I think it's useful to reflect on the influences that lead us to our present selves.

This is a long personal work in progress that attempts to evaluate the influences of my early years.

Many people have played a deep role shaping me: my parents, leaders in my scout troop, middle school teachers, wonderful teachers in high school, professors in college, authors I've read, strangers, close friends, and most importantly my partner.

Parents

My interactions with other influences is fundamentally shaped by the influence of my parents.

Viewpoints & Beliefs

Most would probably not consider my parents or my upbringing 'normal', but growing up it was normal to me - it was other families that seemed odd. What's normal depends on where you are coming from.

To understand how my parents influenced me, it's important to understand them as people and their own influences.

My parents were heavily influenced by the era they were born into, the early 60s, with the a heavy emphasis on technology stemming from the Cold War, the Space Race, and then the liberalization and openness of the 70s when they were in their youth and the 80s when they were in the early stage of their careers. The Moon landings were particularly inspiring to both of my parents.

My dad probably takes everything too seriously. He's highly analytical yet emotionally driven. My dads chief skill is being organized, everything has a place. I wouldn't call my dad particularly brilliant, he's more curious than anything else, constantly trying new things. He loves learning. My dad isn't a people person, he cares about people deeply. Yet, he does not enjoy hanging out with most people, he doesn't have a high tolerance for small talk and he gets frustrated when people display uneducated or uninformed opinions, or a lack of critical thought. If the 'stupidity' becomes too much, he tends to snap and call it out. Suffice to say, my dad has few friends, but deep decades long relationships with those he does have. My dad is driven to do 'the right thing' which leads him to study how to be better. I'm not sure what my dad views as right, but he swiftly condemns ideas that lead to: ignorance, intolerance, discrimination, or clear harm to people. I believe these views stem from his deep care for people, and his love of history which contains many lessons on views that lead to people suffering. My dads greatest joy is fixing things, taking things that are in poor shape, and making them work again.

My mom is eclectic, driven to have an impact, make friends, and make money. My mom grew up poor, the patches in her cloths as a kid weren't a fashion statement. Her favorite toy growing up was a dirt pile. My mom really hated being poor, which is why she wants to make lots of money. Many of my moms career choices were driven by the desire to make lots of money. My mom enjoys hanging out with different people, talking to everyone, making connections, networking, and putting people together to solve problems. My mom's life revolves mostly around her work, while she does other activities, they aren't the core of what she's interested in. My moms general life philosophy is to have a good time, while supporting herself. My mom is pragmatic, and embraces the engineering idea of 'efficiency'. She isn't afraid to ask 'Why?' and she also enjoys making fun of and laughing at things she things are goofy, inefficient, or just plain 'stupid'.

While I've partly characterized my parents here, I don't actually know them both that well emotionally as people. My parents didn't spend a lot of time on emotional or personal connection, I don't think either of them really knew how, and it simply wasn't their focus.

Both my parents had the benefit of good public schools and families that imparted on them the importance of education.

My parents are both excessively educated, they were both trained as Mechanical Engineers and both graduated with MBAs from the University of Chicago business school (where "fun goes to die"). They both continued their personal education throughout their careers. My dads library shelves are full of books on management, manufacturing, art, and many other subjects. My parents engineering education and the rigorous education at Chicago significantly impacted my upbringing. From my parents example I learned to be curious about everything, value education, constantly improve through my own learning, and critically think about everything. Applying critical thinking skills and asking 'Why?' frequently got me in trouble in public school, and continues to get me in trouble. My mom would tell my siblings and I to be creative at home but not at school, in an attempt to avoid calls home.

My parents are workaholics, they are always working on something. They want to do things, make things happen.

My parents 'career success' came from the number of hours they were willing to study and work, and their personal obsession to do well, build great things, and have 'big careers'. The hours my parents put into their careers definitely cut into the time they had to spend on their kids or other activities, I think they both regret this to some extent now, but they both love working. To give an example, my dad tells us it's lazy to work a forty hour work week of five days a week, eight hour a day.

The workaholism of my parents definitely had an impact on my view of work. I'm also a workaholic to some extent, and I understand why my parents love working, it's fun to solve problems and make things happen. That said, I think my parents took work too far, and didn't make enough room in their lives for: each other, family, friends, volunteering, participation in their community, and hobbies. No amount of money, or career, to me seems worth sacrificing those other important aspects of life. So, I now try to make sure I only spend eight hours a day, five days a week at work.

