Parents. I get more email about parents, from parents, talking to me about their kids than ever. More messages. More reaching out. More than ever. Since I'm in the middle of my project, I might as well address it. Parents, please let them win on their terms, not yours. Your children are not a direct indication of who you are. They're a byproduct. There's proxies, there's things, but so many of you are deploying your insecurities about yourself on your children, because you genuinely care about what people around you are saying about them. Other families, other friends, other relatives, talking about your kids. You value more to them. You value their POVs, excuse me, more than listening to your own children.

When I say listening, you have to be able to decode an 8 year old, a 13 year old, a 17 year old, a 20 year old. It's not necessarily their words. When you actual get into an emotional or real conversation, it's their actions. It is your job as a leader of a business, of a family, to reverse engineer the players in the game and put them in the best position to succeed. The thought that so many of you are parenting your children, predicating your short term fulfillment of other people's opinions, devastates the shit out of me and one day will devastate you too. It probably devastates you right now. If that line hit you directly in your fucking heart, or your brain, or your consciousness, please do something about it.

I may never make a video more important to me than this. I am a byproduct of the most incredible parents who disproportionately put me in a position to succeed. Because they were confident in who they were, and did not allow other people to judge them, and allowed me to live in happiness and be who I was. I read 100 messages a day from parents that know they're not, so please parents, please understand, that your concern of being judged, by artificial truths, is positioning your children not to fulfill the happiness that you have to want for them. Your inability to understand how the landscape changes over the next 30 and 40 years is overprotecting your children from the victories that they deserve.

It also creates an unbelievable weakness for them not to be able to deal. I'm able to deal, because my mother and father put me into a framework that allowed me to fail and allowed me to be me. I learned. I learned every day of my shortcomings, of other people's opinions. A real easy way to not be bullied is to not hear them in the first place. Please don't let your insecurities be imposed, and please don't hide them under the false statements that you're trying to do what's right for them. What's right for them is to give them freedom to be themselves, as long it is noble and fair. Do not judge their creativity or the angles they see that you do not see now, because history has proven, it's practical to understand, you can't see it and they can.

Please. Please.