even as they heave against it; they unbalance me from time to time, but I don’t let them get to full throat. I consider as many perspectives as I can, though that seems innate rather than something for which I can take credit. And I try to be generous towards other people in my assumptions about them.

In my head I know there’s a place in the world for me, because there’s a place in the world for everyone. Yet in my heart I have doubts.

The world of arts and letters is stuffed with talent. I haven’t chosen to write as much as I feel compelled to do it. But of what interest are my thoughts, my ideas, my observations compared with both the wide and the deep perspectives shared by other authors and artists, particularly those who come from places underrepresented in our collective narrative? My prose doesn’t soar or dazzle, and my themes are simple, universal. My advantages are an unflinching gaze and pleasingly straightforward expression. That feels meager.

The world of analysts is also full, and though I have the talent and the nerve for it I don’t have the fire. Analyzing for profit is a competitive market, and I lack the motivation to win. I’m curious and creative and unafraid of ideas, but I might be collaborative to a fault. I have no agenda other than understanding. It is how I’m wired.

So I have a compulsion to create where I won’t necessarily succeed, and where I can more likely excel I have little interest. The conundrum of my life, though one I don’t own exclusively. I know there are others with similar situations, people who want to do what they aren’t best-suited for doing.

So how do I measure my value in such a place?

I haven’t a clue.

I am testing that value. I’ve committed to a year of writing to see if my voice does matter, if there are enough people interested in what I have to share to make the dedicated effort worthwhile. I will always write – compulsion, remember? – but it might be more of a hobby than a vocation. It’s a beautiful dream for my writing to support me, and once in a while dreams do come true.

But if this dream remains just that, if there isn’t space for me in the world of letters, then I’ll need to make peace with that and try to return to the world of analysis. I don’t really know how that will work, however.

I’m older and definitely wiser, but I also stepped out of that world for quite a while. My business performance since I retired from corporate jobs is abysmal, though the covid pandemic is wholly responsible for that failure. And while I’ll probably be more at peace with a role back in the business world I will likely still lack the passion that a full commitment requires. Commitment is kind of important to those who would engage my services and pay me for them.

Perhaps I’m destined to close out my working days doing a collection of part-time jobs. Credit counseling. Tutoring. Perhaps even making coffee or stocking shelves. In other words, doing things I’m neither suited for nor driven to do.

And wouldn’t that be fitting for someone who couldn’t find his place because his head and his heart just weren’t aligned?

Agency

I believe in Agency.

Letting every person make as many decisions about their life as possible.

I draw the line at full Agency when a choice or decision hurts another person, but until then I want us all to have discretion about what we do with our time and our energies. Let us each create the life we want.

Agency is just a fancier word for choice. I use it a lot, maybe to sound smarter than I am, but it really is the foundational value on which everything else I believe is hung. It’s like freedom, but less static. Freedom to me is lack of controls, whereas Agency implies action. Freedom allows choice but doesn’t demand it. Agency requires action, the act of choosing.

I talk to my children about intention too. Choosing with intention. To me, that’s even more what what Agency is about: choosing consciously and with intent for an outcome. You may not get what you hope, but you increase your chances, and that ups the odds of living a satisfying life.

I’ve not always used my Agency. In fact, I’ve been pretty negligent until recently about taking action to achieve a specific goal. Most of that is because I haven’t set intentions, but it’s also true that I haven’t had the courage to try for the ones I did set. I trusted the universe to take care of me, and that is a sure path to an underwhelming life. The universe is ambivalent to each of us; it’s not malevolent, it doesn’t want to screw us to the floor, but it’s not going to care if we’re unhappy with our lots either. It will march on in step with that taskmaster Time, blissfully ignorant of our frustrations.

No, it’s up to each of us to choose the life we want to live and then work to create it. Not one of us will get everything on which we set our sights – the universe seems petulant that way – but those who work most diligently and with clear eyes on their own prize will reap more of it than those of us who coast. 80-10-10 after all (80% of the time we get what we earn, 10% we get hosed, and 10% we get away with something).

We win at life when we don’t begrudge what we sacrifice for our choices, because instead what we gain with those very same choices fulfills us. We win when we make the benefit worth the cost, including the opportunity cost of foregoing other choices in favor of those that bring us the biggest returns.

My experiment in Agency is still in its nascent stages, and I am overwhelmed with doubts from time to time. But I have also experienced the exhilaration and excitement when I have a small success on the road to my larger intentions. Because I know that I made that little success happen.

