Heavenly Advice for Careers and Life: 10 Pearls of Wisdom from My Mother

My mother would have turned 100 years old this Sunday, Jan. 22. And I’m convinced that had she been born in a different time and place, she could have been a highly successful business executive and perhaps even a CEO. Drive, intelligence, empathy, will, vision, and leadership were all present in outsized abundance in 112-pound Rita Evans, and after World War II she decided--luckily for my siblings and me!—to lead and shape a family and home rather than a corporation, and for nearly 96 years she carried out those responsibilities with boundless energy and passion and joy.

In honor of Rita’s looming centennial, I’d like to share a column I wrote about her shortly after her death in late 2012. Originally publised on Forbes.com, the piece is called 10 Things My Mother Told Me, and I’m posting it here because it offers a lot of great counsel for our professional careers as well as for our personal lives. I hope you enjoy it--and I know you would have enjoyed Rita Evans.

10 Things My Mother Told Me

At this holiday time of year, I hope you’ll indulge this personal story of a woman whose family couldn’t afford to send her to college but who was far smarter—and wiser—than most; who was 5’3” and all of 112 pounds and loved to laugh and entertain but whose iron-and-steel moral authority struck cold-hearted fear into her six knuckleheaded sons and one thoroughly independent daughter; and who attacked each day gleefully and fearlessly until called to her eternal rest on November 23.

Rita Claire Wiesen Evans, music lover and intellectual powerhouse, card-shark and world traveler, Pittsburgh Steelers fan and loving wife and mother, died recently at her home surrounded by her children and their spouses.

I ask your indulgence in stepping outside the realm of business and technology because over her 95 years on this Earth, Rita Evans accumulated, generated, and shared great wisdom—and wisdom is an asset that should be shared again and again. In that spirit, and as we enter the family-centered holiday season, it’s my great privilege to share with you 10 things my mom told me. 

1) We had a fairly big yard that hosted neighborhood baseball games about 9 months of the year (interrupted only by 3 months of football games). And when each of my four older brothers became old enough to play Little League baseball, a new phase of competition began. When I turned 9 and was finally eligible to play Little League, my friends informed me that it’s not automatic—we first had to do something called “tryouts.” So one evening as my mom was fixing dinner and had a rare moment of relative tranquility in the kitchen, I asked her what Little League "tryouts" are. Stirring a big pot on the stove—beef stew, perhaps?—she said, "Well, there'll be about 200 kids who want to get picked for teams this year, but only about 50 will be good enough to get picked. So you and the other kids will go 'try out' for the teams, and the coaches will watch you, and 50 kids will get picked and 150 won't." That was clear enough, but I had a followup question: "Mom, what happens if I'm one of the kids who doesn't get picked?" And Mom put the mixing spoon down and glided over to me and leaned down and put her hand gently on top of my head and gave me her huge, Katherine Hepburn smile and said, "Then don't come home." I smiled back, and felt perfectly fine.

2) In my college years, Mom once dropped everything else she had going on to respond to my SOS call requiring her to spend about 8 hours helping me rescue my broken-down VW that had just died on an interstate highway. As it happened, renting and using a tow-hitch was a first-time experience for both of us, but we worked it out. That evening, as the magnitude of what she’d just done for me began to dawn on me, I thanked Mom rather effusively, and she responded with some insight that I’ve thought about at least once a day every single day for the past 35 years: “Children never remember what their parents do for them, but they never forget what their parents do with them.”

3) Watching over the seven of us—not to mention the skads of neighborhood kids who joined us daily for endless games of baseball, basketball, and football—Rita Evans realized early on that high-touch supervision and medical care would be impossible for her and ultimately less than good for us. So Mom’s 3-stage medical-triage policy was simple. The first and most widely accepted was a friendly but not too-friendly recommendation: “Oh, brush it off.” Those insisting the injury required more care received the following verbal regimen along with a guiding hand out the back door: “You’re fine—and you’ll feel even better when you go back outside.” And any kid daffy enough to go back for more got the classic stage-3 treatment: “Go sit on the toilet.”

4) Every summer, Mom and Dad took their seven young savages (well, six savages and my very sweet sister) to Lake Erie for a week, and every winter the countdown to “how many weeks until The Lake?” would start just after Christmas. When I was about 12, for some reason I was given control of the grill for the days on which we’d cook hamburgers. I was very excited, and greatly enjoyed the responsibility and attention but discovered that after my grilling chores were finished, the hamburgers—MY hamburgers!—had all been eaten. I stomped over to Mom with a whiny look on my face (mistake #1) and then complained (mistake #2) about how I had slaved away over a blistering hot grill and cooked 36 hamburgers for 20 other people but now I would have to go hungry andwhere is the cosmic justice in that?? Mom narrowed her eyes at me for about a nanosecond—a baby rabbit in the crosshairs of a hawk—and then smiled, shrugged, and said, “It’s a dumb cook who doesn’t get enough to eat.”

