\u201cO, brilliant kids, I was a fool just like you. I was in my mid-40s before I properly thanked my father for his decades of hard work \u201d\u201d paying for me to laze around in the cars he bought me, to get drunk in the frat house whose dues he paid, to spend the afternoons with my girlfriends looking at trees and rivers while Pop worked and got so anxious that he took up smoking three packs of Kents a day.<\/p>\n
\u201cO, brilliant kids, you get to put on the garments of the morally righteous and upstanding while your parents work \u201d\u201d because mothers work now and always have worked \u201d\u201d and your parents must say, \u201d\u02dcYes, sir,\u2019 or \u201d\u02dcNo, sir,\u2019 to those who hire them. O, golden children, you get to talk about how you\u2019ll never \u201d\u02dcsell out,\u2019 and meanwhile your parents stay up late in torment, thinking of how they can pay your tuition. Because, brilliant kids, work (business) involves exhaustion and eating humble pie and going on even when you think you can\u2019t. And you are the beneficiaries of it in your gilded youth.<\/p>\n
\u201cBe smarter than Ben Stein ever was. Be a better person than I ever was. Right now, today, thank your parents for working to support you. Don\u2019t act as if it\u2019s the divine right of students. Get right up in their faces and say, \u201d\u02dcThank you for what you do so I can live like this.\u2019 Say something. Say it, so that when they\u2019re at O\u2019Hare or Dallas-Fort Worth and they\u2019ve just learned that their flight is canceled and they\u2019ll have to stay overnight at the airport, they will know you appreciate them.<\/p>\n