Plant a Seed

“When I was a child, my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll end up as the pope.’ Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”

– Pablo Picasso

The power of planting the seed of a higher calling in someone’s mind, especially a fertile mind, can’t be overestimated, I’m living proof.  Even before I started keeping a journal, I was living in a family that knew how to take intentional action, how to reflect, and how to pass on wisdom. Mom and Dad never missed an opportunity to teach and inspire.

New York was hosting the World’s Fair in 1964 and 1965, and my parents decided it would be an ideal destination for a family vacation.  I fell in love immediately.

We stayed at the New York Hilton on Sixth Avenue and went to the fair for four straight days, taking in all the highlights—the iconic Unisphere, La Pietà (Michelangelo’s stunning sculpture of Mother Mary holding Jesus), and Belgian waffles.  

But Mom and Dad had other things in mind. We rented a car and took I-95 up to New England. After sleeping for a couple hours during the drive, I woke up and was stunned by the grandeur around me: massive Gothic architecture of limestone brick and mortar with a solidity and permanence I’d never imagined. There were towers and gargoyles and spires, stained glass and stone paths. It was far too big to be someone’s home, but too foreign to be in the United States. Yet we hadn’t left the country.

“Mom, where are we?”  I asked.

“Kenny, this is Yale,” she replied calmly. “Look around. Maybe someday, you’ll go to school here.”

For a ten-year-old Japanese American kid from East Los Angeles, it was a magical moment. In one sentence, Mom opened up a world of possibility: Somehow, I could actually enter the halls of an institution like Yale. Growing up in L.A.in the sixties, virtually everyone I knew went to USC, UCLA, Cal State, or L.A. City College. Perhaps some ventured north to Berkeley, and the supersmart ones to Stanford. But the Ivies on the East Coast were never in the conversations I was part of.

I had no frame of reference for going “back East” to school. There’s a saying that you have to “see it to be it,” which rings true. For a ten-year-old, grasping that something abstract could become concrete was a mystical breakthrough. It reminds me of the legions inspired to become rock musicians after seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.

This was my earliest memory of authentic motivation, which works its magic when three things kick in: You see it, you hear it, and you feel it. Something big is out there, and it’s possible for you to achieve it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Mom had planted a seed in me that summer afternoon that was spontaneous, honest, and unforced. I asked an innocent question, and she responded with a mother’s intuition.