I should say I owe my success to my mother. My belief began when I was just a kid. i dreamed of becoming a doctor.
My mother was a servant. Through her work, she found that successful people spent a lot more time reading than they did watching TV programs during the week. In our free time, we had to read two books from the Detroit Public Library and present written book reports to her. She would mark them up with check marks and highlights. Years later we realized her marks were a trick because my mother was uneducated. When I entered high school I was an A-student, but not for long I wanted the brightly colored clothes and I wanted to hang out with the guys. I went from being an A-student to a B-student to a C-student. One night my mother came home from working her various jobs and I complained about not having enough Italian knit shirts. She said, “Okay, I’ll give you all the money I make this week by scrubbing floors and cleaning bathrooms, and you can buy the family food and pay the bills. With everything paid off, you can have all the Italian knit shirts you want. “ I was very pleased with that arrangement but once I got through allocating money, there was nothing left.
I realized my mother was a great woman to be able to keep a roof over our head and any kind of food on the table, let alone buy clothes. I also realized that immediate satisfaction wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Success required intellectual preparation. I went back to my studies and became an A-student again, and at last I expected my dream and I became a doctor.
My mother is a woman with little formal education or property who used her position as a parent to change the lives of her children. There is no job more important than parenting.