That said, I agree with my dad that only devoting forty hours a week to your profession is lazy. To be clear, I still work outside of work, I'm frequently unable to disengage, and I ponder and obsess over problems from work in my head at home after work, and on the weekends. My volunteering, my hobbies, and much of my learning are built around my profession. Much of my reading list of books are technical and inspired by problems I am dealing with at work. Even my primary form of play, Story Games, I originally choose because I wanted to work on my speaking and storytelling skills, which is important for my work. My blog was set up so I could focus on improving my writing skills for work, and the entries on software are frequently in response to work issues (even this one), these all take hours to write, are all written outside of work hours.

Looking at my parents - they were not 'normal' when compared with the parents of my peers. Looking back at how I was raised - my family home life seems atypical when compared with other students at my school.

Generally, my school district was not supportive of mothers with careers. My mom was told at one point by some elementary school teacher she was a 'bad mom' for working instead of staying home to raise her kids. To be clear - this was sexist - since my dad also worked a huge number of hours and often on weekends, yet was not told he was a 'bad dad'. Either way, when I learned that some of the kids at school had moms who didn't work, I thought their moms were weird.

Both my parents working significantly shaped my views of relationships, it took me a very long time to accept that it's reasonable for a partner in a relationship to be a homemaker and not also have a professional career.

My mom having a technical background and leadership positions in the workplace also shaped my idea of women, to me, my mom is normal. I find it a strange idea: that women wouldn't have a professional career, wouldn't have leadership positions, or wouldn't be in technical fields - I still have difficulty understanding how anyone could have this viewpoint.

Both of my parents general attitude was raise us to be independent - 'suck it up' - 'deal with it' - on your own. I distinctly remember in my mom asking a crying elementary school kid who has tripped and fallen on a sidewalk "Is there blood?", the kid replied "No." and my mom asked "Well, why are you crying?". At home, if there was blood, we knew where the bandaids were, and applied them ourselves. This philosophy kind of boils down to "tough love" - "life's hard sometimes, deal with it". Empathy? Sure. Sympathy? None.

My dad (As part of raising us to be independent) insisted we help him with whatever task he was doing around the house so 'we could learn': cleaning the yard, home repairs, car repairs, changing the car oil, and baking. My mom generally didn't do housework, and didn't cook, she supervised our sitters and our activities.

My dad thought TV 'rots your brain', refused to buy cable, attempted to limit the hours we spent watching public TV, despised cartoons, and made fun of them. At one point I loved watching the anime Cardcaptor Sakura, I loved the main characters different outfits every episode, my dad made fun of it by calling "Cow Catchers", I did not find this amusing.

My dad had a single desktop computer at home for work that I shared with my brothers shared to mostly play Civilization III. My dad attempted to limit the time we spent on the computer to an hour a day, and insisted we play outside. My dad tried to do the sport ball catch thing with us - I wasn't into it, I was bad at catching, and it wasn't as exciting as Civilization III, and .

My dad would take the opposite side in any discussion and challenge us with the alternative viewpoint.

The funny part about both my parents coming from relatively modest backgrounds while being excessively educated is they both looked down on academic credentials, and preferred people who displayed skill, and made things.

My mom has a story about when she took over management of a business department she ended up firing most of the people with college degrees (that she thought they were incompetent) and replacing them with people with experience in the specific technology they were dealing with, but without degrees, who were willing to work hard.

My mom has another story about how in business school she had a professor who was supposedly an expert in labor relations but had never been in a manufacturing plant and didn't appear to have talked to the people in the unions. She was shocked and took him to a plant to see for themselves.

Similarly my dad generally displayed great respect for art, craft, and design, with little care of its origin. My dads library displayed art pieces he had collected from his various travels and growing up I would admire: masks from Africa, carpets from Iran, maps from Europe, woodblock prints from Japan, books of pictures of Frank Lloyd Wright's homes, and my great aunts impressionist oil paintings.

My parents attitudes shaped my own, I too generally display a lack of respect for any sort credential or the origin of a particular piece of work, and prefer evaluating the skill displayed.

My mom was obsessed with having all of her children be engineers, and exposed us to everything related to engineering. My dad insisted we could study whatever we wanted in college but he alway reminded us that you need to be able to support yourself.

Both my parents have a weird relationship with feelings. Both my parents are highly emotional, but when the display it then tend to dress it as something else.

My parents worked all the time because they wanted to make money, do well, and because they believed in what they were doing.