I was very big when I was young, and really teased for that. They called me Cow and Big Bird. I stood out because I was so tall. In late elementary school and middle school, I had a lot of trouble with friendships.
I think there’s a common perception that successful entrepreneurs have had a straight-line path to success. People look at Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg and think, of course, their future success must have been obvious to everyone, their path must have been smooth. Yet for many of the entrepreneurs I spoke to, it could not have been more different.
When I speak with the mothers of enormously successful kids, I often hear more about challenges than an easy road. More about struggles and obstacles than brilliance or intellectual gifts. More about parenting strategies than raw talent. More about financial issues than wealth. More about death or divorce or illness than fairy tale childhoods.
Of the entrepreneurs profiled in this book, many faced tough situations: some grew up poor; some struggled with learning issues or other problems in school; many came from difficult family circumstances; several had parents who divorced; some had parents who were struck by major illness. In fact, ten percent had parents who died before the kids finished college, an astonishing number. Even if they didn’t face major crises directly, often their parents taught them about their ancestors’ struggles. And they learned to overcome adversity. As Winston Churchill said, “Success is not final…failure is not fatal…it’s the courage to continue that counts.”
In his book The Gift of Adversity: The Unexpected Benefits of Life’s Difficulties, Setbacks, and Imperfections (2013), Norman Rosenthal says that our most important lessons are learned from life’s challenges. He discusses different types of adverse situations and shows how each kind of challenge can lead to its own form of wisdom. In chapters such as “Don’t Hold On to a Grudge” and “Hold On to Dreams,” he shows how people gain resilience from confronting difficult situations.
Of course, most entrepreneurs don’t learn how to overcome challenges by reading a book. They learn it by watching their parents—and especially their moms—do it, day after day.
The fantasy about entrepreneurs is that they’re geniuses who can do anything with the snap of a finger—even conjure up whole industries out of thin air. In reality, though, most entrepreneurs face enormous adversity before they achieve success. What sets them apart from other people is their combination of vision and resilience. Vision isn’t completely teachable, but I learned from my interviews with entrepreneurs that resilience most definitely is.
None of us would knowingly choose adversity, but I believe that we get to choose how we meet it. We can choose resilience, or we can lower our expectations and even retreat into blame, self-pity, or fantasy. We can settle for being unhappy. One thing entrepreneurs seem not to have learned is how to settle for less than they want. That’s an effect of resilience, a quality that many of the entrepreneurs I talked with trace to their parents.
At its core, the entrepreneurial spirit isn’t about parlaying gifts and advantages into wealth, power, and prestige. It’s about refusing to back down, no matter what.
Sean Stephenson was born with osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), or brittle bone disease. He’s three feet tall and uses a wheelchair. But after you’ve heard him talk a few minutes, you realize he doesn’t think he has problems. And then after a few more minutes, you yourself begin to think he doesn’t have problems either. He’s as mesmerizing, charismatic, and inspirational a speaker as you’ve ever heard. You stop seeing the wheelchair. You start to see instead one of the coolest people you’ve ever met.
By the time Sean was eighteen, he had broken two hundred bones. Then he went on a plant-based diet, eating food that kept calcium in his bones. He got stronger, and now he’s even able to work out, which he does every day in the home gym he designed.
I spoke with his parents, Gregg and Gloria, who told me that when Sean was born, a doctor told them that all children with OI are bright and outgoing. That turns out not to be so, but they didn’t know that until Sean was ten. And maybe it was because they believed it, but in his case, it was true.
Besides vowing to create as normal a childhood as they could for Sean and his older sister, Gloria and Gregg encouraged him in all his pursuits. They told me that if something didn’t work, they tried it another way. And when someone said, “He looks different,” they said, “No, he looks memorable.” When someone called him “a wheelchair person,” they said, “No, he’s a person in a wheelchair.” And when people said he had a handicap, they said, “Everyone has a handicap. You just can’t always see it.” They always told him, “It’s okay to be different. It’s okay to be who you are.”
Sean experienced a lot of discrimination when he was young. One school wanted to transfer him to a school for children with disabilities, but his parents refused. And in college, when he applied for a job, he was told, “We’ve already hired our wheelchair person.” But he kept his sense of humor and didn’t let those incidents discourage him.
