After Mickey passed, I was talking to my mom on the phone. She was talking about how we were such good brothers and we were so close. And I said, 'Mom, think about how we were raised. We were a military family. And in a military family, because you move around so much, your best friends and your first teammates are your brothers or your sisters.'
I think we all spend, sometimes, more time at our jobs than we do at home, and there are people that we wouldn't necessarily choose to spend so much time with. So those irritations and those, just those situations I think are really relatable.
My mom would spend a week in jail. She would spend a day in jail here - a week again, a week and a half, two weeks. My grandmother tells me stories of how because I would be at the house, I wouldn't notice that my mom was gone because she would be at work sometimes. So it was just like time when my mom would be gone and my grandma would tell me she'll be back. And nobody knew where anybody was.
If we didn't spend so much time reacting to things, we would spend less time feeling bothered. We would be able to relax in our lives the way our mind relaxes in meditation.
I can at least hearken to a time when I didn't have a cell phone, where I had to call my mom after movies collect from a pay phone, and when they said, 'State your name,' I'd say, 'Mom, pick me up,' and hang up the phone.
I remember being 24 in Los Angeles. And up until that moment, when my mom would call my cell phone and it would ring, I would be flushed with some sort of excitement that we all have - a little dopamine rush, when my phone rings - and I'd look down, and it would say, 'Mom.' It used to feel like a job to pick that up.
You realize how much the relationship when kids are young can suffer. And it's important to make sure that you are able to spend some time with each other. As a father, the best thing you can do for the kid is to love the mom. Even as a parent, I believe that loving the mother is the most important thing. And even parents who maybe aren't together I think that's important for them as well to respect each other and to be kind to each other, because I think it does so much in who they would pick to be around, or how they feel about themselves.
I think I'm going to spend some time learning how to be a first-time mom, and then I'll go back to work.
What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?
Humans are kind of story-propagating creatures. If you think of how we spend our days, think of all the time you spend on entertainment. How much of your entertainment centers around stories? Most pieces of music tell stories. Even hanging out with your friends, you talk, you tell stories to each other. They're all stories. We live in stories.
In some ways a mark of good parenting is that you don't try to make your children into little knockoffs of yourself. None of us went into business. None of us became powerful people like that. All of us pursued our own passions and our own interests. One of my brothers was filmmaker. One of my brothers was a teacher. My sister was a librarian.
Entrepreneurs need to be reminded that it's not the job of their customers to know what they don't. In other words, your customers have a tough enough time doing their jobs. They don't spend time trying to reinvent their industries or how their jobs are performed.
Think of how much time is spent looking and applying for jobs. Some of those who have read my book on the precariat have told me they have applied for thousands of jobs. This is scarcely leisure; it is work.
All those predictions about how much economic growth will be created by this, all of those new jobs, would be created by the things we wanted - the extension of unemployment insurance and middle class tax cuts. An estate tax for millionaires adds exactly zero jobs. A tax cut for billionaires - virtually none.
Our misconception is in imagining that our suffering or how intensely or how long we grieve is a measure of how much we loved. In truth, none of us would want another's grief as a testimonial of their love for us. More likely we would want our loved ones to live healthy, fulfilled lives without us.
How much time have you invested in thinking about strategy? How many options have you considered before the plan was written? How have you ensured that the thinking behind the plan is challenged? How much time do you spend exploring trends, possibilities and cool stuff? How much time is spent playing with ideas, hopes and dreams?