Success By a Different Metric
This Father’s Day got me thinking about my Dad. Some of the best advice I ever got was from my father, and he taught me more than any other one person by a large margin. He was untraditional to say the very least — outwardly he was a guy with bad grooming, foul language, dancing down the street when moved to do so, and changing jobs at times with great regularity — and by many people’s standards he may not have been a success. He was never materially successful and he certainly wasn’t famous — the yardstick by which our culture today seems to measure people.
But let me tell you a few things about my Dad:
When I was a little girl he was a graduate student, working towards a PhD in History that he never completed. But he took my older sister and me to the park all the time. He swung us way too high on the swings and chased us around pretending he was a bear. He would also get on all fours so we could ride on the bear’s back once we caught him. He gave us his time and genuinely enjoyed hanging out with us. That remained true all his life.
When I was about 12, he owned a very small pizza shop in a not-very-nice neighborhood where my sister and I worked after school and on weekends. The days were long and my father and I enjoyed listening to talk radio and discussing the topics- and critiquing the hosts. One day I was particularly annoyed with the yammering of the host, who was complaining that his wife was always losing his socks when she did his laundry. I said to my father, “Why doesn’t that guy do his own laundry? Or tie his socks together before he puts them in the laundry so they don’t separate? — And stop blaming his wife!”. My father insisted that I take a dime (it was a dime in those days) and use the pay phone (there were no cell phones in those days) to call into the talk show and tell them what I thought. I pushed back very hard — why would anyone want to hear from a kid? And he told me- “Your opinion matters as much as anyone else’s and you have something to say. You should say it!” I had no idea at that point in my life how meaningful a lesson that was!
One day my Dad came home on foot. My mother assumed the car had broken down — but soon learned that he had given it away. Given it away????? We had challenges paying our own bills, and giving away a car seemed insane. My father had wanted as a child to be a monk, and although for personal reasons he strayed from organized religion, the principles that he valued so deeply he lived every day like no one I have ever met. He explained to my mother that the guy who rented the apartment behind the pizza shop (who rented from my Dad) couldn’t get work. He was a plumber, and without a car he couldn’t get to jobs and carry his tools. My father said simply “He needed it more than I did”. And so we didn’t have a car, but learned a lot about giving in the right way- I don’t think my father ever told a soul that he did that, and so many other things, to help the people he encountered every day. Sacrificial giving was for him a very simple, very right, thing to do.
There were a lot of onions to cut in a pizza shop and I really hated cutting onions. Sometimes there was no choice, but on some lucky days my father would give me the choice- either cut the onions or go read the newspaper and summarize each article and tell him about it- since he didn’t have time to read it. No matter how boring I thought the newspaper was, it definitely beat chopping onions. And lo and behold, an interest in Economics, Finance and Politics was born!
When I was 16 and finally old enough to get a waitressing job that paid, I stopped working for my father (well, at least some of the time) and got a job at an ice cream shop close to my house. One day in the summer my friends called and invited me to the beach. I envied my friends’ ability to come and go as they pleased- no job, no financial constraints. So, I called my boss and, interspersed with a few strategically placed coughs, I told him I wasn’t well and couldn’t come in from my shift. Happily, I hung up the phone until I turned to leave the room and saw my father standing there. He almost never raised his voice to me, but I could see he was angry. “What was that?” he asked. I lamely explained that I wanted to go to the beach. Very calmly he explained to me that people were relying on me, and that me not showing up for work meant that I just ruined someone else’s day. He directed me to pick up the phone, call my boss back, and say “I am sorry, I just lied to you, I am actually not sick and I will be right in for my shift.” It was a horribly embarrassing call to make, and it stuck with me forever- both about the downside of lying as well as of shirking my duties.
My father passionately loved sports- and particularly any Boston team. When my son Isaiah was born- the only grandchild he ever met- he refused to call him Isaiah until the basketball season was over (due to his hatred of Isaiah Thomas), and called him Larry (as in Bird) instead. My father was a chain smoker until I got pregnant with Isaiah, and then quit cold turkey so his grandchild wouldn’t be subjected to second hand smoke. All those years that my sister and I complained sitting in the back seat of the car in the winter time with the windows rolled up choking on the smoke from his pipe, cigarettes or cigars for some reason wasn’t an issue (when we complained he would say “Shut up, kids!” with no malice but definitely no sign of quitting- people are complex).
My father learned that he was terminally ill when he was 48. He had one bad day- the first day the doctors told him- and after that he was cheerful and grateful for the life he had. Every day. He often said how lucky he had been to have had so many great years, when some people hardly have any. He tried so hard to make losing him easy on all of us- worrying far more about how my mother and my sister and I were doing with him dying than about the fact that he was actually dying. 27 years later we still miss him every single day.
My Dad was the best, and the #1 person who shaped my life. Success is definitely not wealth or fame but how much you impact the people you encounter. By that measure my father was the most successful person I have ever met.
