What Growing Up With an Alcoholic Grandfather Taught Me About Failure

R3ciprocity.com - Prof David Maslach: Innovation; Research Life; Striving Towards Happiness · Dec 14, 2025 · 19m

I don’t talk about this much, but my grandpa was a severe alcoholic. And I mean severe. He would disappear for days on benders. As a kid, I never saw it directly, but I lived with the fallout. It shaped my family in ways that are still raw decades later.

He was also a World War II veteran. He saw heavy fighting. He came home injured. And he came home to a world that told him to man up and never talk about it. Drinking became his way of surviving what he couldn’t process.

Here’s the thing I’ve learned with time. I would not be who I am without that experience. Not because it was good, but…