Moms are the CEO's of Life

Mom’s Life Lesson #34 If Everyone Jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge One of the things that boys discover quite early in life is the lure of the firecracker. Once he’s shot off that first firecracker and heard that “Bang!” he never stops planning for an even louder upgrade. At the top are M-80’s and cherry bombs, and these spell trouble. One day my friend Pete invited three of us over to his house after school to set off some M-80’s and cherry bombs. After his mom had left, we took a couple of cherry bombs and dropped them down the sewer in the street. This made the neatest sound as the blast echoed around all the sewers in the neighborhood. We now had to kick it up a notch: boys will be boys. Once a group of kids starts to wonder what they can do next to raise the stakes even further, it can only spell trouble. We decided we could light a couple of M-80’s and flush them down Pete’s toilet. It would then journey all the way out to the sewer, where it would go off, echoing through all the sewers for miles around. Absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan. Strangely, Pete was reluctant to do it. We reasoned with him: “Would we possibly ask you to do it if we wouldn’t do it ourselves?” Sure enough, Pete accepted the challenge. We told him two of us would go out to the street to listen for the noise from the sewer. What we really meant was that if for some reason our plan didn’t go well, we could get out of there in a hurry. We cheered Pete on until he signaled it was a go One of the guys stayed with him and flushed while Pete lit the M-80’s and dropped them into the toilet. The thing we didn’t count on was the M-80’s going off in the bowl. We were outside in the street, with our ears to the sewer. We didn’t hear anything for a minute or two, and then we saw our other friend flying out the front door. He was screaming, between laughs, “Get out of here, they blew up his toilet!” We didn’t stick around to help—we wanted to be long gone before his mom got home. We did look back to see Pete come to his door, yelling for us to help him. The only help we offered was “Call the plumber!” Thinking we were in the clear because we had made it home, I played outside for a while until I heard, “Eugene, come in here right now!” I was sure there was no way that mom could know; it hadn’t been long enough. But I knew from past experience that “right now” meant I was in trouble. Pete’s mom had come home right after we’d fled, and had called my mom to tell her what had happened. When I got inside, mom sat me down and asked about the firecrackers. I hesitated, and she started on, as moms always do, about the dangers. I made the mistake of saying, “Come on mom, everybody does them.” With that, mom produced her classic trump card: “If everybody jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you?” I thought maybe if I said “Yes,” I wouldn’t get the lecture any more, but I knew better. Boys will be boys, but mom was right. Once you learn the answer to: “If everyone jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you?” life becomes so much easier. If you’re wondering, we all had to pitch in and replace Pete’s toilet. Kelvin Taylor, Founder, CEO Taylored Analytical Marketing People who get ahead in business don’t typically follow the crowd; they are the ones who blaze their own trail. My mother must have delivered her Brooklyn Bridge speech numerous times for that reason. Another mom who preached it continually was Thelma Taylor. Growing up in Natchez, Mississippi as an African-American, life was never easy for Thelma. She could easily have followed the crowd, but she didn’t; she made sure she instilled that same ethic into her kids. She never allowed anything to detract from her making a better life for her children. Thelma was highly disciplined and organized, and this enabled her to teach school during the day and relentlessly pursue her education at night. One thing above all that she passed on to her children was her drive for excellence, never following the crowd. Kelvin Taylor understood this himself it at an early age, and knew it was better to study and excel than to do what everyone else was doing. In the summertime, the Natchez public library had a reading program for the children, and maintained a chart with gold stars signifying how many books each child had read. Kelvin made sure he knew how many the other kids were reading, and he saw to it that he read at least twice as many as the next person. Whether he was playing in a sports game or just walking down the street, if he heard name-calling he didn’t “jump off the Brooklyn bridge” to escape; he used it to stoke his competitive fires. His mother had taught him well, and he earned a scholarship to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta can be truly eye-opening for a young black man from Natchez, Mississippi. Kelvin will tell you that this was the one and only time he actually did follow others “off the bridge,” and subsequently lost his scholarship in his sophomore year. One of the key things he had going for him was that Morehead College had teachers who took a personal interest in their students. Two teachers in particular, Professor Willis B. Sheftall, chairman of the economics department, and J.K. Haynes, saw in Kelvin what his mother had instilled; they recognized that he was a student worth saving.