Since there were lots of things Sean couldn’t do while he was growing up, his parents let him play video games, more than they would have if he’d been more mobile. Sean loved sports, and so he loved playing sports video games. One day, he was sad because he couldn’t play any sports except the ones on his game console. To cheer him up, his dad said, “You can always make a lot of money and own a team one day.”
Often, when Sean was young and couldn’t play with other kids, he spent his time watching adults and making mental notes. He loved to figure out what makes people tick. He realized that everyone has fears about the same things, and that everyone experiences joy about the same things.
It isn’t often that someone three feet tall wheels into a room. Sean knew he could easily command attention. He never had stage fright, and he learned that once you have people’s attention, you have to keep it. He always had compassion, and he knew he wanted to help people. In fact, the first time I heard him talk, he said, “Guys, why are you afraid to ask a girl to dance? Look at me. If I’m not afraid, you shouldn’t be, either.”
Sean began his career as a public speaker when he was in high school. One speaking invitation led to another, and soon he got paid—$200 the first time. It hadn’t even occurred to Sean that he could get paid to speak. He kept it up through high school and college. But one thing he refused to do was speak only to people with disabilities.
It was through the Make-A-Wish Foundation that Sean met his mentor—Tony Robbins, the famous motivational speaker. Tony told Sean, “You can do this, too. And you have an advantage over me. When I tell people that they can overcome anything, they reply that it’s easy for me to say. But they’ll never say that to you.”
Sean became outcome-oriented. He told his parents, “If I can’t do it myself, I have to figure out a way to get what I want,” and that taught him to keep trying different approaches until he solved a problem. When he broke his arm in high school and couldn’t write out his math solutions, he learned how to come up with the answers in his head. Then he had to argue with his teacher so he wouldn’t have to submit the worksheets.
Though he was generally optimistic, there were still times when Sean felt dejected. His parents never discounted his feelings, but they also encouraged him not to wallow in them. When he was sad, his mom told him, “You get to choose how you’re going to feel. All emotions are valid. But feeling sorry for yourself isn’t a good place to live. You have to decide how long you’re going to feel that way. If you can’t decide, I’ll decide for you and set the egg timer. You can feel sad for twenty-five minutes.”
Sean spent more time with his family than other kids did because he couldn’t do some things on his own. So the family became very close and traveled a lot, visiting forty-seven states together. Gregg and Gloria tried to show their kids how other people lived, exposing them to as many places and people as possible.
Sean’s parents told me that the choices they made as a family gave him opportunities to do many things. But they never directed him toward any career: “We let him do what he wanted. We never told him what he could and couldn’t do from his chair. We let him figure it out.” So that’s exactly what he did.
While enrolled as a student at Chicago’s DePaul University, Sean worked as a White House intern for President Bill Clinton. He published Get Off Your “But”: How to End Self-Sabotage and Stand Up for Yourself, with a foreword by Tony Robbins. He became a therapist with a private practice working with top executives from all over the country, who consult with him in day-long sessions to learn how to be happier. Oh, and in 2012, the Three Foot Giant married lovely, successful, five-foot-tall Mindie Kniss, a business coach and former Fortune 100 entrepreneur. They live in Arizona.
Did Sean’s physical limitations result in his being entrepreneurial, because he had to figure out his own ways of accomplishing his goals? Or would he have accomplished just as much if he’d been three feet taller? We’ll never know, of course. But we do know that with his parents’ help, he learned to view his challenges not as a burden, but as an opportunity.
Most children don’t face obstacles as imposing as Sean’s. But the more common difficulties of childhood—getting bullied or teased, failing to fit in, having a hard time making friends—can feel powerfully intimidating to a kid. Those challenges present the same choice that Sean faced—to give up or keep trying. That’s important for everyone, no matter how tall.
Today Ellen Gustafson is beautiful, happily married, successful, and very involved with her causes. In 2007, she cofounded FEED Projects with Lauren Bush after Lauren created the FEED Bag, a tote whose proceeds feed one child for a year for each bag sold, through the World Food Program. Ellen has cofounded other food programs and initiatives since then, including the 30 Project, a food policy research center in New York that also operates a health and fitness program in public schools; Food Tank, the “food think tank” she cofounded with Danielle Nierenberg; and the Change Dinner campaign and HealthClass 2.0, both intended to change attitudes toward food at home and in schools. But, as she told me, life wasn’t always easy for her:
I was very big when I was young, and really teased for that. They called me Cow and Big Bird. I stood out because I was so tall. In late elementary school and middle school, I had a lot of trouble with friendships.
