I want to talk about my own life, and I am leaving my family and my kids out of it, because that is a different kind of good.
Take every sweet memory I have, the comfortable stretches, when I was making lots of money and everything was wonderful. When my life is comfortable, when I was making lots of money, when everything is wonderful, I gain nothing from it. I liked those years. But as a person they did not make me better, they did not increase my wisdom or my knowledge, and the one thing they grew reliably was my ego. In the best time of my life financially, and in every other materialistic way, I was worse than I am right now.
The hard things did the opposite, and each one paid in something specific rather than in general wisdom. When I was a kid my parents divorced. My mother had to leave my father, and I grew up independent. That is a bad thing that happened to a child, and it is also exactly where my independence came from.
Then my father remarried. She was a strange Central Asian mix, her father Russian, her mother not, and when she walked through the streets of Urumchi everybody turned to look. My father loved her. And every single day at dinner, only at dinner, never any other time, she found something to say that would hurt me. I felt like I was chewing glasses. Like the food I was eating was cutting my throat on the way down.
What I learned from her is empathy. A sentence can make somebody's day or make their life miserable, and the difference costs the person speaking nothing at all.
Years of that at dinner, and what I took out of it was empathy. Where does a skill like that actually show up?
On the phone with strangers whose job is to tell me no. A ticket of mine got canceled and I called the airline. Most people call customer service and vent, because they are angry and the person answering is the only human available. It is not their father's company. They lose nothing if you walk away. So I asked how her day was going, and where she was working from, and she told me, and I said I had heard beautiful things about her country, and then I explained what had happened. She fixed it properly, better than the policy required. Every time I catch myself opening a call that way, I am using something I was taught by somebody who did the opposite to me at dinner for years: showing empathy, and being kind.