Project Love: What legacy do you want to leave?

By Payman Fazly

Our collective yearning to love and to be loved has childhood roots that lie deep within the hearts of people of all ages, cultures, faiths, and backgrounds everywhere on our planet. Our deep human desire for love is a childhood phenomenon that follows us into adulthood and is our main drive for getting married and having a lifelong companion.

We all have heard the saying, "If you can't love yourself, you can't love anyone else," yet we are not born knowing how to love ourselves or anyone else. Our capacity to love, as well as our impairments around love, grows out of the first interactions with our parents.

Learning about love is just like learning a language: If we learn it in our homes when we are children, it becomes our native language that we use to express ourselves effortlessly. For most of us, love becomes a second language that we need to consciously learn as adults. Having come to the United States as a teenager from my native country of Iran, I know all too well that the later in our adult life we learn to speak a language, the harder it is to learn and the heavier our accent!

I never expected to write a book about love because I have been struggling with it all my life. As much as I genuinely desired to love, I was miserably unhappy in my marriage. This book was born out of the dissolution of my marriage, which compelled me to explore the mysteries of love relationships.

In a world that seems to have gone mad with mass shootings and public incivility, I share my life story to inspire hope that the foundation of love is built on the shoulders of loving parents. The essence of this book is to remind us all about the importance of love in all aspects of our lives, which is the foundation for a happy life that I plan to teach my children.

Experiencing love may seem like a straightforward thing, but it is a skill that has to be acquired. School systems do not teach children about the most important topic in life, which is love. This must be learned in our homes. True love begins in our homes with our parents—if we were lucky—or with our children once we become aware of our enormous responsibility as parents. No parent can adequately articulate the experience of holding his or her child.

The future of the world depends on parents' ability to teach their children how to become loving and respectful human beings, because all distressing habits of humankind are acquired after birth. There is nothing more powerful than the power of love to change the world by raising the next generation of our civilization who will not allow race to disconnect them, religion to separate them, or wealth to classify them. One mistake we can make is thinking that we, as parents, cannot make a difference.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737563716

Book preview

Introduction

When I first started writing this book, my four-year-old daughter asked me, Daddy, why are you writing a book? What is your book about? I am writing a book to help people remember their dreams and to remind them about the importance of love, I replied. My daughter stared back at me, confused. You mean they forget?!

Our collective yearning to love and to be loved has childhood roots that lie deep within the hearts of people of all ages, cultures, faiths, and backgrounds everywhere on our planet. Our deep human desire for love is a childhood phenomenon that follows us into adulthood and is our main drive for getting married and having a lifelong companion.

I had forgotten that all I ever dreamed of was simply to feel loved when I grew up. I never expected to write a book about love because I have been struggling with it all my life. As much as I genuinely desired to love, I was miserably unhappy in my marriage. This book was born out of the dissolution of my marriage, which compelled me to explore the mysteries of love relationships. I wanted to discover how such a deep yearning for love turned into so much pain and unhappiness.

Our childhood home is our first school, and our parents are our first love teachers. We all want to have a happy and healthy love relationship, yet the ability to build long-lasting and fulfilling love relationships is a skill we must acquire by watching and emulating others. We all have heard the saying, If you can’t love yourself, you can’t love anyone else, yet we are not born knowing how to love ourselves or anyone else. Our capacity to love, as well as our impairments around love, grows out of the first interactions with our parents. Learning about love is just like learning a language: If we learn it in our homes when we are children, it becomes our native language that we use to express ourselves effortlessly. For most of us, love becomes a second language that we need to consciously learn as adults. Having come to the United States as a teenager from my native country of Iran, I know all too well that the later in our adult life we learn to speak a language, the harder it is to learn and the heavier our accent!