All parents struggle with how much to help their children in difficult situations. Should they fix them or let their children struggle and learn to fix the problems themselves? Ellen’s parents did a little of each:
It got so bad that my parents moved me from a small, sheltered school to a big public school after fourth grade. They wanted to take me away from kids who were mean and they thought I might find more friends in a bigger school.
At the time, I wanted my parents to fix the situation for me, but they couldn’t. I realize now parents can’t do that for you. You have to do it yourself.
So they gave me the tools to handle it myself. They told me I was talented and good enough, and that I didn’t need to be hurt by those mean kids.
And then it was sink or swim, which in retrospect helped prepare me for the big wide world. My mom was very good at balancing being comforting and making me solve problems on my own. She made me feel I wasn’t a big ugly monster, even if the kids called me that, but she didn’t try to make friends for me. She taught me that life won’t always be fair. People won’t always be nice to you. Things won’t always turn out the way you hope.
This has really helped me in my professional life. It’s helped me understand that my convictions and what I thought about the world were right, even if others didn’t agree with me.
Her mom’s approach enabled Ellen to transform a potentially damaging experience into an attitude toward challenges that later propelled her entrepreneurial ventures. Ellen also gained some important insights into human behavior:
In eighth and ninth grades, when the other kids started growing, it all worked out. I had the classic “ugly duckling” transformation, as suddenly I wasn’t taller than everyone else. But it was interesting for me to observe because I saw how differently people treated me when they thought I was attractive, compared to when they thought I wasn’t.
The love and support from my parents got me through those difficult times. I didn’t care as much that those kids in my class were mean to me, because my parents kept telling me I was a smart, capable person—and I decided they were probably right.
Parents have a powerful instinct to shield their children from trouble and protect them from the pain the world can inflict. I’m confident that mothers who raise entrepreneurs don’t feel that impulse less strongly than anyone else. But the mothers I talked with chose to let their children experience and respond to difficulty. They knew, consciously or not, that for their children to reach their true potential, they would have to learn to meet adversity head-on.
Sean Carasso was backpacking around Africa in 2008, when he went to the Democratic Republic of Congo. There he met five child soldiers who had been abducted from their homes, subjected to unimaginable conditions, and forced to kill. And then he learned that young children who were too small to carry a gun were sent to the front lines armed with only a whistle—to distract the enemy or to act as cannon fodder.
He helped the children escape, wrote about the experience, and sent it to eighty friends and family members. People forwarded his e-mail to others they knew, and it went viral. The next day, he had thousands of e-mails from people asking how they could help. He realized he had the power to do something about it, so he formed Falling Whistles, a campaign for peace in Congo. They raise funds by selling metal whistles people wear as a necklace to let the world know they’re whistleblowers for peace. The whistle has been converted into a voice to stop the warfare that continues to grip parts of Congo and its neighbors in the aftermath of the Second Congo War (also known as the African World War)—the deadliest war of our time, with millions dead and displaced.
Sean told me about something momentous that happened in his family when he was young: his family lost all their money. Other families might have been crushed by this—or at least tried to shield their children from it. Sean’s family embraced it—and even learned to have fun with it. It’s another example of taking something positive from adversity. Sean told me:
I still remember the dinner conversation with my parents, my grandparents, my brother, and me. My father’s business partner had absconded with all the money. My dad sat us down and said, “We have nothing left.” I was in third grade.
Glow-in-the-dark necklaces were brand new then, and my grandpa thought we could sell them. So we bought a load of them and went to parks and sold them to kids. I loved it. And I was a really good salesman—probably because I was selling to kids my age. We did this a few times a week for the next few years while my dad was in a lawsuit to try to get his money back.
And now I think back to when I was twenty-six, completely broke, and wanting to raise money to help the people in Congo. I think that there must have been something in my subconscious that told me to start selling necklaces.
The other thing we did when we didn’t have any money is my mom ran a swimming camp in our backyard. It was great, full of fun and laughter. I loved that everyone was at my house. So when we started selling necklaces for Falling Whistles, I started holding events in my backyard in Venice, and bringing in the community, just like my mom had done. We’d educate them about what was happening in Congo; we had a musician, a fire, live art. It wasn’t combative, as activism often is; it was inclusive and warm.
This spirit of survival and resourcefulness has deep roots in his family, Sean explained. His father is descended from Holocaust survivors—his great-grandmother was smuggled onto a ship in Greece as a stowaway at the age of fourteen, but the rest of her family perished.
