by xyzelement | 2025-05-01 21:08:54+00:00
If your family put good values into you, then hopefully you as an adult are a reasonable evolution from the child version of you - you are manifesting those values in your own ways, appropriate to your environment.

I recently was at a Gala for a Rabbi, who wasn't born religious. His secular parents were there, and he thanked them for teaching him to always seek truth and to priories that pursuit. The pursuit itself took him to a different area (they are secular, he found truth in Judaism) but he was still operating on their parameters, just took them to a logical conclusion for himself.

Similarly, I think a 5 year old version of myself would not be too disappointed with the 44 year old version of myself, because to a large extent I then and now share my family's core values.

At the same time, you evolve in response to where you are. So for example I always knew I wanted a family, but I had to "grow up/evolve" to be someone that my someone like my wife would marry, and evolve again was we had 1, 2, and now 3 kids. Am I a different person as a father than as a single guy in NYC? Yeah. Is it a natural evolution - perhaps a richer manifestation what was always potential? Doubly yeah.

The other thing is - we have a lot more room to evolve aspects of ourselves, even as adults. For example I've personally always been very upfront, very intense, very intolerant of fuckups. All these things have ameliorated as I became a father - not because I betrayed some aspect of my personality, but because underlying that intensity was a deep care about the outcome, and with little kids, something different is required to attain the outcomes.

So things you think are "you" - you zoom out and just see as tools, and then realize that other tools are more appropriate to pursue your actual values.

Analogously from fatherhood, being a leader of larger and larger organizations has similar effect. The deep intrinsic set of abilities and behaviors that made me a rockstar engineer IC, is not the same as what makes me successful as a product leader. So as I step into these different roles, I have to figure out what's not working - and to figure out if that's really "intrinsic parts of me" that are in the way, or is there a perspective that lets me change those things while remaining true to myself.

So again thinking back to my 5 year old self, did I have what it takes to be a good father/leader? Obviously not. But I had some value of "not sucking at those things when I become them, and evolving in response" somewhere in there. So when I encountered those things, it wasn't a betrayal of self to evolve.

My oldest kid is almost 5, and I am realizing how much you get to shape some of their values/ideas. For example if I don't let them watch TV/videos, I always say "it's because this stuff doesn't make you smarter. But we watch certain things because they do make you smarter." It's less to win an argument about a particular TV moment but more to create a life long memory "dad always cared that we did things that made us smarter" kind of thing. I am sure my kids will end up in plenty situations I can't possibly anticipate but there's hope that "which one will make me smarter" is one lens they'll use to decide in their own evolution.