5) Two quotes from literature typified Mom’s outlook on living, striving, and the mysteries of creation. From my earliest days, I was enchanted by these soaring thoughts written in Mom’s ugly handwriting (arthritis) and posted in our kitchen:

--“Ah, but a man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” – Robert Browning

--“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright//In the forests of the night;//What immortal hand or eye,//Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

“In what distant deeps or skies//Burnt the fire of thine eyes?//On what wings dare he aspire?//What the hand, dare seize the fire?” --William Blake

6) From the ancient Greeks came an admonition that Mom showered on us with regularity: “In all things, moderation.” However, as my oldest brother Harry has pointed out, “It’s interesting because in many ways, Mom believed the exact opposite.” Indeed, I wish Rita Evans had extended some moderation to me when it came to my grades (particularly in the area of “Conduct”), various elements of youthful personal hygiene, and my occasional tendency toward self-pity. And so, Mother dear, I’ve got to do a little editing of your words on this one and go with Harry’s interpretation that reflects more dynamically what you demanded of us rather than what you said to us: “Moderation in few things.”

7) Of the ancient Greeks, Mom’s favorite was Alexander the Great, whom she came to admire in her reading of a dozen historical as well as fictional accounts—particularly Mary Renault’s trilogy—of the young conqueror. Indeed, a huge photo of a bust of Alexander hung for decades just above Mom’s favorite chair. When I was in college and taking a class that included some study of Alexander, Mom warned in a letter that I’d need to keep my wits about me when reading what some “experts” had to say: “It seems to be fashionable these days to try to tear down the achievements and reputation of Alexander,” she wrote. “But these critics who say Alexander was brutal and vicious and a drunk—I don’t think they quite comprehend that life 2,400 years ago was a little bit different than it is today.”

8 ) Later in life—let’s say in her 80’s and 90’s—Mom offered the following wise perspective, but never with regret and always in the hope that her not-so-old and not-so-wise listeners might be able to bend the curve a bit: “We grow too soon old, and too late smart.” A less-elegant variation that we heard occasionally in our younger days—and again, always with a smile—was, “Spit in one hand and wish in the other, and see which one fills up first.”

9) Along those same lines, Mom occasionally had to remind us how little we knew and how much we had to learn: “Don’t ever think you have all the answers. Because the one thing you can be certain of in this wonderful life is that you don’t—and you never will.” Mom also occasionally deployed a customized version of that for my brother Frank, a larger-than-life character who, when describing his various exploits, often had a tendency to, let us say, color outside the lines: “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back.”

10) Rita Evans was born with triple-sized rations of focus, willfulness, and determination, and please trust me when I say that the passage of time in no way diluted the potency of those qualities. Twelve days before Mom died, she was in her home on a Sunday afternoon and fully engaged in one of her favorite pasttimes: watching NFL games while decked out in her Pittsburgh Steelers jersey, earrings, and scarf. My brother Joe, who lived close by and for many years was the first person Mom saw when she woke up and the last one she saw before going to sleep, stopped in during one of the games, and after a quick exchange of greetings Mom turned her attention back to the game. Now, I need to interject here that only 8 weeks earlier, Joe had undergone emergency and life-saving brain surgery—and even though Joe quickly made a miraculous recovery, Big Rita still got pretty weepy each time—well, almost each time—she saw him. Joe pulled up a chair next to Mom’s and tossed out a few different conversation-starters but got little response from Mom other than “MMM-hm” or a desultory glance. Finally, when Joe tried for the fifth or sixth time to hook Mom into some small talk, Mom waved her hand at him somewhat dismissively and said, “Joe, get a soda and be quiet—I have to watch football!”

In closing, please let me mention a couple of recollections from the visiting hours at the funeral home. The first has to do with not just the sheer number of people who came to pay their respects, but the variety of those people whose lives Rita Evans had touched: young and old, successful and struggling, sobbing and smiling, close friends and random acquaintances. And my siblings and I all took great comfort in knowing that all of those kind people had been touched by Rita Evans and likely took with them some of her wisdom, passion, and joy.

And second, just as the visiting hours were about to begin, three wonderful women who had known Rita Evans for almost 100 years walked in together, helping each other along, and one of them said to me, “The thing about Rita, even from first grade, was that she really knew right from wrong.”

Rita Claire Wiesen Evans, Jan. 22, 1917—Nov. 23, 2012. A life not only well lived, but brilliantly and fearlessly lived. RIP.

-----

If you liked this piece, you might also enjoy my other recent LinkedIn posts:

Career Nightmare: The Worst Possible Thing that Could Happen at Work

Life After Oracle: Helping Companies Grow Via Strategic Content, Communications, and Messaging

Here's Why I Decided, at Age 60, to Launch a Startup

Amazon Named World's #1 Cloud Vendor in New 'Cloud Wars Top 10' Ranking

CLOUD WARS: Will Amazon, Microsoft, Google, or Some Underdog Rule the Cloud?

The Most Outrageously Good Business Book of the Year: Lightning and Pirates and Kings, Oh My!