About the author
I’m not a parenting expert.
But I am the guy your kid wants to impress.
I ran more than a hundred interviews in eleven years of hiring, and not once did I care whether a candidate went to college, or where. I’ve yet to meet a hiring manager who did.
From the hiring chair
You already know how to hire.
When you hire someone to paint your house or watch your kids, what do you actually check? Two things. Can you show me you can do the job? And can somebody I trust vouch for the rest of you: reliable, motivated, easy to work with, open to feedback? Nobody asks for a transcript.
I’d thought so for years. Then I started hiring, right as our daughters were heading toward middle school, and saw it first hand. Grades, credentials, the degree: none of it was what I was buying. I cared what someone knew and could do. I didn’t care how they learned it. Taught yourself? Great. Learned it at college? Also great.
That’s when Donna and I stopped defending the checklist other adults handed our daughters, and started mentoring them to be valuable at twenty-five instead of impressive at fifteen.
For both of you
I wrote it to be handed over.
That’s launch day, the book finally in hand, with my wife Donna, our daughter Brooke, and her husband Sean. Everything in these pages was lived in our house first: the conversations, the long game, and the stretch in the middle where we weren’t sure it was working.
No pressure on grades. No résumé to pad. No demand that they decide at eighteen what they’d “be.” We offered freedom in return for honest, ongoing conversation. We let them run their own learning. We showed them what things actually cost. We walked through every option after high school. College included.
And the part nobody warns you about? Two parents on the same page. If I had to pick one reason this book exists, that’s it. One of you reads it, decides there’s a better way to do this, and hands it to the other.
Nothing Donna and I did would have worked if we’d been pulling in different directions. Thirty-one years in, I’m more sure of that than of anything else in this book.
We weren’t aligned during this family game of Apples to Apples. But we were always aligned on how to raise our daughters.
Start the book free, or bring me to your stage.
The first four chapters on the house, a 20 minute read. Or the talk that gives parents language for the conversation they’ve been avoiding.
