What Your Parents Did For a Living Might Be Shaping How You See Everything

A reflection for Mother's Day and Father's Day — and every ordinary day in between

There's a question I've been sitting with lately, one that hits differently when you're both someone's child and someone else's parent: What did the work your parents did teach you about the world before you ever understood it was a lesson?

Not the explicit lectures. Not the "here's what I want you to learn from this" moments. I mean the quieter curriculum — the worldview baked into their instincts, their language, the way they moved through problems. The stuff that seeped into you before you had the words for it.

I've been thinking about this a lot.

My Father, the Patent Lawyer: Failure Is a First Draft

My dad was a patent lawyer, which — if you've never spent time around one — is a particular kind of mind. It is someone trained to look at a thing that doesn't exist yet and ask: What is this, really? What problem does it solve? And who stood here before you, building toward the same idea? He didn't hand me those questions directly. He just lived them. And somewhere along the way, inherited them.

From him I learned that a challenge is rarely a dead end. It's an invitation to get creative — to look at the constraint sideways and find what it's actually asking of you. Patent law is fundamentally the art of turning "no, that's been done" into "but not quite like this." That reframe rewired something in me early.

I also learned that failure is part of the process. Not a verdict. Not evidence that you shouldn't have tried. In intellectual property, you file, you get rejected, you revise, you learn what you missed, you file again. The work improves because of what didn't work the first time. My father never treated a setback like a stop sign. He treated it like data.

And then there was this: stand on the backs of greats to learn. Prior art, in legal terms, is the body of knowledge that already exists — the inventions, the ideas, the attempts. You don't ignore it. You study it. You understand what came before so you can understand what's actually new. That's not plagiarism. That's intellectual humility. It's knowing you don't have to start from zero when brilliant people already got you halfway there.

I use all of this, constantly, in ways my father could not have planned.

My Mother, the Teacher: Everyone Has a Story Worth Hearing

My mother taught students with disabilities and special needs. Which means she spent her career mastering something most people never fully learn: how to meet people exactly where they are.

She taught me that communication is the bridge between isolation and connection. Not eloquence. Not volume. Communication — the willingness to figure out how someone receives, not just how you send. Her students communicated in all kinds of ways. She learned all of them. She never decided that her way of communicating was the right way and waited for them to catch up.

She also taught me that everyone has a story worth telling. Her students were often written off before she ever met them. She refused that. She found the person inside the label, the light inside the struggle. She listened for it. She looked for it. And when she found it — she named it out loud.

That last part is the one that stays with me most: speak the greatness of people and into them. She didn't just acknowledge who her students were. She spoke to who they could become. She held a vision of them that was bigger than what they could hold for themselves, and she articulated it back to them until they started to believe it too. That is a profound and underrated form of power. She wielded it gently, and with complete conviction.

What I Think About Now, as the Parent

I work in communications. I lead a team. I think about narrative for a living — how stories land, what they change, what they make people feel and do and believe. And I think about my parents constantly in that work, in ways that aren't always obvious even to me.

But lately, the question I find myself turning over is a different one: What is my work teaching my children before they know it's a lesson?

I watch my boys. I watch what lights them up. Engineering camps. Art projects. Experiments that make a mess and a discovery in the same afternoon. They get so excited. Not because someone told them engineering was important. Because they got to try something, and see what happened.

That's the whole thing, isn't it?

In a world that often defaults to certainty — that rewards knowing the answer, that treats confusion as failure — what does it mean to model something different? What does it mean for your kids to watch you lean into not-knowing with curiosity instead of dread?

We are living through a genuinely strange and uncertain time. The pace of change is disorienting. The old maps don't quite match the territory anymore. And in that environment, I think we are all role-modeling something for the people who are watching us — especially the small ones. We are showing them either that uncertainty is a threat to be feared, or that it is a landscape to be explored.

My father would have looked at this moment and seen a thousand patent applications waiting to be filed. What problem is this creating? Who's going to solve it?

My mother would have looked at it and found the person in the corner who needed someone to finally learn their language.

I want to be both of those things for my kids. I want them to see me get excited about something new instead of nervous. I want them to watch me fail at something and keep going. I want them to hear me ask questions I don't have the answer to — and mean it.

Curiosity Is a Choice

Here's what I believe: in an age of uncertainty, we get to choose what we role-model.

Fear is available. Fear is understandable. Fear has solid reasoning behind it.

But so does curiosity. Curiosity says: I don't know what this is yet, and that's actually interesting. Curiosity says: Let me try. Let me look. Let me stand on the backs of greats and see what I can see from here.

My parents didn't sit me down and teach me how to navigate the unknown. They just lived in front of me. They got up and went to work with a set of values about problems and people, and those values became mine.

And now I get up and go to work — sometimes from a kitchen table, sometimes in a conference room, sometimes at a soccer field or a camp drop-off line. And my kids are watching.

I want them to see someone who finds the world interesting. Someone who believes that other people have something worth understanding. Someone who doesn't flinch at a hard thing.

Not because I have it all figured out. But because I watched two people who didn't either — and they gave me enough to work with.

Happy Mother's Day and Father's Day to every parent who taught without knowing they were teaching. And to mine: thank you for the curriculum.