This year, several people wished me a Happy Uncle’s Day.
Most of them were joking. But as the uncle who lets his niece and nephew get away with things their parents would prefer they didn’t, I appreciated the gesture more than I let on! But it also led me to think about something that happens quietly as we get older.
When we’re young, we keep score. We notice the rules, the restrictions, and decisions that don’t go our way. As a child, it feels like parents are remarkably talented at ruining perfectly good ideas. They enforce bedtimes, set boundaries, and decline requests that seem entirely reasonable from where we’re standing.
From a child’s perspective, the scorecard feels simple. We know what we want, and we know who prevented us from getting it.
Looking back, it’s funny how confidently we judged decisions we didn’t fully understand. The scorecard felt objective because we only had access to one side of the equation, our view. We rarely considered what information our parents had that we didn’t, the concerns they were weighing, or what consequences they were trying to avoid. We simply assumed that if a decision made us unhappy, it must have been the wrong one.
Life, though, has a way of changing our perspective; we grow up. We take on responsibilities of our own, build families and lead teams, manage businesses, navigate relationships, and make decisions that affect other people. Over time, we discover something our parents understood long before we did: most decisions don’t have perfect answers.
Sometimes you’re choosing between two good options or two difficult ones; rarely are we blessed with “no-brainer” decisions. Sometimes you have information that others don’t, or you know that, regardless of what you decide, someone is going to be disappointed. The decision-maker’s side of the table looks very different than the child’s.
I think about this now when I’m with my niece and nephew. There are moments when I have to be the one who says no, or not yet, or that’s probably not a great idea. It does not happen often, but on occasion, it does. I catch a look on their faces that feels strangely familiar. It’s the same look I undoubtedly gave the adults in my life when they made a decision I didn’t like.
What I didn’t appreciate then was everything that sits behind a decision that appears simple from the outside. The tradeoffs, the timing, and competing priorities. The responsibility of making the best call you can with incomplete information, knowing that the people affected by it may not understand your reasoning.
One of the quieter markers of adulthood is the moment you stop evaluating your parents solely as a child and begin understanding them as an adult. Not because they were always right. They weren’t. Like all of us, they had blind spots, made mistakes, and occasionally got things wrong.
The facts don’t change; context and perspective are gained.
You begin to see the pressures they were carrying that you couldn’t see at the time. You recognize the tradeoffs they were navigating and the weight of being responsible for people who depended on them. Decisions that once looked obvious begin to look more complicated.
I’ve noticed the same thing in organizations. It’s easy to evaluate a leader’s decision when we only see the outcome. It’s much harder when we’re the ones balancing competing interests, working with incomplete information, and carrying responsibility for the consequences. Experience doesn’t guarantee wisdom, but it does provide something equally valuable: context.
The longer we live, the more opportunities we have to sit on both sides of the table. We become the employee and the manager, the child and the parent, the person affected by decisions and the person responsible for making them.
And somewhere along the way, many of the judgments that once felt obvious begin to soften.
It turns out the scorecard was never wrong.
It was simply incomplete.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Søren Kierkegaard
As always, I welcome your thoughts.
Have a great weekend.
-Vijay