Be Proud Of Your Parents

Welcome to Issue 008 of Decoded. I had one of those out-of-nowhere realizations this week - the kind that stops you mid-thought and doesn’t let go. This one’s about our parents, and something I don’t think we say to them enough.

⚡ The main idea

I was sitting around doing nothing in particular this week when a thought landed on me out of nowhere. My parents had a childhood too.

Obvious, when you say it out loud. But I’d never actually sat with it before - not as a fact I already knew, but as something real. My parents were once exactly where I am now. Twenties, thirties, trying to figure their life out same as I’m trying to figure out mine. Their own mess, their own heartbreaks, their own version of staying out too late and lying about it. They pulled the same tricks we did. They were just as unfinished as we are.

And somewhere in the middle of all that unfinished business, they became parents. Ours. They didn’t arrive pre-loaded with wisdom and patience - they built it, in real time, while still figuring out who they were themselves. Then they spent the next however-many years giving us a platform most of us never once stopped to say thank you for.

We don’t see any of that growing up. We only meet our parents after the fact - already cast as the ones with the answers. So we hold them to a standard we’d never hold ourselves to at the same age, and forget there’s a whole person under there who was once every bit as lost as we are.

You can still see it, if you look properly. The youth never fully leaves someone’s eyes. It’s there in the way they laugh at something silly, or get excited about a plan, or tell a story from thirty years ago like it happened last week. That’s not a leftover. That’s still them.

I talk a lot in this newsletter and on the podcast about high performance - training, deep work, the systems elite people build around themselves. But I don’t think that list is complete if it only covers the parts of your life you can put in a spreadsheet. How you show up for your parents, whether you actually check in, whether you extend them the same patience you’d want extended to you - that’s part of the system too. Not the soft part. The part that’s easiest to neglect precisely because nobody’s tracking it.

I think that’s the whole point of this one. Not guilt. Just proper, deserved pride - and the kind of thank you that doesn’t need a reason to say it.

👁 On my radar

Three things catching my attention that connect to the same idea.

1. Novak Djokovic has talked openly about what it cost his parents to get him onto a tennis court in the first place - buying rackets and paying coaches through Serbia’s war years and the embargo that followed, years where the family couldn’t even afford to send him to junior tournaments abroad. He wasn’t handed a career. He was handed a childhood’s worth of his parents going without, quietly, so his could look different from theirs.

2. Jensen Huang was nine when his parents made what by every account was an agonising call - sending him and his older brother ahead to the United States alone, hoping to build a foothold for the rest of the family to eventually follow. Decades later, running the most valuable company on earth, he still describes that period in blunt, unsentimental terms - because the toughness it built in him is the same toughness his parents were quietly betting on when they made the call.

3. There’s a term in developmental psychology - filial maturity - for the exact moment an adult child stops seeing their parent purely as an authority figure and starts recognising them as a whole person, with a history, fears, regrets, and dreams that predate the role entirely. Researchers treat it as one of the more underrated markers of actually growing up. Not managing your calendar better. Seeing your parents properly, for the first time, as people.

↗ The takeaway

Here’s the reframe. Your parents are not a fixed category of person who arrived pre-loaded with rules and certainty. They were you, first. Same confusion, same twenties or teens, same desperate hope it would all work out - just a generation earlier, with less information and a lot less grace extended to them than we now expect for ourselves.

That doesn’t erase the hard parts. Some relationships with parents carry real complexity that a newsletter paragraph has no business smoothing over, and empathy for where someone came from doesn’t mean excusing everything that came after. This isn’t about that.

Here’s what I keep coming back to, though. If you trace it far enough, this isn’t just a two-generation thing. Your parents probably had this exact realisation about their own parents at some point. And their parents about theirs, further back than anyone bothered to write down. It’s a chain that runs in both directions - and if you end up on the other side of it one day, someone will eventually have this same thought about you. Strangely, I found that comforting rather than heavy.

So this week, if the relationship allows it, call your parents. Not to fix anything, not because something’s wrong. Just to ask what they were actually like at your age - what they were into, who they were before any of this started. Let them talk. You might be shocked at who answers. And somewhere in that conversation, tell them thank you. Not for a specific thing. Just generally, for everything you probably haven’t said out loud in a while.

That’s the whole exercise. Not analysis. Just gratitude, pointed in the right direction for once.

That’s Issue 008 of Decoded. Glad you’re here for it.

If this landed, forward it to one person who needs to hear it. That’s how this grows - one reader at a time.

See you next Tuesday.

Cheers, Sachin.