Boyz II Men
America has a peculiar deficiency in that we have no official “rite of passage” for declaring boys to be men. Many cultures have some kind of ceremony – for example the Jewish Bar Mitzvah. But I never had anything like that; most people don’t. There’s no point where someone comes out and says “OK, you’re a man now. You have permission to enjoy the privileges and responsibilities of manhood, and join the adult world.”
Instead we have “teen years” which is kind of a no-mans land of quasi-responsibility that extends from age 13 to the mid 30’s. (Did you know that the word teenager didn’t even exist before the 1930’s? Did you know that the very concept of the teen years is a recent, artificial construction of the 20th century? But I digress…)
This is disastrous. More to the point, many men privately question their manhood. They go through life feeling that their dad never really approved of them. Some guys have never heard their dad say “Hey son, I’m really really proud of what you’ve done in your life.”
There are few things sons need to hear more from their dads than that. Sure, we’ve all heard it from mom, but that’s not the same. The connection between a father and a son is unique, and a dad’s blessing is coveted. A mom is no substitute for a dad, any more than a father is a substitute for a mother.
This turns a lot of psychologically unhealthy, neurotic, insecure men out into the world.
Some become workaholics; others traverse the expressway in a haze of lethargy each day, blankly following the license plate just ahead. Men are motivated to impress their father, but for some it’s an impossible goal. Maybe he’s never going to be impressed, or maybe he’s not even alive anymore. So they go through life with an insatiable craving for approval they’re not even conscious of.
If I just described you, this hardly qualifies a fix-your-inner-child newsletter. But surely it’s worth asking yourself if some misplaced motivation like this, some elusive insecurity could invisibly motivate you, perhaps drive you but with no sense of direction. Or maybe Dad told you you’d never amount to anything, and a string a failures is a symptom of a crippled belief system.
And having said all that, if you have a son, never ever forget that he desperately craves your approval. Not just knowing that you approve of certain things he does, but that you approve of him as a man and as a human being. That he has your blessing to go out into the big wide world and succeed. He needs few things from you more than that.
Perry Marshall