Small family farming is a labor intensive way to go broke.
When I was young I spent some weeks each summer with my grandparents. As farmers and cattle ranchers, my grandparents scratched out an existence. My grandpa was up before dawn feeding cattle and out working fields of corn, milo, sorghum, soybeans, and wheat until after sunset. There were too few boom years, and too many bust years. They had neighbors lost everything. My grandparents survived.
One thing that helped keep them afloat was that my grandmother was an elementary school teacher in their rural community. When we ran errands together we frequently encountered her former students and it was clear from the things they said that they loved and respected her.
At one point she decided to get her master’s degree. My granddad stopped her. He didn’t like the idea that she would have more formal education than he did.
I’ve been thinking about this bit of my family history lately, prompted by reading Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.
My granddad may have perceived that his pride was spared by preventing my grandmother from pursuing her master’s, but I’ve been thinking about the emotional, financial, and communal costs. Was my grandmother wounded by this? How could she not be? She would have made more money over her career and may have been a better educator, which would have benefited an entire community.
If he would have been supportive, allowed her to lean in to her career and leaned in more at home himself, how would things have been different?
As I said, my reflections on this were prompted by Sandberg’s book, which I read because I’m a people manager and Sandberg is an incredibly accomplished leader and I want to pick up the lessons of great leaders wherever I can.
I’m also a father to three young women. I want to support them in their careers and Sandberg is arguably one of the most successful business leaders of all time, perhaps I could learn something that would help me help them.
This personal family anecdote came to me as I was thinking about t
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