You know the story of Martha and Mary? One of them needed to make everything perfect for Jesus, and the other one just listened to him. Well my mother was the one who needed everything to be perfect. She would lose her temper every Christmas because something was out of place. She was the definition of a ‘tiger mom.’ She rarely praised me. She showed her love through sermons and lectures. I was afraid of her, and so I always performed well on my assignments. I always made the honor roll. I became an executive at a fairly young age. I can thank her training for a lot of those things. But one thing I never learned was how to fail. I was always too afraid of the consequences. So even today I’m not good with the unknown. It’s hard for me to try something new, because I’m scared of messing up.
