Rick Jackson

It is an ongoing discussion but also a letter to my 14 year old son about overcoming whatever in life is in front of you. I overcame when I was his age 13/14 years old, I probably had five people that were close to me pass away in a five year period – my father, my brother that was 2 years older, my grandma, my grandpa, and my aunt. But you overcome. When I was much younger, I was horribly sight impaired – because of that and I was really short – which I still am – there was a lot of bullying. You overcome it – you overcome whatever it is. My wife, my sons mother, in 2007 had colon cancer. She overcame it. It's all about telling him you can overcome anything. You choose where you go from this. You choose how you deal with this. You choose the person you become because of all the obstacles and hurdles that are put right in front of you. And mine are interesting, everyone's are interesting. Mine aren't better or worse than other people's. We all have things happen to us – you overcome them. I overcome client challenges, I overcame team challenges, I overcome deadlines on a daily basis. Everything in life, it's just different things in different places. They're your hurdles and your obstacles, you overcome them, you move on to the next thing. C: But what do you do? How do you overcome them? Like bullying... You put your head down. This is a perfect thing with my son. In school, I learned after a while that is just a trial thing. You may or may not be friends with a small group of people like that for the rest of your life. Move on, you're going to make new friends. Move on you're going to have different experiences in front of you. Move on, you have other opportunities, other challenges. C: That can be hard though! To not let yourself get down in that moment. Well of course you get down in the moment. And that's what I'm trying to tell my son, like 'Yeah, it's going to kind of suck in the moment. It's not going to be good in the moment. But at the end of the day you move on. At the end of the day you overcome.' You learn, hopefully, either good traits, bad traits, nice people, mean people, whatever that is, you move on. C: Is he taking it to heart? I think so. He's a very mature 14 year old. He's been too close to 20 countries, he is nearing trilingual status. He's a chef, he's a ballroom dancer, I think he's a really well rounded young man. Which I don't take any credit of at all. My wife does a great job of managing that outcome and I just say 'Look, your mom has had crazy things to overcome with some people in her family passing, with cancer. I've had some things that I've had to overcome. You're in the middle of the glory years of things you have to overcome – I mean, it's not always great in any kind of high school situation. It's like 'This is the first of your tests of overcoming life.' And it's always something to overcome.