Mother's Day & Fearlessness!
Today is Mother’s Day. My Mom is a very big reason I travel the world! I just read an article on themogulmom.com called How my entrepreneurship made my son fearless! about how one mother used entrepreneurship to help raise her child. Not to completely bury the lede, this was my mother. She wrote a blog all about the challenges of being both an entrepreneur and a mother at the same time. She discussed about how I was tasked in my life to help me feel like I contributed to the success of the family business.
The article is a great read and I won’t retread every point that she made (because you should read it). My perspective as the child of the mompreneur is I don’t think I learned of “fear” until I was at least in high school.Fear in this sense, is the fear of going without. My parents are strong and they’ve didn’t instilled a value of material possessions so I was rarely attached to toys growing up.
SIDENOTE: My father continues to laugh at how I am, still to this day, genuinely over-elated with the cheapest gift he gets me for Christmas. This year it was a selfie-stick.
In terms of fear, there are things that knowledge prevents. Of all of my mother’s advice in the blog, “teaching your children how the world works,” I understood how money was earned and how bills were paid. Ergo I knew that if there if is no money, bills will not be paid. There is no fear of loosing utilities when you figure out far in advance that you can pay the bills for them.
There was no moment when I thought my family was “poor” or that we couldn’t get by. I saw it as the conflict in any great man vs. the world story. Like Earth, Wind & Fire said: “A child is born with a heart of gold. It’s the way of the world that makes his heart turn cold.” Behavior is a learned process and not innate and I have been taught very well. So as a child of a mompreneur I think it is important that you must teach your children the value of happiness. Finally, I say thank you to my mother for not just giving me life and all, but actually choosing of becoming an entrepreneur. She chose her own sense of happiness of a sense of security for the family. I know that sounds selfish, but to me I feel the converse is true selfishness. No child wants to know that there parent’s happiness was sacrificed for their life. It creates a burden that neither party can get over. So while my mother constantly celebrates my travels. It should be known that I do the same for her. I love that I am the son of an entrepreneur. As her star rises I look on like an astronomer viewing the cosmos. As she takes on her ventures in making our world a better place I am just glad that she and I both know she made the right decision.