Although I am a product of my circumstances, I believe we carry knowledge within us from elsewhere, enabling us to make better choices in this life. If we get the right parents, as I did, these choices come easier. Inner knowing helped me choose the right mentors in the form of brave managers, who took the risk of betting on a darkie in time when people like me weren’t considered for thinking roles in business.

How do you know whether you have enough information, enough experience? Advice on this varies widely. R. Buckminster Fuller said, “When in doubt, don’t.” Songwriter and pop recording star Harry Chapin said, “When in doubt, do something.” And former Belgian prime minister Achille Van Ackere used to say, “I act first, then I think about it.”

The answer is to develop your own style; only you know what is right for you in each situation. Each time you experience your own creative resource makes it easier to experience it again. The more you make decisions from Essence, the quieter your VOJ. And the quieter your VOJ, the sharper your observation; you begin to pay attention without worry or mind chatter, and you begin to build up the wisdom to make good decisions. And the more sharply you observe, the more profound your questions. Either you find the problem or it find you.

When I read that study, I thought immediately of my father telling me about trauma being in my mother’s blood. Add to that despair and detachment. Add to that an inability to follow rules, form lasting relationships, or feel guilt. Those are all things that are also true of me, in some measure. They are the qualities I most detest in myself. They are qualities that would make it difficult for me to be a mother.

Note that healthy attributions about failure not only stay balanced and rational, they also take account of the ways—small or large—that you may have contributed to what happened. Maybe you didn’t prepare sufficiently for the interview. This is not to beat yourself up or wallow in shame. Quite the contrary; it’s about developing the self-awareness and confidence to keep learning, making whatever changes you need so as to do better next time. Each of us is a fallible human being, living and working with other fallible human beings. Even if we work to overcome our emotional aversion to failure, failing effectively isn’t automatic. We also need help to reduce the confusion created by the glib talk about failure that is especially rampant in conversations on entrepreneurship.

I think that my parents would like me to know how they contributed to our freedom. My professional skill and proximity to the primary sources should make telling their story an achievable task. But all my elders were trained in forgetting. Some of this was struggle discipline. Some of it was survival. And then there is the passage of time, decades in which some memories were lost entirely and others faded to the point that they can barely be seen.