The (Business) Lessons I Learned from My College-bound Daughter

by Charles Epstein

I’m gonna have to say it: it feels like yesterday that we took pictures of my daughter just before she walked through our front door en route to her first day of kindergarten (I’m reminded of it every day as the picture is affixed to my monitor). A mere 12 years later and we’re seeing her off to college. It’s wrenching, exciting and unsettling all at the same time, which Daniel Drezner neatly captured in his recent Washington Post column, “An open letter to incoming frosh at colleges from one of your parents (I’m not crying you’re crying)” : “After all that effort, just when you’re getting interesting . . . you leave. It seems as though parents should get a longer period of time to enjoy this more fully formed version of you. But that is not how it works.”

Technically, my daughter started becoming “interesting” not long after she turned 12 and began basing most of her decisions on her body of lived experience, with thoughtful input from her eager to help peers. (I primarily blame the iPhone for turning parenting into a nonessential, luxury option.) Thankfully, she eventually — though by no means inevitably — became interesting in the Dreznerian sense.

Recently, I overheard a dad I know proudly state that he learned as much from his daughter as she had from him. My…