Leading and Learning: 2 Bits of Wisdom from My Parents that Shaped My Life

Influential childhood advice.

If there’s anything I remember from my early childhood, it’s my parents bestowing these two bits of advice, the latter in the form of a question:

• Be a leader, not a follower.

• What did you learn today?

Every day on the car ride home from school or around the dinner table for the first 13 years of my life, I heard these two nuggets of wisdom. Without knowing, they became ingrained in my psyche. Looking back at the trajectory of my life, it’s clear that the beliefs and habits these two bits of advice instilled in me set the foundation for the person I am today.

Be a leader, not a follower.

“Because someone else…” did not fly in my house.

Before I could even finish the poor excuse explaining my poor behaviour for something I did that day, my Dad would cut me off, often by citing the annoying but true “If someone else jumped off a bridge, would you follow them?” adage.

And, as much as I hated it, I knew he was right.

Nothing can be said or done that gives you a permission slip to blindly follow. You must ask questions. You must think for yourself and decide. Followers can still be leaders if they follow with awareness, independent thought, and the courage to change course when necessary.

Beyond not blindly following, I was conditioned to actively lead.

To step up to the plate when no one else will. To take charge. To volunteer to go first. To take on the biggest workload in the group. To coordinate and organize. To make sure everyone’s voice is heard. To take responsibility not just for your work, but to ensure the group’s objective is met in a timely manner and to a standard of excellence. To speak up when something isn’t right or when someone is wronged. To lead by example.

Ultimately, to be a leader is to accept complete and total responsibility and accountability for everything in your life. Everything.

In school, at work, and in sports I led. Whether formally appointed or informally influencing, I defined myself by being a leader. And it’s paid off in my personal and professional lives.

Yet besides the brave few who seek leadership, there are so many sheep.

Scared to be seen or heard at the risk of being unliked. Those who have allowed themselves to be over-conditioned by society allow their thoughts and actions to be dictated by their approximation of how it will impact their position in the social hierarchy. But as soon as someone else steps up and leads, accepting the risk of being the first, the sheep eagerly follow.

Not everyone is wired with the leadership genes of Tom Brady or LeBron James. That’s okay. Being a leader doesn’t require a boisterous voice or a daunting physical presence.

To me, being a leader means thinking for yourself, accepting absolute responsibility and accountability over your life, and having the courage to walk the untreaded path despite what others think or say or do.

You always have a choice. Choose to be a leader, not a follower. 

What did you learn today?

After picking us up from school the second question out of my Mum’s mouth after the customary “How was your day?” were “What did you learn today?”

And you better have a good answer because if your response was “nothing,” the next question was “Then, what the hell did you do all day?”

Around the dinner table, my Dad repeated the same routine.

It didn’t take long for my brother and I to make sure we learned something good, maybe even enough to impress our parents, every single day at school. Although we started paying more attention in class to have a good answer for our parents, a natural curiosity and passion for learning became deeply entrenched in both of us.

Today, we devour books and courses like a starved lion on fresh meat. We journal and think and write. We share ideas, philosophies, and strategies. We tackle problems in our life through methodical learning and practical application. We both graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools, have worked in a diverse set of challenging and competitive jobs, and each write a weekly newsletter (his on practical life philosophy, mine on longevity).

A learning mindset is one of the biggest assets you can have since if you can learn, you can adapt, grow, and evolve. And thanks to how our parents raised the three of us (my sister is a physicist and has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering), we have been gifted with the belief that learning is critically important and the habit of continuous and never-ending improvement.

So, I challenge you to end your day with the simple question:

What did you learn today?

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