I look forward to the rush I’ll get when I achieve one of my big goals.

Brilliance, Unlimited?

I surprised both my friends and myself during an argument over coffee the other day. My very good friend Tom is a fan of iconoclastic businesspeople, people who dream big and dare bigger – people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. I had an unusually visceral response when he complimented Musk, and I was particularly inarticulate about my thoughts.

I am a free-market guy mostly, but I also believe in vigorous oversight, because far too many businesspeople will push boundaries and take advantage.

It’s a logical outcome of the widely-held view that a businessperson’s main goal is to maximize returns to shareholders. Behaviors like price fixing, price gouging, withholding new products that will cannibalize existing products, adopting rosy economic-growth forecasts when funding benefit-defined retirement programs all reward shareholders at the expense of collective utility, which is – or at least should be – the goal of any economy. In other words, businesspeople will most often choose narrow benefits over broader benefits because their goals, performance assessments, and compensation are aligned with narrow company-specific performance rather than wider economic performance.

And that’s cool. Try to reward a CEO on a broad economic performance metric on which they will have very little impact and you’ll very quickly have an unmotivated CEO. Or need to search for a new one.

But without a vigorous counterpoint (i.e., public regulation) to enforce collective utility, we end up with society as a whole bearing externalities, costs that are created by individual entities but paid for by the collective. Which leads to income disparities (shareholders get all the rewards while non-shareholders get zero rewards but have to cover part of the costs), which further frays our community.

But back to Elon Musk. I have two views of him, and there is some nuance in them.

Musk is brilliant. Tesla will change our world at least as dramatically as Amazon restructured retail shopping – and I’m all in on that change. Moving our transportation economy to sustainable fueling is seismically positive. It will reorder our world, but that huge disruption will leave us in a far better place than we are now.

He is also highly skilled at building companies. Counting PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company he’s had a significant role in creating four companies that are thriving, which is a great indicator of the appeal their products and services have to people.

But.

His Twitter acquisition shows hubris. He fancies himself an expert in social media and public conversation with no evidence of his expertise. He hasn’t grown up in social media companies, learning the essential issues, understanding the wants or needs of the broader markets, differentiating among the various markets and market segments. He’s extrapolating his personal experience, assuming his experience is the same as everyone else’s, which it certainly isn’t.

People have followed him on Twitter because of his brilliance in engineering and creating companies, not because of his opinions on other topics. Like many other users, he’s using that platform to opine about stuff in which he has little to no expertise. And as long as he’s just one user spouting nonsense, then I have no issue. Free speech and all. But when he uses advantages gained elsewhere to buy influence where he hasn’t earned it, then I do have an issue with it.

The best analogy I can come up with on the fly is Microsoft buying its way into search with Internet Explorer by bundling it with Windows. Windows won its dominant position in the marketplace by its features and its marketing and its sales to personal-computer manufacturers. IE had not earned a market-leading position by its performance. So to force IE into that leadership position by power earned elsewhere undermines collective utility.

Similarly, I think, Musk views himself an expert on speech and social media. He’s transferred the appeal he has because of his engineering and company leadership into social media, but the jury is still out on the latter. He hasn’t earned a leadership position in that area.

To me this whole discussion gets into Ayn Rand territory, where she believed there exists a small number of supermen, disproportionately gifted and superior to everyone else, who need to be allowed to exercise their genius so the rest of the world can benefit from it.

But.

Those people don’t exist. There are geniuses among us, but they have no emotional or moral superiority to the rest of us. They are no less petty and no more aware about our community, its needs, and how we interact than those less blessed with brainpower or technical insights. That their genius manifests in commercial success makes them no better – and no worse – than the rest of us. I don’t begrudge these titans of industry their hard-earned rewards – and to have outsized commercial success you have to work hard – yet many of these self-same titans seem to believe that brilliance in one space equals brilliance everywhere. Musk himself seems to believe that his own brilliance knows no limits.

I respectfully disagree.

Cousin Mike

I don’t have a particularly large family, but then again it isn’t small either. Each of my parents had two siblings, and they gave me six cousins on my mother’s side and four on my father’s. All of my cousins have an appeal, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about one in particular.

My cousin Mike (on the right, above) is the oldest on my father’s side. My Uncle Edward’s four children showed musical talent, and family gatherings with them always featured guitars and banjos and singing. Everyone enjoyed it, but music to cousin Mike is like oxygen. He simply needs music to live.