Sean learned early that hardship didn’t have to send a person into isolation or despair. Instead, it could be used as fuel to connect with, and serve, others who faced adversity.
Sean’s parents didn’t hide the family’s problems from their children. They let the boys participate in solving them, in creative and playful ways. What could be better training for entrepreneurship than that? Sean learned one response to problems can be to create, laugh, and play.
We met Jenna Arnold, founder of the content creation company Press Play, when we were exploring how schools aren’t always the best incubators of future entrepreneurs (rule 3). But Jenna’s mom, Lauren, told me that learning issues weren’t Jenna’s only challenge while she was growing up:
When Jenna was ten, her hair fell out. One day I noticed a bald spot. I took her to a doctor, who told her she had an advanced case of alopecia. Within a month, she was completely bald.
Jenna somehow found the strength to get through it. She wore a wig for the next five years—she didn’t want her friends to know. I washed it every day.
We finally took her to the Cleveland Clinic. They told us that she had autoimmune issues triggered by environmental and emotional conditions.
She was taking all sorts of medication. After two years she said, “Mom, let’s sit in the hot tub and talk.” Then she said, “I want to heal myself.”
I couldn’t see past the baldness. I couldn’t see the future.
My husband said, “Let her have this adversity. She will grow from this.”
And he was right. I grew from it, too. A friend told me, “It’s time for you to get out of her hair so it can grow back.” A light bulb went on.
I agreed to let Jenna spend the summer with an aunt she liked.
Two years later, she spent the summer with her uncle in California. Before school started, she came home still wearing her wig and said, “Mom, I have to show you something.” She took the wig off. She had a gorgeous full head of hair. She said, “I’m afraid to take my wig off, because what if it falls out again?”
She decided to take the wig off anyway. She thought nobody had known she’d been wearing one. When she arrived at school the first day, all her friends hugged her and said, “Your hair grew back!” They had all known the whole time but had never said anything, because they hadn’t wanted to embarrass her.
But Lauren told me that Jenna’s struggles didn’t end there—sometimes her classmates were unkind:
In the middle of high school she said, “I can’t take these girls anymore. I’ve found an international exchange program, and I’m going to Spain. I don’t like the focus on makeup. I don’t like that my sixteen-year-old friend wants a boob job. I need to see what else there is in the world.”
Some parents would have balked at the idea of letting a struggling teenager go overseas. But Jenna’s mom embraced it:
We trusted her instincts for herself and her survival during those difficult teen years. When life got tough for Jenna, we recognized the importance of getting her into a different environment so she would see that the world was bigger than the world she’d known. We allowed her to leave the country for an international year to remove herself from the mean girls.
As my husband and I realized who she was, we supported her so that she would fulfill her potential and find her life’s purpose, which, based on her compassion, we thought would be philanthropic.
She wrote about her hair in her college admissions essay, and about the lessons she’d learned coping with adversity. I always knew that she was such a special person, and that I needed to trust her instincts because she knew herself, and what was best for her, better than I could ever know her.
Lauren also told me that she talks with young women all the time about the things that matter when it comes to raising children.
“It’s easiest in hindsight, of course,” she said. “In the throes of parenting, it’s sometimes hard to see a path forward.”
She told me that as she watched Jenna grow, she embraced certain insights that became mantras. Here are the hard-won observations Lauren learned to live by:
Lessons like these stand in stark contrast to the approach of some of today’s parents, who try to shield their children from adversity, not realizing that learning to deal with it can help children become fearless, resilient adults.
Some of the entrepreneurs faced their biggest crises after their childhood years. Only in the wake of those challenges did they realize the full power of their upbringing.
Nyla Rodgers is living testament to the effect that a resilient parent can have. Her mother, Stephanie Moore, died while Nyla was in grad school, and Nyla redirected all her energy to starting a nonprofit to honor her mom—Mama Hope, which has established thirty-four health, education, agriculture, and water projects to help 150,000 people in four African countries. She’s also been inspiring people with her Stop the Pity campaign, the spirit of which can be traced directly back to her mom’s approach to life. Here’s what Nyla told me:
The main lesson I learned from my mom was that I was a global citizen—I wasn’t just an American. I was part of the whole world, and what I did affected the whole world, not just my community. We’re interconnected, and what you do matters. She taught me that when I was really young.
