Parenting
The Most Important Lesson I Learned From My Father
Personal Perspective: How does one learn to think differently?
Posted June 9, 2025 Reviewed by Kaja Perina
In the best film of last year, Better Man, when Robbie Williams is a boy his father tells him, “You’re either famous or you’re a nobody.” The father then abandons the family which provokes Robbie to set off on a 40 year quest to become a world famous performer racking up fifteen #1 hits in the United Kingdom and ultimately headlining a concert at Knebworth for over 100,000 adoring fans. One could say that the driving force or in Robbie’s life was to become famous in order to make his father proud of him so that they could reunite and Robbie would feel “unabandoned.”
In my workshops and in my books I say, “We become what we love and we become what we hate and both are inauthentic.” We imitate our parents when we are infants because we need them to protect us and feed us. As we gain a sense of self there are numerous individuation processes that we go through in order to become our own individual selves.
Like Robbie Williams, some people idolize their parents and spend their lives trying to gain their parents’ appreciation and approval (often even after their parents are deceased). Other young people overcorrect and individuate too hard: if their parents are squares, they become rebels; if their parents are hippies, they become conservatives.
Parenting is the most difficult job in the world. It is difficult because parents are trying to instill mutually exclusive characteristics: self-regulation and self-esteem. And I believe that parenting styles come in waves: if one generation was emotionally withholding and oppressive, the next will be laissez-faire and think the sun shines out their children’s asses.
There’s no perfect parenting. All parents (save the rare sociopaths) are doing the best they can with the tools they have at the time.
Looking back as Father’s Day approaches, here is the most important lesson that I learned from my father:
Sometime around 1974, long before Steve Jobs coined the phrase “Think Different,” my dad and I were walking on Hope Street across from the Palmer’s shopping center in Springdale, Connecticut where we lived. I think that we were holding hands — not necessarily out of affection but probably so I wouldn’t run out into traffic seeing that I was somewhat of a wild child.
As we passed the local convenience store, Bill and Fred’s, I spied through the window a lottery machine and accompanying blue lottery sign and excitedly asked my father, “Daddy, daddy, can we play the lottery?”
Without breaking stride he replied, “We just did. We win a dollar every time we pass the store without buying a ticket.”
Like Robbie Williams, this one phrase provoked me to conceive of money, investing, opportunity cost, time and most importantly freedom — mental freedom — in “different” ways than many other people. For instance, when I was at UPenn the cost of each hour of class time (tuition divided by classes) was extremely expensive — today about $140 for each hour of instruction. Thus, since the classes weren’t recorded as they are today, I never missed a class. Similarly, when I was in credit card debt at a 20% interest rate, every time I spent $20 I actually conceived of it as a $24 purchase to incentivize myself to pay off the debt faster: when everything you purchase suddenly costs 20% more, your desires are quickly curbed. Lastly, I learned all of the long-term percentage chances of winning and losing when gambling at casinos and can decide how I wish to flush my hard-earned money down the toilet accordingly.
So if there is a driving force that has guided my life, it was born from my father believing (seemingly, to my young mind) that he won $1 every time he didn’t buy a lottery ticket; this inversion transmuted into my 40,000 foot view of language, consciousness, and mores, and my “meta” analyses of everything that most people consider to be “normal.” The single taste is my ability and mandate to think different(ly).
Thinking differently has had its pros and cons. I have lived such a non-conventional life that it has caused me to be alienated from swathes of people who — like fish that cannot see water in which they swim— cannot question the arbitrariness and contingency of their own assumptions and beliefs. And thinking differently has also endeared me to many fellow seekers as well as many readers, students, and patients.
So thank you Dad. And Happy Father’s Day!
