Obama Reveals 3 Pieces of Advice He's Shared with Daughters Malia and Sasha
When it comes to achieving leadership goals, Sasha
and Malia
Obama have a pretty good role model — their dad.
During a Q&A with Bill and Melinda Gates on Wednesday for their charity
foundation, former President Barack
Obama revealed the three big pieces of leadership advice he’s given his
teenage daughters over the years.
1. “Being responsible is an enormous privilege”
“When they were small, their responsibilities were small, like, ‘Say when you
want to go potty’,” Obama joked of Malia, now 19, and Sasha, 16. “As you get
older, your responsibilities grow.”
Obama says he and his wife, former First Lady Michelle Obama, have tried to
impress upon their daughters the importance of being kind, considerate,
empathetic and hardworking. “These are the tools by which you can shape the
world around you in a way that feels good,” he said.
“Part of what we try to communicate is that being responsible is an enormous
privilege,” he added.
The former president also said that owning responsibility is “an ethic that
[my daughters have] embraced.”
2. There are many ways to make a difference
Obama said he understands that Sasha and Malia “will choose to participate in
different ways because they’ve got different temperaments, different
strengths.”
“You don’t have to go out and lead the protest march,” he said, noting that
being a leader could also include activities like mentoring children or working
at a local health clinic.
“If you are a brilliant engineer, you don’t have to make a speech,” Obama
said. “You can create an app that allows an amplification or the scaling up of
something that is really powerful if you’re someone who likes to care for
people.”
“There are a lot of different ways to make a contribution and I try to
emphasize that to them as well,” Obama said.
3. Change takes time
Obama says he and his wife have told their daughters that making an impact
can take some time and “you have to be persistent” and patient.
“We get disappointed and we get frustrated,” he said. “I always tell people
that my early work as a community organizer in Chicago taught me an incredible
amount, but I didn’t set the world on fire.”
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