I grew up in the Bay Area, an only child raised by a single mother. She was a hotel concierge. One day she took a dance class for fun and realized she could teach the class better than the teacher. So she studied videos, and when I was six and she was the age I am today, she opened a dance studio. She taught every kind of ballroom class—swing, jitterbug, tango, waltz, two-step. She did this so she could be with me during the day. She taught in the evenings.
She showed me I could do anything I set my mind to. I never realized we were struggling financially, although looking back now, I can see that we were. “No” was never an option. Not being able to do what we wanted was never an option. Even if my mom didn’t know anything about it, she always figured it out. She hadn’t finished college, but at a time when other moms generally weren’t starting their own businesses, she did that, too. She wanted to do something she loved, and she raised me on that income for sixteen years.
When she got older, she decided she no longer wanted to put on a sexy dress to teach dance, so she started teaching creative writing out of her home. She had taken a couple classes and decided she could do it. She was even more successful than she had been teaching dance.
Nyla’s mother taught her, both by example and through her advice, that the way to do something is to go out and do it. Her mom never paused to reflect on the difficulty of raising a child as a single mother, or to worry that she lacked the proper qualifications to do something she wanted to do.
Then, Nyla said, her mom got cancer:
When my mom was sick, her students were all there for her. People signed up on an hourly basis to spend time with her. She was never alone. My mom was a shining beacon of what’s possible when you follow your heart.
She was the opposite of parents who tell their kids to finish everything on their plate. She was adamant that you should only take what you need. She would say, “Don’t take any more than that. When you leave something, you make it possible for others to have something, not just for you to have something. When you’re not taking everything, there’s more for everyone.”
And she also taught me to do what you can. We delivered food on Thanksgiving. We always did service work during the holidays. We were always giving back, even though we didn’t have very much. It set up the feeling for me that no matter who you are, you always have something to give.
That sense of generosity was combined with a spirit of self-sufficiency and a belief in hard work. If you wanted to do something, you worked to make it happen:
I always wanted to do international work and see the world. I would watch National Geographic stories with my grandmother.
I took my first overseas trip when I was fifteen and my French class was going to France. I really wanted to go, and my mom said if I could raise half the funds, she would match me. That’s what started my entrepreneurial work. I babysat, mowed lawns, walked dogs, taught swimming, did data entry. I worked fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, for a month to raise the money. By the end of the summer, I’d raised enough to go.
Nyla went to UC Santa Barbara, she told me, and she majored in global studies. As a freshman, she was asked to write about the career she wanted, and she wrote that she wanted to do international community development work. Nyla continued her story:
When I left for college, my mom had an empty nest. She had a phobia about flying, so she never left the U.S., but she still managed to help people around the world. In her mind, she was a global citizen, and she always tried to do something bigger than herself.
So she started sponsoring an orphan in Kenya named Benard. He became her son. I had just finished college and started grad school, studying international relations with a focus on peace and conflict transformation. She and Benard kept writing letters to each other, back and forth. They’d never met, but my mom had a picture of each of us on her mantel. When she first got sick, it was her dream to go to Africa and meet him.
Nyla’s mother died before she could go. But she continued to provide inspiration:
Two weeks after she passed away, a friend of my boyfriend’s mother was planning an environmental trip to Africa with her students and said she was looking for someone to go with her. Incredibly, it was in the same village where Benard lived. I told her I’d love to go, and I wrote his sponsoring organization to say I wanted to meet him.
When I arrived in Benard’s village, there were five hundred people holding a memorial service in honor of my mom, singing “Amazing Grace” under a canopy. I hadn’t known that while my mom was sick, she had held a fundraiser and raised $1,500 for the women there to start businesses. They had wanted to start a community bank, and the seed money my mom had raised had transformed their community.
I was struggling with what to do with the leftover love I had for my mom. I think that’s what grief is—we don’t know what to do with our leftover love. When we’re children, we send love to our parents every day, and if they die, we have no place to send the love. It gets stuck, and that’s what grief is.
The people in the village presented me with a statue of two giraffes with their necks intertwined. They said, “We’re giving you this statue because your mom had the vision to see her feet and the vision to see far beyond. And it’s obvious you are a giraffe as well.”
