Founder of Connect Consulting Group, helping leaders thrive in our VUCA world with neuroscience, behavior change & lean communications.
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Forget about asking what advice you’d give to your younger self—a common question in profiles of the famous, not-so-famous and everyone else in between. Instead, ask, “What do you want to thank your younger self for doing?” The value of this question is at least threefold: It helps you reflect, show self-compassion and direct your future actions.
The idea for this question came to me while reading the engaging, insightful new book Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life by bestselling author and data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.
In the chapter about the secret to great parenting, the author reveals that where a child is raised—i.e., the neighborhood—has a much bigger impact on the outcome of the child than anything else the parent does. How do we know this? The economist and professor Raj Chetty and his team were able to access and analyze Internal Revenue Service tax data from all American taxpayers after it had been deidentified and anonymized. They also supplemented the tax information with other data. Chetty and his team then identified the three biggest predictors for a neighborhood increasing the child’s success in later years. These three factors are 1) the percent of residents who are college graduates; 2) the percent of two-parent households and 3) the percent of people who return their census forms.
Notice that all three factors relate to the adults who live in the neighborhood. As Stephens-Davidowitz explained, adults who are college educated tend to be smart and accomplished. Adults who live together in two-parent households tend to have more stable family lives. And adults who return their census forms tend to be conscientious and active citizens.
And there’s another benefit to having these responsible adults in the neighborhood: The kids around them can view these adults as role models. Further research conducted by Chetty and his team suggests that neighborhood adults who serve as effective role models can be more influential on a child’s development than the right schools or flourishing economies.
While reading about this research, I immediately remembered two influential adults I met at the age of 13 after landing my first job. I had convinced first my parents and then the Tulsa Oilers, the minor league baseball team, to hire me as their first female vendor, selling peanuts, popcorn and crackerjacks.
One of my role models was my dad’s coworker who agreed to drive me to work on his commute home, provided I could meet him at the office downtown. (My mother agreed to drive me there. She then picked up my dad who rode home with her on game days rather than take the bus. He’d pick me up after the game.) The 20-minute car ride from downtown to the ballpark with my dad’s coworker was a great opportunity for me to get to know another responsible adult as well as practice my conversational skills in a low-risk situation.
This travel arrangement got me to the ballpark a couple of hours before the game started, which meant I could watch the teams practice—one of my job perks. I hung out in the third-base box seats with the baseball scouts who shared inside baseball information with me. One scout made an effort to engage me in conversation. Once he realized I was as passionate about journalism as baseball, he also provided me with unsolicited career advice. His most intense advice was “Never date ballplayers if you want your own career.”
During high school, I met a noteworthy adult through another summer job. This time I was indoors in the accounting department of the company that also employed my dad. One of my tasks was serving as a courier, which is how I met George Kaiser, the president of another Tulsa company. He was the first Harvard graduate I ever knew.
George often chatted with me when I hand-delivered documents to him. At first, he asked me what I was reading in my spare time. Later he started asking me about my college plans as well as career plans. He was kind, yet firm, about how I needed to set high aspirations. I took his advice to heart, deciding to apply to higher-ranked, out-of-state colleges. Being admitted to and attending Northwestern University on a generous financial aid package altered the trajectory of my life.
Decades later, I remain grateful to these three men as well as to my parents for guiding me. Yet, until now I hadn’t given myself credit for listening to them and taking their counsel.
So here’s a thank you to my younger self for paying attention and acting on the advice I received. What these three role models told me and what I did with their advice were transformational. And also thanks to Stephens-Davidowitz's book, I’m now inspired to be a much more intentional and meaningful role model to young people in my downtown Charleston Eastside neighborhood.
If you’ve not recently thought about your role models growing up and other influential childhood events, you too may want to do a similar exercise. Who and what had a big impact on you growing up? What did you learn? How did you weave these learnings into your life? Anything you ignored? Any regrets? And how was your life shaped by all of these people and experiences?
Then ask yourself, “What do you want to thank your younger self for doing?” You deserve credit, too.
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