Gratitude, Curiosity, Perspective
Lessons from My Mother
This holiday season, I am reflecting on how fortunate I have been to learn from many extraordinary teachers in and out of the classroom. While our team recently spent time working with our partner Tony Robbins, I had an epiphany: many lessons taught by my favorite coaches and teachers have been core teachings my mother has shared with me for the last 40 years.
Mom is a retired kindergarten teacher and community leader. Among her core beliefs have always been (1) gratitude, (2) curiosity, and (3) perspective. Every year, I find more ways to notice these teachings as they show up powerfully in my life.
Mom’s Spirit
In earlier posts, I have shared admiration for my late father, who made it out of Houston’s Fifth Ward during Jim Crow and came to California as part of the Great Migration. So much of who I am is connected to Dad’s journey. One of my greatest areas of self-discovery years ago with Tony was honoring the foundation Dad laid for my success, while separately designing a framework for life on my own terms. Mom’s spirit is a key inspiration for that framework.
My parents could not have begun in more different places. While Dad had stories of being chased by torch-carrying men on horseback as a Black teenager in Texas, Mom grew up with blonde hair and blue eyes in the paradise of Mill Valley, California. And yet they found each other.
Mom and Dad met at San Francisco State in the 1960s and fell in love. Only a few years earlier, interracial relationships were still illegal in some states. At times they feared for their safety. But from the beginning, Mom led them with courage: she went “all in” on the Civil Rights Movement, pushing Dad and others to do more. She still sings “Black is beautiful, Free Huey; Let my people go, Free Huey” when she reflects on those years.
Mom is a lifelong revolutionary: the granddaughter of Danish immigrants marched in solidarity with the Black Panthers as a college student, started her 30-year teaching career in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point housing projects, and founded a community garden and crop swap in her “retirement” so apartment residents in our family’s neighborhood could grow — and share — their own fresh fruits and vegetables. Mom’s soul runs deep, and now she most frequently shows up as a creative, imaginative, and fun grandmother who revels in every opportunity to break out the paint or play in the mud.
Mom continues to drive forward powerfully. The one-time Tamalpais High cheerleader (“only because girls weren’t allowed on the baseball team,” she’s known to say) recently survived a major stroke. Upon regaining her speech, she answered the question, “How are you feeling?” with a single word: “Ambitious.”
A Few of Mom’s Lessons
If so much of who I am is from Dad, so much of how I am is from Mom. Tony Robbins says “Business is a Spiritual Game”: here are three soulful lessons from Mom that have provided some of the highest leverage for me at work.
Gratitude
My friend Peter Diamandis is one of many leaders currently evangelizing for gratitude, promoting a gratitude mindset and explaining its benefits.
My maternal grandmother, born in 1918, kept a journal where each evening she wrote gratitudes for that day. Mom noticed her own mother’s excellent mental and physical health (living independently until she passed at 92) and started following this practice decades ago. When I was a young corporate lawyer working long days and nights, I remember Mom encouraging me to try this practice . . . and I also remember being highly skeptical.
I admit my surprise in the last several years to see publications from Harvard Business Review to UCSF recognize the connection between gratitude and well-being. But having implemented and seen the power of this practice both at home and at work, I am now a true believer.
At Prime Movers Lab’s team meeting each Monday, we have a “raving fan” section, when we share gratitude for other team members or convey that we heard someone else express gratitude for them.
This year, I stepped into the boardroom for one of our fast-growing startups and listened to its CEO, Sassie Duggleby, explain that Venus Aerospace begins its board meetings with a gratitude practice. Perhaps not surprisingly, the team has a thriving culture, is hitting its milestones, and is rapidly scaling.
Curiosity
One of my favorite quotes from Tony Robbins is “the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask.”
One of Mom’s great gifts is expressing curiosity for other people’s passions. She is always present and listens carefully to find ways to embed herself in her conversation partner’s model of the world and show love and respect for it. She responds with genuine appreciation in the moment, and when the opportunity presents itself she follows up, going deeper by writing poetry or music honoring the person’s story for a birthday or get-well-soon message.
Whether in interviews, diligence, or sales, high-quality conversations are built on high-quality questions. Our team learns as much as we can about our conversation partners by leading with questions, so that we are talking with them, not to them. Beyond traditional questions, we also seek to understand what combination of the six human needs is most important to our conversation partners, which enables us both to serve them better and assess their alignment with ours. When interviewing for my series Celebrating Black Founders and Investors, I channeled this gift: asking questions that discovered my conversation partner’s model of the world, and then rewarding them for their trust with responses honoring what they shared.
My partner David Siminoff is known for asking probing questions about science, technology, and finance. But he brings that same piercing inquiry to the personal questions he asks everyone, even his colleagues. David and I were recently in the midst of an otherwise granular discussion of a writing project when he sent me the question: “So what is it that you really want from life?” Having established trust and care through his prior depth of engagement, David’s intensely personal inquiry provoked introspection rivaling what Tony can elicit.
David’s devotion to asking the highest-quality questions of everyone around him reflects how much he cares about serving others, whether for the firm or for his friends and partners on a personal level. Mom modeled this curiosity for me from an early age, and partners such as David (and Dakin and Suzanne, who also possess unique question-asking superpowers) continue to inspire me to embody this quality even more.
Perspective
Underscoring the importance of a human connection to nature, the philosopher Sadhguru says, “No matter what work you are doing, you must stick your fingers into the earth for at least one hour a day.” An hour of daily engagement with nature feels aspirational for me at this stage of my life, but the connection between nature and mental health has been corroborated in mental health literature. I notice my perspective shift to gratitude even with smaller blocks of time spent noticing the soil, plants, wind, sunlight and so many other gifts that were not created by us.
Mom’s appreciation for and connection to nature is core to who she is, and she has engaged with nature daily for decades. She starts every day with at least an hour in her garden, during which she cares for a paradise of native plants. Her favorite time away is camping and hiking in California’s beautiful national parks. And she has long encouraged her children and grandchildren to break away from their screens and go into nature to find a different perspective.
Prime Movers Lab is a remote firm, so we spend much of our days engaging over Zoom. Nevertheless, several members of our team live in Jackson, Wyoming, and our firm prioritizes time in nature.
We design our team retreats to be more substantive and engaging than most fluorescent-light-conference-room team meetings–and mostly outside in nature. We also encourage our team members to break up their day of Zoom meetings with walks outside. I have recently followed the lead of my friend Sal Churi of Trust Ventures by converting Zooms with people I know well into telephone calls, and giving us both permission to be away from our computers by beginning the meeting with a declaration that “I’ll be outside walking during this call.”
Everything Old Is New Again
As 2021 comes to a close, I reflect on my gratitude for everyone from whom I’ve learned so much over the years. I am thankful especially for Mom, whose prescient teachings are at the core of the life for which I am so grateful. I look forward to the rejuvenating power of some time in nature with Mom later this month. And I wish you all, and your families, peace and love over the holidays and in 2022.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.
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