They were right. What the giraffes symbolized—the rare combination of down-to-earth, practical humility and visionary perspective—shaped Nyla’s next move:
I had been working for international aid organizations like the U.N. In that moment, I realized I’d never seen anything as impactful as my mom’s $1,500. In bigger organizations, it’s always about the organization, not the community. I decided right then to dedicate my life to finding other communities like this one, by asking what they needed and funding it. I would do it in honor of my mom, and I’d call it Mama Hope.
What separates it from other organizations is that it started from love because I was so inspired by how ten women had taken that funding from my mom to start businesses and, by putting the profit back in the community, helped the whole community.
When I talk to a community, I ask about their vision, what they need. We create a partnership. I don’t create dependence—it’s not a handout. Often, communities have the tools to be a success. They just need the funding. I believe a community can solve its problems if it has the resources it needs.
Nyla took her mom’s approach to life and turned it into an organization that is changing the way the world sees poverty. Her mom’s influence lives on in other ways, too. Stephanie Moore’s writing students still meet every week. Three of the group’s members have published books, and all of them have had their work published in literary magazines. And they get together at a monthly poetry reading, Pints & Prose, to raise money for Mama Hope.
Deena Robertson, who cofounded Modo Yoga with her sister Jess, experienced a devastating injury as a young adult. She turned her rehabilitation into an opportunity to change what she was doing with her life.
Deena, Jess, and their sister, Shauna, grew up in a small town outside Toronto. Shauna, three years older than Jess, spent twenty years in the film industry and now raises money for charities through an online crowdfunding website she cofounded, CrowdRise. Deena told me that there was nothing for the three of them to rebel against, because everything they did was okay:
My mom had told us, “We believe in you as individuals, and we believe in your choices.” Because my parents trusted me to make good decisions, I wanted to honor that. They said, “If you drink, call us.” So I didn’t drink.
Deena was passionate about three things in school—photography, English, and, especially, sports. When she was in fourth grade, she was put on the eighth grade basketball team, and by the time she reached eighth grade, she was really good at a lot of sports. Her teammates were her best friends.
When she was a junior in high school, however, her school dropped the sports program.
“That’s what I lived for,” Deena said, “so what was the point of staying in school?”
She was uninspired by her classes—and, in a terrible turn of events, her best friend committed suicide.
“I realized I was using school for a distraction,” she told me. “I think so many kids are in school for the end goal. I wasn’t getting what I could get out of it. I didn’t want to go back there.”
So she talked to her mom, Janet, who’s called JJ. Deena told JJ that she hated school and wanted to leave. JJ had been a teacher at that school for many years, but she told Deena, “I’ll support you. If you’re not interested, drop out.”
When I talked with JJ about Deena’s not wanting to stay at her school, she said, “I felt she was my child, not the school system’s. What my children learned in the world was more important to me than school.”
She then arranged for Deena to enroll in an alternative school that allowed home study, and Deena, through a college program, was able to condense her last year in high school to a single semester. She was thriving.
Deena next enrolled in an acting program in Vancouver. But while she was there, a large blackboard fell on her and fractured her back. Suddenly the super-competitive athlete could barely move and was told that she might not walk again.
Deena flew home and began rehabbing with yoga. It healed everything and changed her life. She decided that instead of acting, she would open a yoga studio. She and Jess started Modo Yoga, and they now have more than seventy-five hot-yoga studios across the U.S. and Canada. The sisters are committed to promoting ethical, compassionate, environmentally conscious living through their studios, and their motto is “Calm mind, fit body, inspired life.”
Deena’s response to the accident—working hard, through yoga, to heal—didn’t come out of nowhere. She told me that family members before her had experienced plenty of adversity:
My mom lost her dad when she was sixteen, and then, when she was twenty-one, she lost her mom after a three-year battle with a massive brain tumor. My sister Jess had severe scoliosis and was told she’d need a metal plate in her spine. My dad broke his neck two weeks after Jess was born and was told he’d never walk again.
Today, happily, every member of Deena’s family is strong and healthy, physically and emotionally. Deena told me that’s because learning from challenges has always been integral to her family’s life:
The cool thing is, we really are all deeply grateful for this so-called adversity that happened to our family. Those experiences have been our greatest teachers, the long-term gifts that have made us who we are today. Adversity has a way of placing you in front of a crossroads. Either you die in the habit of pain and suffering, or you dive into the power of an empowered life through choice.
All of our life is just made of moments, and we can label them good, bad, happy, or sad, but they are all moments in time. So why do we give so much attention to the pain in our life? Imagine if we spent as much time thinking about a beautiful sunset as we do about our pain!
