It was on an ordinary day that Jimmy Carter’s father pulled his son aside for a conversation. “Jimmy,” he said (and he never called his son Jimmy), “I need to talk to you about something important.” “Yes, sir, Daddy,” Jimmy replied. “There is something I want you to promise me,” his father continued. “I don’t want you to smoke a cigarette until you are twenty-one years old.”
This was the late 1930s, when something like 40 percent of the population smoked and cigarettes could still be marketed to children with advertisements that made claims like “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!” Carter’s dad himself was hopelessly hooked too. “I won’t,” Jimmy promised. And then his father sweetened the deal: “When the time comes, I’ll give you a gold watch.”
When he was twenty-one years old, then in the Naval Academy, young Jimmy Carter finally tried smoking. By then, it was too late. He’d missed his window and he hated it. He never smoked another. Tragically, Carter’s mother and three of his siblings followed in his father’s footsteps. Each one of them died of pancreatic cancer. Carter, as of this writing, is still alive at age ninety-eight.
When it comes to the important things with lifelong implications, you have to make them promise, as Carter’s father did. But you also have to learn from his failure and lead by example. The costs of not doing it could be everything.