Mike Brown learned that chasing wealth was really chasing freedom, until failure showed him that what matters most doesn't cost money. He tells parents not to create hardship for kids, but to teach them resilience through inevitable struggles. His family's motto: Browns can do hard things.
Failure forces you to get really clear on what's important. And for me, the big lesson was I thought I needed more money to be wealthy. And it turns out what I really needed was the freedom that money could buy. And I was focusing on the wrong things. I was trading my time, I was trading my peace, I was trading my health trying to accumulate more. And instead, I should have been focusing on what actually matters and getting clear on those things. And they didn't cost more money.
How do you think about that when it comes to parenting? This is something I was actually just thinking about the other day is this idea that you have to watch your kids fail? And they're— the only thing more painful than failing personally is watching your kids go through that struggle. But you have to, right?
I think this is a great question because number one, you can't avoid failure or pain in life. At some point your card's gonna get pulled, right? And so you're teaching kids that, that resilience I think is really important. But at the same time, I think there are a lot of parents out there who generate or manufacture hardship for their kids to like teach them a lesson. And For me, life is painful enough. Like, they're gonna get their lessons regardless. I don't need to make my kids' life unnecessarily hard to teach them lessons. Like, life's coming anyway. Yeah. I just try to teach them how to have resilience in order to bounce back. So we have a family motto, which is, "Browns can do hard things." We can't control what happens to us.
We have some control, not complete control. Bad things will still happen to people who do all the right things. All we can control is how we react to it. And an example that comes to mind, during the original dot-com boom, I started a company with one of my best friends. We raised $12 million, rode the wave all the way to the top, and then the bubble burst and we rode it all the way back down. And what was really interesting as a case study is how the two of us reacted to the exact same situation. We were literally co-founders of the company, had the identical experience. I thought it was an incredible learning experience. It gave us the opportunity to do some amazing things. It blew up in our face and I sort of moved on pretty immediately. Whereas my partner, to him, it was just this deep sense of personal failure. He didn't move on to his next kind of job career thing for a year, and it impacted him for years. The only difference was mindset. And I think goes back to that idea of resilience that you talked about. It's like, that's foundational to everything. You can't avoid heartache. You can become resilient to it.
