My Greatest Teachers
When people ask me from whom I learned the most in life, many expect me to name entrepreneurs, inventors, or people who influenced my professional path. But the truth is much simpler. My greatest teachers were my father and mother. Neither of them ever wrote a book. Neither ever received an important distinction. They were simple people. And yet they taught me everything that truly matters.
My father, Antonio Rossi, was a man of few words. He belonged to a generation of men who rarely expressed their feelings through speech. He rose early. He went to work. He came home exhausted. And the next morning, it all began again. As a child, this seemed the most normal thing in the world. Only many years later did I understand that each day he was once again putting his health at risk. Deep beneath the earth.
In the darkness. Far from daylight. Not because he loved the work. But because he believed his family deserved a better life than the one he himself had known. My father had a dream. Not for himself. For his children. He often said that none of his sons should ever have to work in the coal mines. That was his greatest victory. Not what he earned.
But what he hoped to spare us. My mother, Guglielmina, was very different. Where my father often hid his feelings, my mother showed her love in everything she did. In the meals she prepared for us. In the care with which she looked after our clothes. In the way she comforted us when we were sad. She rarely complained. And yet she had a thousand reasons to do so.
She had left her homeland. Left her family behind. Lost a daughter. And despite everything, day after day, she continued to care for those she loved. Only when I became an adult did I begin to understand the strength that must have required. My parents never taught me how to become rich. They taught me to go through life with honesty and dignity. They never told me I had to become someone important.
They taught me that every human being deserves respect. Rich or poor. Well known or unknown. Highly educated or barely able to read and write. Later, when I had the opportunity to sit at the same table as executives, industrialists, and successful entrepreneurs, I never felt that they were worth more than the simple miner my father had been. That is a value I received at home.
That is probably also why I have always felt at ease wherever I was. In a neighborhood café. In a factory. In a business owner's office. Or around a table with people I had just met. I always tried to see the human being first. And only then their profession or position.
Today, I sometimes wonder how much of my parents still lives within me. I believe it is far more than I once thought. Whenever I try to help someone. Whenever I show respect to a person who owns little. Whenever I choose to listen instead of speaking, I recognize something of my father. Something of my mother. They do not live only in old photographs.
They live in everything they passed on to me. And perhaps that is the greatest inheritance parents can leave their children. Not money. Not possessions. But values. Values passed from one generation to the next. If only one thought from my childhood were to remain forever, it would be this: my father taught me to work. My mother taught me to live.
Only much later did I understand that without both of them, I would never have become the man I am today.