He made his living as a salesperson for a big company that makes a lot of different things for buildings and machines, but whenever he had a spare moment he played music or listened to music or thought about music. He can play just about any stringed instrument, and he’s played in hobby bands throughout his life, often with other family members. He’s played for the past several years in a bluegrass band that plays regionally in the midwest, mostly northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.

To call it a compulsion is probably accurate, but there’s something of a muddy film that coats the word compulsion. Mike really feels compelled to make music, but music brings him great joy and satisfaction. It’s not drudgery, it’s a light in his life. It’s such a part of him, fused to his identity and the goals that give his life its purpose, that he yearns to do it, so there’s no friction at all with his need to do it.

I envy that alignment, and I hope my writing becomes that for me.

I am sometimes reminded of my brother’s bachelor party when I consider questions like this one. We took Shawn to Las Vegas, where we did the expected shows and gambling and adult entertainment and extravagant meals for a long weekend. It was probably 3am on Sunday morning when I found myself with a couple other friends of his sitting in a lounge cut out of the casino. On the tiny stage was a cover band playing pop hits from the 70s and 80s.

My first thought was dismissive, bordering on disdain.

“How pathetic do you have to be to play someone else’s music in front of six people at a casino at 3am? The effort to practice, the expense of the instruments and equipment, the costumes, the opportunity cost of the time and money invested, and this is the best you can do?”

And then a second though occurred to me (not in time to save me from proving myself a judgmental jerk, of course).

“If they are playing this gig, then it’s obviously worth the sacrifices they’re making. They get to do what they love to do, and someone is paying them to do it. They are performing on stage, playing music with their bandmates, because they want to do this exact thing. And that’s such an admirable trait. Chase your dreams and appreciate the journey.”

I chose to believe that they were living the life they wanted to live, not grudgingly punching the clock on a dream with a different destination.

That Vegas trip was a couple decades ago, and I hadn’t considered my cousin Mike at that time. But thinking about him validates for me the second thought I had on that early Sunday morning: some people are lucky enough to love what they must do.

And I hope to be one of them.

The Struggle

There’s a purity in selfishness.

An enticing simplicity.

A seductive ease.

I know my own desires, my own needs fully, but I’m just guessing at yours. And who knows what the guy down the street thinks. No, I know what I need, what I want, what I deserve, and that robust and certain knowing contrasted with my supposition of your thoughts – even if it’s well-intentioned – gives exaggerated weight to my side of the scale.

Plus I don’t get a direct return from investing in your satisfaction.

So I have a thorough understanding of the geography of my desires and I reap the entire benefits of what I do for myself. No wonder it’s so tempting to ignore you.

And yet.

We live communally.

I need you and the rest of our neighbors to do things for me, like build roads and schools and hospitals and parks and recreation courts and fields. I need you all to help provide police and fire protection and maintenance for those roads and schools and hospitals we built. I also want you to keep an eye on my house when I’m on vacation, and I need to have some social interactions with you to feed my real need for human connection. Plus I actually like hanging out with you. We play well off each other, you make me laugh, and we both like beer and the Bears.

So for a plethora of reasons, I interact with you, and you need a reason to interact with me. But this is where it gets complicated, I suppose. Some of my interactions are motivated by necessity – I need to be nice to you so that you will do what I want. Others are motivated by good will – I like you, and I like doing things with you. So what looks like altruism might actually be selfishness dressed up. Or it might really be altruism. Giving for the greater good.

How can we tell the difference?

I can’t know another’s heart. So I choose to believe that what looks like altruism really is altruism. That assumption creates emotional risk, of course – the good feelings end when there’s no further gain to be had – but I much prefer it to the stress and distraction to which suspicion and second-guessing lead. And I really do believe that most people are honest. Or at least guileless. They tell you what they think, perhaps shading the truth here and there, but you can generally trust what someone tells you. So I figure I’ll be right more often than not when I give the benefit of the doubt.

There will be pain, of course, because people sometimes lie. But maybe that’s selfishness talking again. If I’m worried about getting hurt and strategizing about ways to reduce that risk, then I’m just saving my ass again, and I’m not thinking about how to make life better for all of us.

And maybe that’s where we should really start.

Cycling

I cycled the Katy Trail – at least part of it – last weekend with a couple of my best friends from college.

It was an interesting trip, and, as usual for these types of unusual experiences, highly informative. I learned so much. About Missouri. About my friends. And mostly about myself.

