Thanks for the advice, Mom! And Happy Birthday!
Today would have been my mother’s 91st birthday – she died ten years ago on December 12, 1999.
In the ten years since her passing, I have thought about her often – even more so in recent days. I remember the stories she told me about growing up in southern New Jersey just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia as a middle child of Polish immigrant parents. She came of age in the heart of the Great Depression and married my father two months after the Nazis invaded Poland to mark the start of World War II in 1939. And having grown up in a neighborhood of boys, she could hit the hell out of a baseball. I still have a mixture of pride and embarrassment when I think about the summer evening she was playing ball in our back yard with the neighborhood kids and hit a line drive directly into the neighbor’s kitchen window!
I’ve blogged in the past about what I’ve learned from my father about working and playing well with others. I just wanted to share a key lesson from my mother that contributed greatly to my almost twenty year run as a freelance consultant/writer.
I was probably about eight years old. It was summertime and I was playing Little league baseball. I guess I inherited my mother’s prowess with a bat because I was a pretty comfortable as a hitter right from the start. And this particular evening I had four base hits and was touting my exploits to the neighbors. My mother overheard my bragging, dragged me into the house, and firmly explained that “tooting your own horn” was not only inappropriate, it could come back to embarrass you. Her belief was that it is much better to let others talk about your accomplishments rather than doing it yourself.
Today people often ask me if I am an expert in whatever. Having had my mother’s good counsel, I will respond by saying something like, “Well, I do work in that area, however, it is really not for me to say if I’m an expert; that’s for others to say.”
As I look at some blogs, resumes, Facebook pages, and other venues, I wonder how my mother would react today to some of the claims people are making and what they are saying about themselves.
I’m interested in hearing from everyone – particularly Millennials and Gen X readers – regarding the relevance of my mother’s advice in this new age of social media marketing. Thanks!
Happy Birthday, Mom!
Tags: commentary, Gen Y, Millennials, Values