At twelve, I thought my father's kindness was bad arithmetic. It took me three decades to understand he was the one doing the math right.
By Alex Kruglov, co-founder & CEO of pop.in | 3 min read
My sister and I were out walking with our parents on an early January afternoon when we passed two people struggling to untie a mattress strapped to the roof of a station wagon. All of a sudden my dad was sprinting over to help. The next thing I knew, he was carrying the mattress up the stairs into their building.
They must be paying him, I thought.
A week earlier I had been helping my dad clean a four-story walkup stairwell for two dollars an hour. He was lifting furniture for three, paid under the table by a "friend" of an uncle. It was 1992 and we had uprooted ourselves from Ukraine a few weeks earlier. There was a recession and jobs were hard to come by. As a twelve-year-old who had imbibed underground magazines in Kyiv that sold me on the magic of capitalism in America, I couldn't fathom spending time on something that didn't generate a return.
None of that was my dad’s math. While I was doing mental calculations, he was simply doing. When I found out no one paid him, I shared my capitalist twelve-year-old thoughts. He laughed and said, "If you see somebody who needs help, you help them."
By the time I was seventeen, the age my oldest daughter Zadie is now, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He was gone within six months.
A grumpy teenager, I had been skeptical of his kindness. He struck up friendships with neighbors and total strangers, and I thought he was naive, maybe not discerning enough. I’d annoyingly lecture him about how things are done in America.
He’d just chuckle.
My father got the chance to share some words with us before he passed. He asked us to be kind to each other. He told us he believed in us and loved us very much. But in the years since, I have reflected more and more on how he was rather than what he said. His natural math was reckless empathy and kindness. My natural math is swift judgement and dismissiveness.
A few years ago Zadie asked me how we felt about a controversial social issue. My first thought was “oh man, this will be an argument.” Instead, I paused and said, "Zadie, could you articulate how each side might feel?" She thought about it and built a genuinely thoughtful case for each one. By the end it was clear every point of view had something valid in it.
Then she said, "But Daddy, what do we think?" I said, "What do you think?" Where she landed wasn't one side or the other. It was something more nuanced than both. She arrived there on her own.
As I write this, I can hear clanking in the kitchen. Zadie and two of her friends are cooking rice and chicken to serve a hundred people tomorrow at the local food shelter. Nobody asked them to, and they do it every month or so. The last time they did, her sisters Maia and Esme, thirteen and eight, jumped in to stir.
At twelve I would have asked who was paying, or at least whether this counts for school credit. My daughters never thought to ask the question at all. They just do.
I like their math.
Alex Kruglov is a five-time founder and co-founder/CEO of pop.in, a social gaming platform built on the idea that people who play together find common ground faster than people who argue. A founding team member at Hulu and a Founding Partner of Builders, Alex came to the U.S. as a refugee from Ukraine in 1992. He and his wife Alia have three daughters, who keep teaching him better math. You can follow Alex on LinkedIn.