Central Missouri, at least along the Missouri River, is a beautiful, largely friendly place. For most of the ride we had the river on one side and bluffs on the other. The river is huge, much beefier than anything I’m used to seeing, and the bluffs are either exposed and looming or covered in vegetation and towering. Trailside trees make canopies in spots, tunnels in others. And when the river is away from the trail, fields of corn and soybeans cover the floodplain. The folks in the towns along the trail are welcoming. Very open and very helpful (with the exception of one intimidating general-store owner). And they love their Cardinals if shirts and hats are an accurate indication of such sentiments. . . .

Our ride went from Boonville to St. Charles, about 155 miles, with another 20-ish in side trips to Jefferson City and Hermann, over 4 days. It is the longest ride by far either of my friends have made, and so it tested them. It was easier for one than the other.

My first friend has arthritis and is significantly overweight, though he has been losing weight for a few months, and he did prepare for the ride by going on regular weekend rides in Chicago. He also drew the short straw on the rented bikes, getting the oldest and biggest and heaviest bike among the three of us. He struggled physically, slowing as the day and days went along. His arthritis affected him as he stayed in the same position on the bike for hours, and he spent a lot of the first couple days deep in the pain cave. He never complained, but it seemed to me that he often wondered if he’d be able to finish the ride. On the third day his rear wheel went way out of true, so we passed the bike around – when he was on one of the other bikes, his ride felt a lot better, which lifted his mood, and the fourth day he got a new bike, which made a huge difference in how he felt. It was so gratifying to see him finish the ride and to see in him the pride that comes with completing something that is really hard to do.

My other friend had the opposite experience: he was the nervous one going into the ride, but when we got started he was nearly euphoric with how manageable he found it. He’s been training consistently for nearly a year now, and he dedicated a large part of his training in the weeks leading up to the ride to the bike. That preparation paid off big time. He could easily handle the pace and the distance, and the confidence that bloomed the first day just continued to grow over the rest of the trip. He was very pumped by the end, and so excited that he started talking about other trips we could do.

As for me, I enjoyed the ride, but for different reasons than I expected. I always like spending time with these friends, and being with them for 4 consecutive days was no strain at all. But where I thought the ride itself might be the background for more vivid interactions with my buddies it actually became the centerpiece of the time we spent together. We pedaled probably over 17 hours, and over that time I became first aware and then deeply appreciative of the act of cycling in a way I’ve never felt before. I realized that being outdoors, in nature, moving myself through space, gave me a deep and profound joy that was even more satisfying because it was also unexpected. That I got to share that joy with close friends added to the delight.

I wouldn’t hesitate to reprise the experience, preferably with company and even more preferably with the specific company I had on this ride, but my biggest learning was that I can enjoy such a trip even if I made it alone. And I like knowing that.

Motivation

Whoever unlocks the secret to motivation will be incredibly rewarded for those insights.

I like to work out. I like to have worked out. But I often struggle to begin a workout. And I don’t have the slightest clue as to why that is. I’ve completed several marathons and half-marathons, Ironman and 70.3 triathlons, century and multi-day bike rides, and I’ve been training – save when I’ve been injured – for nearly 15 years.

And I still choose my bed or my sofa over my workout more often than prudence would dictate.

Meeting someone for a run or a ride is perhaps the best way to get me to the start of my workout. The terror that comes with committing to something I’ve not done before is another effective method. Absent either of those prods I’m just as likely to turn off the alarm or find a seems-like-compelling-at-the-time reason to do something else.

Perhaps it is as simple as genetic coding. We rest because we’re programmed to do so, to conserve our energies. Or maybe I’m just afraid or anxious or worried about falling short. Which is why, you’d think, that I’d be more determined to practice. If we ever needed evidence to show that we’re not a rational species I think our collective behavior around exercise would settle the argument: we know physical activity is critical to our health, and yet we seem to actively avoid it.

No, not always. But consistently.

And I feel tremendously disappointed with my choice when I bail on a workout. If the positive vibe post-workout isn’t enough motivation, you’d think the post-workout-shirking shame would do the trick. But no.

So what can get me to the gym day in and day out?

That is the more-than-one-million-dollar question.

Sacrifice

I believe in choice. In fact, I insist on choice.