Deena told me that with yoga she rehabbed her mind as well as her body. Today, not only is she strong, graceful, and athletic, but one of the most joyful people I know.
For Hooman Radfar, the most striking experience of adversity came after he’d become an entrepreneur. His mom’s example, and her advice, helped him figure out how to deal with it.
Hooman, born in London shortly after his family emigrated there during the Iranian Revolution, grew up in Pittsburgh. He graduated magna cum laude in computer science and economics from the University of Pennsylvania before earning a master’s in engineering from Carnegie Mellon, where he researched social networking. In 2004, with his younger brother Cyrus, he cofounded Clearspring Technologies to create products and platforms based on their research into web services and social networking. Hooman later acquired AddThis, a social infrastructure platform reaching one and a half billion users monthly across a network of fourteen million publishers. He subsequently sold it and joined the cofounders of Uber and Foursquare at Expa, which works with proven founders to launch new companies. Their parents are both psychiatrists, and got divorced when Hooman was twelve years old. The boys also have a much younger brother, Darius. Hooman told me that he believes he and Cyrus became entrepreneurs because of their mother:
I have a very strong mom who was so influential in my life. She’s a very persistent woman who knows how to take a punch, which is so important for entrepreneurs, because you get a long string of no’s before you get some yesses.
Some parents are so determined for their kids to succeed that they foist their own interests onto them. But Hooman’s mom, Soraya, took a different approach, by supporting her children’s passions:
My mom always promoted and supported whatever we were interested in. From a young age, I was constantly drawing. I would steal my dad’s computer paper and draw with a pencil for hours. My mom recognized my talent and asked a colleague at her job who was also an art teacher to work with me. So from fifth grade through high school, her friend gave me art lessons.
Mom always wanted to help us unlock our potential. When she saw that my brother and I were interested in programming, she arranged for us to go to a computer camp for the summer. The first time I saw the Internet was at computer camp, and I was blown away. From then on, we were hooked.
She thought we were unstoppable, so we decided we must be. When I left for college, I was intrigued with day trading. Trading in my dorm room, I was making real money—tens of thousands of dollars on paper. When the market crashed, I followed it down and lost most of the money I’d made.
I was so depressed. I called my mom, crying. “I’ve lost all the money!”
I’ve never forgotten what she said. “I have news for you. That’s not the only time you’ll lose money. Do you know how many times I’ve had to start over? When I came to this country, I had nothing and had to start again and keep applying to hospitals until I got a position. Focus on school. Keep going.”
She was so calm, so confident, so reassuring. I never looked at failure the same way again.
But it wasn’t the last time she’d teach Hooman that lesson:
I had started a company after grad school. We pitched it to some early investors, who were supportive. Then we went to Silicon Valley, and no one was interested.
We were upset, but we decided to change direction and focus on the social area instead of the technological. We told our investors, who said, “We’ll support you if you change, but we won’t fund you.”
I was wrecked. I called my mom, so upset, and said, “It’s over. They won’t give us any more money!”
She was so calm. She said, “You’re going to be okay. You’ll get more money. Go in the direction you want.”
This time, the lesson seemed to stick:
It was so powerful for me, because I had seen my mom battle and persist and come out on top. I had watched her on her journey.
My parents were divorced by then, and she was a single mom who was on her own, but she had done it. She was the master of her own destiny, and we had watched her take hits and bounce back up. So we knew we could do it, too. She was like a metronome—she always brought me back to the center.
We only had a few months of cash left, but we walked away from our first investors. We pitched new investors, and they gave us $2 million, and we moved to D.C. to be near them. And Clearspring became a huge success.
Hooman and Cyrus grew up in difficult circumstances, with parents who struggled. The parents didn’t shield their sons from adversity, and the boys learned to grow stronger from it. Hooman told me it helped shape them. He also shared his own ideas about the essential ingredients of entrepreneurship:
I think you need three qualities to be an entrepreneur.
First, you have to be willing to take more hits than the guy next to you. You have to be willing to run head first with all you’ve got. And you have to be willing to run into failure. That persistence is the key.
Second, you have to have a passion.
Third, you have to be creative and be able to run down the path with that idea for a very long time.
Watching his mom cope with adversity, and then learning to cope with it himself, helped Hooman become an entrepreneur. Whether or not your own children ever do so, the lessons you teach them about responding to adversity will help shape what they do when life doesn’t go their way.