Eric Siu reflects on losing his mother and how it shifted his approach to leadership. He realized he'd been absorbing all the chaos to protect his team, like a parent would, and decided to stop trying to be everywhere at once while still growing the business.
about how losing someone can actually completely reshape you in business. 'Cause I lost my mom last week on a Thursday. The moment she passed, I was like, whoa, like the way she's covered for everybody. Like, you know how a parent, they'll take care of things that they shouldn't be taking care of. They'll shield you from everything. I realized that in the past, not so much anymore now, but I've always done that almost as if people in my company were my friends or my family, right? And I would shield them from these things. And what's interesting is we have this leadership meeting each week. I didn't join these last 2 weeks, right? 'Cause of all the things that were going on. So what happened was, I have a call recorder that joins those to look for compelling content ideas. And I saw a line that was actually very compelling. It said that chaos is always present in the business, but it's usually the leaders that absorb it. And I was like, oh, whoa, that stuck with me. It's like props to my team for observing that. But also I think what instantly clicked for me, yes, I'm going to do everything it takes to grow this business, but I'm not gonna do everything I can to just be at all places at once. 'Cause at the end of the day, I'm just one person.