Scott Peck’s classic book The Road Less Travelled left a profound impression on my heart long before I became a father, when he wrote: Ultimately, love is everything and the feeling of being valuable is a direct product of parental love. Such conviction must be gained in childhood. It is extremely difficult to acquire it during adulthood. Our core belief about the possibility for love and happiness in our lives is formed during childhood. This knowledge is worth more than gold. My life story is a demonstration of how extremely difficult it is to reclaim this conviction during adulthood, but completely possible.

In a world that seems to have gone mad with mass shootings and public incivility, I share my life story to inspire hope that the foundation of love is built on the shoulders of loving parents. I’ve directly experienced the undeniable energy of love the instant I held my newborn son, an experience that transformed my perception and allowed me to see beyond my inherited beliefs about love. Most parents have experienced something similar with their own children. Such transcendent moments can last only a few minutes, yet can alter a lifetime. This is the point of this whole book: The love for a child can help us see the world from a different vantage point. The essence of this book is to remind us all about the importance of love in all aspects of our lives, which is the foundation for a happy life that I plan to teach my children.

Michelle Obama once said, Your children are watching you and forming lasting opinions on love, commitment, and marriage based on what they see in you. Give them hope. Make them look forward to marriage. I am not married now, but my dream is to demonstrate to my children what a happy marriage looks like so they experience firsthand knowledge of a loving relationship. Our capacity to believe is our greatest asset. To believe in the possibility of having our dream come true is what makes life interesting.

The Future of the World Depends on Love

We are living at the most pivotal time in the history of humanity. Our world is reaching a tipping point—environmentally, socially, politically, economically, and technologically. In our modern world, race is still an issue, hubris is at an all-time high and humility an all-time low.

Animals kill and eat members of other species, but when it comes to the members of their own kind, they rarely cross that line. Why do humans kill each other? The essence of humanity is that we’re all alike, despite our differences. So, what is the root cause of the problems we have all over the world?

Native Americans have a saying: No tree is foolish enough to have branches that fight among themselves. The history of humanity reveals that we have been at war with the branches on the same tree for most of our recorded history. People blame the politicians for the problems we are experiencing. But where do these politicians come from? They come from a family.

The solution to most problems in the world is love. Experiencing love may seem like a straightforward thing, but it is a skill that has to be acquired. School systems do not teach children about the most important topic in life, which is love. This must be learned in our homes. It is the parent-child relationship that teaches and models love for us. The idea that the future of the world depends on love may sound difficult to imagine, yet possible within the context of how we parent our children.

Every child has a legitimate need for love. President Barack Obama, during a speech in South Africa honoring Nelson Mandela, said, No one is born hating another person because of the color of their skin, or background, or religion. People must learn to hate. And if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said: Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that, and he also said: It’s time to put a new dimension of love into the veins of human civilization.

History shows that those who mistreat others have often been victims of cruelty themselves. Children who grow up in families where punishment and dictatorial control their behavior and actions learn to use their power over others. Not every abused or neglected child becomes a dictator, yet every dictator in history—like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, Benito Mussolini, and Francisco Franco—has suffered and been wounded during childhood. Behind every dreadful crime, behind every dictator or mass murderer or bully, we can usually find a wounded child.

Mary Trump in her book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, describes how Donald Trump’s mother was seriously sick when he was only two and half years old, and as a result became emotionally and physically absent to her children, which made Fred, Donald’s father, the only available parent. Mary Trump said, Fred’s self-interest skewed his priorities. His care of his children reflected his own needs, not theirs. Love meant nothing to him, and he could not empathize with their plight, one of the defining characteristics of a sociopath. By learning about what Donald Trump experienced, we can have empathy for how he has been wounded as a child.

Mary Trump went on to say, None of the Trump siblings emerged unscathed from my grandfather’s sociopathy and my grandmother’s illnesses, but my uncle Donald and my father, Freddy, suffered more than the rest. Donald Trump’s father wanted his oldest son, Fred Junior— who was destined to lead his father’s legacy to be a killer (the exact word he used)—to succeed without compassion toward others or respect for the law. Fred Junior became an alcoholic as a direct result of his father’s relentless criticism, pressure, and unrealistic expectations, and died at the age of forty-two. Mary Trump said, The only reason Donald escaped the same fate is that his personality served his father’s purpose.

