A Jealousy Confession: What My Son Revealed To Me Over Beers

The garage doors were open at Claremont Craft Ales, my favorite local Southern California spot, and the warm evening air mixed with the din of voices that somehow made our conversation feel private despite the crowd. My son and I had fallen into that comfortable rhythm that reveals itself after a few beers and the kind of distance that forces you to see each other as people, not just roles. It had been a couple of years since I left his mother, 22.5 years of marriage that ended not in explosion but erosion.

Three beers in he shifted in his seat, that tell I've known since he was five years old signaling something important was coming.

"Dad, can I tell you something?"

"Of course," I said, taking another sip.

What came next blindsided me.

"Mom and I... we're jealous of you."

I laughed. Not a polite chuckle, but the kind of laugh that comes from genuine absurdity. Here was my son, this young man with raw talent spilling out of his pores, the kind of natural ability I've spent my entire life wishing I had, telling me he was jealous. Of me. And his mother, an equally gifted artistic person, apparently felt the same way.

When I finally settled down from roaming thoughts and chuckles, wiping my eyes, I listened.

"You just... do things," he said. "When you decide you want to do something, you go out and do it. Like with your novel. You decided to write a book, so you sat down and wrote it. Within a year, you self-published The Outlaw River Wilde." (Now retitled The Rogue River Incident, but that's a story for another post.)

I sat there, stunned. "You know I'd kill for the kind of talent you and your mom have, right?"

But he wasn't having it. This wasn't about talent. This was about something else entirely.

The Grit of Dairy, Oregon

I grew up in a small Oregon town called Dairy. The name tells you everything you need to know. My childhood wasn't about talent development or finding your passion, it was about stacking hay at 5 AM in the freezing dark. It was about chopping ice in cattle troughs with a hatchet before school so the cows could drink, the ice-chips flying in the pre-dawn quiet while your breath hung in the air. It was about weeding endless rows of garden in the summer heat, splitting wood until your back screamed and your hands blistered in the fall.

My parents didn't raise me to be talented. They raised me to finish what I started.

Angela Duckworth has a word for this: grit. That quality that matters more than IQ, more than natural ability, more than circumstances. It's the capacity to sustain effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.

My parents called it "doing your chores."

Churchill and the Will to Continue

Somewhere along the way, I adopted Winston Churchill's perspective on success: "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."

Maybe I'm too naive to know when something is impossible. Maybe I'm too thick-headed to recognize when I should quit. But honestly? Why not try? Why not go for it?

If it doesn't work, you do something else. The world doesn't end. The cattle still need water. The wood still needs splitting.

So when I decided I wanted to write a novel, I didn't worry about whether I had the "talent" for it. I just started writing. Every morning before work, and most evenings when I got home after all my duties in life were met, I'd sit down and put words on the page. Some days were good. Most days were terrible. But I showed up.

Within a year, I finished my first manuscript. Was it perfect? Hell no. But it was done. And then I published it, because that was the next thing to do.

Six Novels and Counting

Now I'm working on my sixth novel. No critical acclaim yet, emphasis on "yet", but that's not why I do it. I write because I love it. Because it feeds something in me that my day job, as fulfilling as it is, can't quite reach.

As a marketer, storytelling is everything. You need to understand narrative, character, motivation, conflict, resolution. Novel writing isn't just a hobby; it's sharpening the exact tools I use every day. It's a natural outlet for those muscles.

But more than that, it's proof that the kid who stacked hay in Dairy is still in here somewhere, still showing up, still doing the work.

What Talent Can't Buy

My son's confession that night shifted something for me. Here I'd spent decades envying the natural abilities of others, including my own son and ex-wife, while they were looking at me and seeing something I couldn't see in myself.

They saw someone who finishes things.

In a world full of people with ideas, talent, and potential, the ones who actually show up day after day are rarer than we think. Talent is spectacular, but it's also fragile. It can be squandered, ignored, or left to atrophy. Grit, on the other hand, is ugly and relentless. It doesn't care if you're inspired. It doesn't wait for the muse to show up.

It just keeps splitting the wood.

The Long Game

I'm not suggesting talent doesn't matter. Of course it does. But I've learned that it's not the only thing that matters, and maybe not even the most important thing.

What matters is the willingness to start before you're ready. To publish before it's perfect. To keep going when nobody's paying attention. To do the work not because you're guaranteed success, but because the work itself is worth doing. The work itself is the success.

So yes, I'll keep writing my novels. I'll keep showing up at my marketing job and telling stories that move people. I'll keep doing the things I set my mind to, not because I'm special or talented, but because somewhere in Dairy, Oregon, a younger version of me learned that you don't quit just because something's hard.

And maybe, just maybe, that's worth being a little jealous of.