You Must Kill The Boy (Parents Edition)
Forgive your parents for what they got wrong. Then surpass everything they thought was possible.
You’re on the phone with your mother. You just told her about the business you want to start. There’s a pause. Then that voice. The one she uses every time you try to color outside the lines she penned in for you when you were ten.
“That sounds risky, honey. Why don’t you just focus on your job? You have good benefits.”
And something inside you deflates. And she’s wrong about the risk. But a part of you, the boy who still lives somewhere in your chest, just heard the only woman he’s ever truly loved tell him his dream is stupid. So you go quiet. You say yeah, maybe you’re right. You hang up. And the idea that was burning in your skull for three months starts to cool down until it melts off you entirely.
This is how most men die before they’re actually dead. You’d think it’s from failure but no. It’s actually from waiting on permission that was never coming, from people who had no business giving it.
They Were Kids Raising Kids
Your parents had you when they were young, clueless, and figuring it out the same way you are right now. Your father was probably in his twenties. Maybe broke. Maybe terrified. Working a job he couldn’t stand with a baby on the way and zero instruction manual for how to raise a man. Zero internet. Zero TFM. And your mother was in the same boat. Maybe younger. Maybe more scared than him but she didn’t let anyone see it.
They gave you what they had. And for most parents on this planet, just keeping you alive and under a roof was the war. That alone took everything they had some days.
So here you are at twenty-five or thirty, scrolling through some self-help thread or sitting in a therapist’s chair listing every way your parents failed you. They yelled too much. They didn’t hug enough. They pushed you toward accounting when your hands wanted to build things. They split up and you had to bounce between two apartments every weekend like a human ping-pong ball. You vilify marriage and say, “It’s a social construct I’ll never get sucked into!!”
I understand you.
Some of that pain is real. I won’t pretend it isn’t.
But you need to zoom out for a second and look at who these people actually were when they were raising you. Your parents were playing a game nobody handed them the rules to, using tools nobody taught them to use. Your dad’s temper? He got that from a man who got it from his own father. Your mom’s anxiety about money? She grew up watching her parents argue about bills at the kitchen table until she was old enough to leave the house. These people didn’t sit down and craft a Dynastic strategy for your childhood. They survived and improvised with whatever scraps of wisdom their own broken parents handed down to them.
You must learn to forgive them.
Not on some Dr. Phil tearful phone call bullshit where everybody sobs and hugs it out. Forgive them inside yourself. Quietly. Release the idea that they owed you a flawless upbringing and chose to withhold it out of cruelty. They didn’t. They were just kids raising kids. And most of them did a hell of a lot better than the hand they were dealt.
Because here’s what I need you to understand. The man who spends his thirties blaming his parents for his twenties will spend his forties blaming his twenties for his thirties. The chain never breaks unless you break it. The clock doesn’t pause because you feel wronged. You either grab the wheel or you get dragged behind the car. Those are the only two options and there has never been a third.
The Ceiling They Built Over Your Head
Let’s get into the meat of the post…
Your parents programmed you.
Every piece of advice they ever gave, every fear they voiced at the dinner table, every “be careful” and “that’s not realistic” and “people like us don’t do things like that” wrote another line of code into your operating system. You’ve been running their software your entire adult life without once opening the latch to your subconscious to check if any of it still makes sense.
Think about what you heard growing up. “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” “Be grateful you even have a job.” “Don’t get too big for your britches.” “We don’t do that in this family.” Each sentence was a brick laid on top of you. They were trying to keep you safe inside a structure they understood. The problem is that their structure was built for their world. Not yours.
Your father told you to get a stable job with good benefits because that’s what his father told him. That was his ceiling. Health insurance and a pension. The summit of ambition in his world. He handed that ceiling to you wrapped in love, genuinely believing it was a gift.
Your mother told you to play it safe, stay close to home, marry someone “nice” because that’s what security looked like through her eyes. She wanted you protected. And protection, the way she learned it, meant keeping everything small and manageable and within arm’s reach.
Now you’re walking around carrying their fears like they belong to you. Making decisions through the filter of two people who never had access to a fraction of what’s sitting in your lap right now. Capping yourself at a height they set when they were your age, with a tenth of your options.
Their words come from love. Every single one. But love filtered through fear is still fear. And fear, no matter how well it’s packaged, will always whisper the same thing.
“Stay where you are. Don’t climb too high. Don’t become something we can’t relate to anymore.”
That last part is the one nobody says out loud. There’s a quiet friction that builds in a lot of families the moment one member starts outgrowing the rest. Your ambition puts a mirror in front of their choices. Your courage exposes their settling. And a lot of parents, without realizing what they’re doing, will try to pull you back to the altitude where they can still breathe for themselves. And it’s not entirely nefarious, it’s moreso they do it because your staying small keeps their world making sense. Like they might the right moves, and their parenting was ideal.
I’ve seen this play out in many families of a lot of men I’ve spoken and personally worked with. The moment you start making moves they don’t align with, the dinner conversations drastically change. The questions go from “how are you” to “are you sure about this?” and “if you listened to my advice, you’d have xyz right now”.
But what most parents don’t seem to understand?
You are the genetically upgraded version of both your parents combined. Their best traits are alive in you, stacked on top of tools they never got to touch. The internet alone hands you more knowledge than the entire library system they grew up next to. You have AI, global reach, remote income, mentors you’ll never shake hands with but who can reroute your entire life with a single piece of advice. You have options that would’ve made your parents’ heads spin at your age.
The question is whether you keep running their outdated software or start writing your own code. Fulfilling your own upgraded and Dynastic Destiny.
And writing your own starts with the most uncomfortable thing a grown man can do.
Killing the boy inside him who still needs to hear his mother say it’s okay or his father approve before he makes a single move.