We all have the capacity for both love and hate. Even the most aggressive or heartless personality traits are rooted in certain tragic events in a child’s life. Much of the violence in the world is a direct result of unresolved childhood wounds. Freud coined the term repetition compulsion to describe the way re-enactments of wounds can usually be tracked back to family history. The key lesson we all need to learn is that hatred and destructiveness can materialize in very different ways, yet they spring from a common root, and that root is often the same: The urge to avenge the humiliation experienced and repressed in childhood.

Children assimilate the ways their parents behave at a very young age. Parenting is the opportunity to raise the next generation to not just withstand the cruelty in the world, but to change it. Today, children need the help of their parents more than ever. Research indicates that parents remain the strongest influence in the lives of their children. Respect is the attitude of honoring someone, and parents have the responsibility of creating an environment that promotes respect. True love is simply respecting that we are all the same.

True love begins in our homes with our parents—if we were lucky—or with our children once we become aware of our enormous responsibility as parents. No parent can adequately articulate the experience of holding his or her child. It must be lived. Holding my newborn son in my arms and feeling the weight of his life against my chest for the very first time was life-altering. I had the same experience holding my infant daughter fifteen months later. My goal is to fill up my children with love and respect for themselves so they will have plenty of love and respect to give to others.

The future of the world depends on parents’ ability to teach their children how to become loving and respectful human beings, because all distressing habits of humankind are acquired after birth. People are the same everywhere in the world. There is no difference in the way we laugh or cry. The healing power of love can break through the beliefs that keep us apart, because what unites all human beings is the desire to love and to be loved. There is nothing more powerful than the power of love to change the world by raising the next generation of our civilization who will not allow race to disconnect them, religion to separate them, or wealth to classify them. One mistake we can make is thinking that we, as parents, cannot make a difference.

The Art of Project Management

Project management, as an idea, can be traced back to the builders of the Egyptian pyramids and the architects of the Roman aqueducts. Project management is a process of defining what needs to get done, developing a strategy to plan how to do it, and then following that plan to get it done. An architect first designs a building and creates a blueprint before building the house. A business determines its goals, develops a strategy, and then lays out the action plans to make it happen. Pretty much every goal in life, professional or personal, can be a project.

The most intensive project of my life began on my forty-seventh birthday, when I realized that my core beliefs about love had turned out to be wrong. It was a cloudy Friday morning on January 30, 2015, when I opened the birthday card my wife had given me. I remember the day clearly, like it was yesterday. The card had a picture of a kid standing with a helmet and grocery cart in the middle of a desert that read, He took the road less travelled, yet being prepared made all the difference. That card left me with a surprising amount of compassion, as we both had realized that our marriage was over.

At age forty-seven, as I faced the end of my marriage, I felt enormously guilty about the inevitable footprints of divorce on the tiny hearts of my innocent four-year-old daughter and five-year-old son and was horrified about the thought of making more mistakes. There are numerous ways parents unintentionally infuse their children with emotional wounds that last a lifetime, and divorce is just one of them.

In that defining moment, I decided that I never wanted to inadvertently damage my children. I began the journey of applying my project management expertise to systematically trace and expose the root cause of my failed marriage and to truly comprehend how my choices and decisions about love were all woven together based on my childhood beliefs. It was a process I called Project Love, so I could become a role model for my children.

I left my secure corporate job in February of 2015 and began a deep dive into extensive research to discover how the lack of love in my childhood had morphed into an albatross around my neck without my awareness of its source. I started reading parenting and love bestsellers, as well as books about energy and healing. I devoted seven days a week to reading and learning. In order to find the right answers, we must first learn to ask the right questions. I first discovered the power of asking the right questions while I worked my way through college in the late 1980s as a consultant in a men’s