Free will is the essence of our humanity. We decide for ourselves our actions and our inactions. We choose what to say and what not to say, when to say it, and to whom. We choose what we believe and what we do with the time we have. And our legacies are the sum of those decisions. Blaming circumstances or crediting others for outcomes of our decisions dodges the accountability we have to accept in order to realize our possibilities and responsibilities.

And choice necessarily requires sacrifice.

No matter what we do or say or think, in choosing we close the door on anything else we could have done or said or pondered with that same time and energy. And the more extensive the decision is, the more time and energy we must exert to make that choice, the greater the sacrifice required.

In our day and age, sacrifice has a negative connotation. It comes with a sense of deprivation or discomfort. What do you mean I have to give up something? I’m not wired to give things up happily. Just keeping the option open is enticing – it means I could still choose that path. Don’t take anything from me!

Instead of resenting it, we should celebrate sacrifice. Giving something up in order to achieve something else is not just an acknowledgment of reality. There is reason in the conscious sacrifice. There is maturity too, recognizing that some things have more value than others and that striving for something greater means foregoing things that matter less. You can add nobility too, if the sacrifice is personal enough – it is noble to put some things above your own comfort and security. Other people’s critical needs. Principles like freedom. Confronting evil and cruelty.

Recognizing sacrifice should inspire us to prioritize how we spend our time and energy. We would waste less of both if we were clear on what we are trying to achieve with our choices. We could weigh the opportunity cost of each choice confronting us against how we benefit. Like reasonable people do.

We could have such a different world if we looked to make sacrifices to achieve better things instead of looking for more of lesser things to hoard for ourselves. A deeper, more meaningful world. Can we try it?

My Daughter

My oldest daughter graduated from college over the weekend.

Such milestones prompt reflection for me. I couldn’t help but relive her birth, the delight I felt in her infancy, the mental and emotional turbulence of seeing her navigate her young life, cheering (and sometimes cringing) as she faced fears and tackled new challenges with varying degrees of success, balancing support for her with coaching and even discipline. I was better at the coaching and discipline, I’m afraid.

With some chagrin I admit that she emulated my study habits in her early academic career, procrastinating on homework and projects until she absolutely had to begin. As much as she was afraid of engaging with her work – afraid she wouldn’t measure up, I suspect – she couldn’t let her teachers down by failing to turn in something. I saw a lot of myself in her then: awareness of her talents, but unsure if they would really translate to excellence, and very much afraid to find out.

Some of my favorite memories of time with her were very stressful. She demands much energy at the best of times, but when she had a school project due, well, anxiety ran very high. Still, once we had a plan, we worked well together. She’s always been able to focus on the task at hand once she settles on it.

CLB Graduation Steps 4 Blog Our work together started with her fourth-grade California history project. We made a model of a gold-rush settlement called Squabbletown mostly out of popsicle sticks. It took many steps – we had to make the ground, paint it, add foliage, build and assemble the buildings – all of which we crammed into the weekend before it was due. Naturally.

She started off the same in middle school. Her project then was to build a model of an Egyptian sarcophagus. Again, multiple steps of designing the coffin, finding materials, painting, assembling, and writing a narrative. All of which we crammed into the weekend before it was due. Same with a model of the Parthenon.

And then she parted ways with my own middle-school self (that extended through my college graduation, and, to be honest, beyond). She found that the stress of delaying her projects affected her much worse than the thought that she might not deliver an acceptable product.

In seventh grade she started planning her projects, finishing them well before their due dates and enhancing her happiness greatly. She stopped needing my help. I had been the training wheels for her academic bicycle ride, and, as is the fate of parents throughout time, I was sidelined to her developing competence. And as much as I hoped for that transition, as much as I ache to see her blossom into all of her abilities, I miss not the uncertain and underconfident little girl (though I loved that little girl fiercely) but rather the tangible value I provided that she needed then and doesn’t need now. I have to admit that I’m a bit adrift, searching for the things that she needs from me now. The challenge is no longer hers, but mine, and I’ve not built all the habits or mastered the skills that will tell me what those are. But I do strive, because I believe that she needs me, even if I don’t know exactly how.

Watching her become not just more capable but also more aware of her talents and more sure of her efforts has been as gratifying and as satisfying as anything I’ve ever done myself. Seeing her pride in her success, watching her with the friends who adore her, hearing the professors who praise her, it’s all so affirming. Of what she’s done to this point, but also of the efforts of her mother and me. Accepting her hard-won diploma (magna cum laude, no less – please forgive me) was a milestone for her.

And for me. And I hope there are many more milestones ahead.